Masterclass is an online education platform that provides courses across a range of industries and subject areas.
Since being founded in 2015, they have reached a $2.75 billion valuation. A lot of that success can be attributed to their organic search growth.
Key Takeaways
- Simplicity rules: Too many “Gurus” overcomplicate SEO. Yes, it’s all about horses for courses and sometimes, highly complex and technical approaches are needed. However, on the most part Masterclass show that – creating a good UX, a lot of relevant and good quality content, and setting up the website to gently cajole your customers through the funnel is often all that’s needed.
- Cheap and sizable TOF traffic: Masterclass understand that informational-based content, is a perfect fit for their product. They also realise that due to the significant volume of traffic it can provide at a low cost, it’s worth pursuing instead of just targeting MOF and BOF topics.
- Using instructor bios to establish EEAT: As they have some of the most experienced and authoritative sources in the industry, on their courses, Masterclass utilises their profile and insights to establish experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust.
- Funnelling: They use multiple and varied CTA’s throughout their articles. As a CTA is constantly visible, they significantly increase the likelihood of moving the reader over to the next stage in the funnel.
Simple yet highly effective
Just as with their business model, MasterClass doesn’t have an overly complex SEO strategy.
They haven’t established regional subfolders or subdomains with hreflangs (potential opportunity missed), they don’t seem to use programmatic SEO, or even have basic schema setup for key pages.
What they do have however, is a simple content strategy focussing on informational-based queries, usually longtail and a bucket load of them. 13,945 to be specific, which works out to be 83.4% of all their pages.
This content strategy has meant they are receiving an estimated 8.5M in monthly search traffic, impressive considering 4 years ago they were only at 1M.
A focus on informational TOF traffic
Almost all of Masterclass’s traffic is informational in nature. Longtail and informational content is typically cheaper to acquire and comes in significant volume.
For example, their top traffic pages are:
For a lot of businesses, this type of TOF content is usually low value and sometimes useless, especially when funnels and retargeting steps haven’t been put in place.
This is not the case with Masterclass.
As they offer an educational product, the intent of the users who arrive at their articles through their informational content is often an ideal customer. The only limitations are whether or not they have the budget to make a purchase or if they are at a buying stage.
Let’s take the page focussing on the topic “what is my face shape” as an example.
A user searching a query like this seems to be a bit of a stretch when it comes to converting visitors to sign up for an online education course, unlike a page focussing on “Maslows hierarchy of needs “ which has a more clear relationship to an educational product.
However, there are two clear reasons why it works:
- They understand that a significant amount of those searching for that keyword care about their appearance, potentially so much so that they would be willing to learn about how they could improve it through a course. In comes Bobbi Brown (the owner of a cosmetics company and a course instructor on Masterclass)
- The search volume that page alone brings in, is an estimated 50K visitors a month
Through the combination of low competition traffic, significant volume and search intent that fits perfectly with their educational product offering, Masterclasses content strategy to focus on informational and longtail queries is a clear winner.
However, how they convert that traffic is where things get more interesting.
They have a vast range of world class instructors, which are renowned for being the most famous and/or the best at their craft.
You would think that the major part of their strategy would be around focusing on “online classes” types of keywords. Those would be searches that tie directly back to their core products. While Masterclass does this, they realize that it’s a fairly limited strategy with limited upside.
Instead they take an educational approach. For skill aquistion related keywords, they create an informational article that can appear for the query. Then within the content, they tie it back to the instructors for the related courses they’ve created. Thus increasing the likelihood the reader wanting to pay for that course and potentially others.
Funnelling
Masterclass has two main locations they look to drive TOF traffic.
- The instructor’s “classes” page
- A “find my classes” landing page
And both have one goal, to signup users to the 30 day free trial.
Users who arrive on an article page, (which is 97% of Masterclass traffic), are faced with a rather underwhelming introduction, that doesn’t do much to entice the audience to read deeper into the blog, other than showing them that they have arrived to the right place for their query.
Masterclass understands that they need to add content before they can display their first CTA, to avoid the audience from bouncing off the blog.
If the reader feels they haven’t come to the right place they will usually bounce and so showing Google poor user signals and that the intent wasn’t matched. Which in turn impacts rankings and conversions.
#1 CTA = ‘Learn From The Best’
This display is based on the overarching category or tag the article is given. Which occasionally throws out some slightly irrelevant instructors.
But for the most part, they are relevant – even with the likes of Mathew Walker (sleep expert) being placed on the front of a Masterclass dry-humping article….
Why it works?
- It takes up a lot of real estate, the reader has no option but to take notice of the instructors and the signup CTA
- The instructors are highly familiar – establishing instant trust and interest
- As mentioned, they are usually highly relevant to the article
#2 CTA = ‘Meet one of your new instructors’
Why it works?
- Boxed CTA’s are so simple, yet so effective. You can add context to the CTA unlike a typical standalone button CTA and the use of techniques such as the reverse pyramid entices the reader towards the CTA button.
- Masterclass are able to utilise a relevant instructor, to entice the reader to sign up. Higher relevance leads to higher conversion rates.
#3 CTA = Sticky header CTA
Why it works?
- Always visible once they scroll past the first fold
- Moving the audience onto a “quiz” has a few benefits:
- Low level of commitment is required – so increased likelihood of them moving through the funnel.
- Data capture as they fill out the form, which allows them to segment their audience for personalised messaging and potentially even retargeting if they are tracking each action as an event.
The use of instructors to establish EEAT
Masterclass doesn’t explicitly state that their instructors contributed to the article, as they almost certainly didn’t.
However, they do position their profiles and the language used in a way where the assumption might be that they contributed or the article was influenced by their teachings within the course.
They also often use quotes from their instructors, from the course videos, which display expert knowledge and insights.
How this helps with EEAT
EEAT (Expertise, experience, authority, trust), isn’t a ranking factor as such, it’s a way of establishing concepts to measure and evaluate the quality of your content.
By adding clear author bios, with authoritative and expert sources, you are able to show: experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust.
This alone wouldn’t be enough to get you ranked, but it definitely helps.
Masterclass, have written just under 14k articles so far. Which they wouldn’t have been able to do when relying on their instructors or top industry experts to write content.
A content machine that produced 14k articles in roughly 6-7 years has to be driven by professional copywriters, who can churn out content at scale.
So – instead of adding any old Joe to their author bios, Masterclass uses their most relevant instructor bio and adds it as the ‘FEATURED MASTERCLASS INSTRUCTOR’.
Whether or not Google deems this to be the author, doesn’t matter too much in my opinion, as they are still able to lean on their instructor as the main source of knowledge and therefore achieve EEAT.
