How CMA Exam Academy Skyrocketed Course Sales
by 124.7% in a Single Year

“For online courses, I’ve found that organic traffic is insanely more effective at driving sales. After five years of wasting money on paid traffic, I’ve gotten way more results in one year with SEO.”

Nathan Liao

Founder and CEO, CMA Exam Academy

The Client: 

Nathan Liao is an accountant by trade, with a focus in Certified Management Accounting. This subspeciality of accounting requires you to pass a challenging exam to get your license.

The difficulty of the test is a significant hurdle for many accounting students who hope to break into this field. There was a lack of quality resources out there to help, so Nathan saw a significant opportunity.

In 2014, Nathan created CMA Exam Academy as a comprehensive prep course to help people pass the CMA exam.

The Challenge:

Nathan had a funnel, a website, and a valuable course that converted. He had a solid handle on his students’ needs and pain points, not to mention a fantastic product.

The big problem was getting more of the right traffic. 

Nathan wanted to scale his business, but he hadn’t had much luck finding an effective growth strategy that worked for him.

Like many online course creators, he tried paid advertising with Google, Facebook, and other ad platforms. After all, that was what many experts in the field were recommending for this kind of product.

But after years of trying, paid ads weren’t working. 

He was blowing through his budget at a record pace, but none of the online advertising strategies he tried delivered the results he needed.

Social media marketing did show some results, but it was slow, and took a ton of time and resources. Nathan concluded that the quality of the leads and the level of traffic growth from social just weren’t worth the effort and expense.

“I tried paid traffic, I burned a lot of cash through paid traffic, but I was not getting the results. So the struggle was that I was happy with how we were growing, but it wasn’t fast enough. I felt we could grow faster. And that’s what we needed.”

One thing Nathan had experimented with that did seem to work was content marketing. Organic traffic from Google outperformed their AdWords program.

“For online courses, I have come to find that organic reach is much better – I get more results. I’ve gotten way more results with SEO than I ever got with paid traffic. I’ve learned that it’s a tough sell when it comes to online courses and paid traffic.” 

He’d written some blog posts and done a bit of SEO work on his own, with better results than either paid ads or organic social media.

But the time and energy needed to scale a successful content marketing and SEO campaign was more than what Nathan could realistically take on by himself.

“While wearing the hat of the CEO, and running the business, there was just no way I could scale my content and also manage the growth of my students’ team and success.”

The challenge was to scale up CMA Exam Academy’s content marketing and SEO strategy through an outsourced solution, transforming it into the critical area of focus. 

That’s when Nathan brought in DCP.

The Solution:

DCP came in to handle SEO and content marketing, freeing up Nathan’s time and energy to focus on other core areas of his business.

DCP started with a comprehensive SEO and content strategy makeover. 

First, we refreshed the site’s technical SEO fundamentals. We then introduced a new, totally hands-off content creation and publication process to produce a steady stream of content with a clear strategy behind it.

“People need to get to know and trust you before buying. They need to understand what you and your program stand for, what they get out of it. When people find me on Google, they just search and find me there.

So I started building that relationship with them because it’s not, I’m not selling it to them. They’re just reading very informative and useful blog posts, and through that, they get to know me, they get to know my brand and they started building their relationship.”

Here’s a full breakdown of exactly what DCP delivered to Nathan’s business:

1. Analyzed and audited CEA’s website to fix technical issues that were holding back their organic rankings and traffic growth.

“When you and your team came on board and started to help me with this, there was a lot of researching and analyzing my site – I knew that was the first step –  and that went beautifully.

It takes time to build a foundation, and you guys did an outstanding job of digging into all the details. The first month of the relationship showed me that I had made the right decision, and I could not have done all that work and research you guys did.”

2. We quickly uncovered “quick win” opportunities, like rewriting and republishing existing blog posts.

Nathan already had some great content with a lot of potential. The only problem was that it wasn’t optimized properly. We were able to improve rankings early on by rewriting and re-optimizing these posts, resulting in an uptick in traffic.

“When you guys came on board, we were able to follow your guidance and zero in on the low hanging fruits, the keywords that would make a difference. Before then, we just wrote whatever came to mind.”

3. Next, DCP developed a custom content strategy for CMA Exam Academy. We integrated CEA’s writers into their content creation process – creating a scalable and hands-off content creation process for CEA.

“You guys took a holistic approach to understand our industry, understanding the audience, understanding the tone of voice, understanding how I like things structured. 

Having clear and open communication between our teams helped me build trust in you guys. And at the same time, you guys were educating our team into the processes required to drive traffic.”

Lastly, DCP delivers a comprehensive report to CMA Exam Academy each month. This report explains the progress of their campaigns and what they plan to do next, so Nathan and CEA’s team stay informed every step of the way.

The Results: 

Revenue Increased Across the Board: CMA Exam Academy’s total monthly revenue increased by 124.57%. Organic revenue increased by 42.32%.

“I hoped for great results, but I was not expecting to see the results that I see today. Plus, I knew it wasn’t a coincidence – it didn’t happen by chance – it was because all the work put into our website, into content, all of that legwork set the stage for more reach organically. The business has exploded.”

Sales Skyrocketed: The total number of transactions increased by 748.84% within a year, from May 2019 to May 2020. The number of transactions attributable to organic search traffic increased by 395.12%.

Traffic Grew Steadily: From 2019 to 2020, the number of total users visiting CMA Exam Academy increased by 146.83%. Total pageviews increased by 121.17%.

On average, CMA Exam Academy saw a 116% increase in users every week. These results started becoming noticeable by the third month into the campaign. 

“Even today, six months after working with DCP, our rankings keep going up every month. So yeah, it’s an investment with a huge ROI.

It’s not like when I was trying to pay for traffic and burning through cash, plus when I stopped the campaign, traffic would stop. With organic traffic, it just keeps going.”