Udacity engaged our team after experiencing a multi-year decline in course enrollments, despite continued investment in marketing. While overall traffic had softened, the more pressing issue was a drop in conversion from visitor to enrolled student.
Competitive pressure from platforms like Udemy and Coursera had intensified, particularly in search, where both platforms were aggressively expanding their content footprint. As a result, Udacity was losing visibility for high-intent queries tied to career-focused and upskilling programs.
The objective was to regain visibility across high-converting search queries while supporting the launch of new programs, including upcoming Agentic AI courses.This required a more structured approach to search, aligning program pages with user intent, expanding coverage across Ideal customer profiles (ICPs) from search, and ensuring that new course launches were supported by demand-driven content from day one.
I conducted a full crawl of Udacity’s website and segmented all URLs into distinct content categories to better understand the existing site structure and performance.
Several key findings emerged:
- Udacity had 568 individual course pages, effectively creating 568 distinct opportunities for user enrollment.
- The blog content was significantly outdated, and despite having thousands of blog URLs, only a small fraction generated meaningful organic traffic.
-There was a notable gap in consideration-stage content, which is critical for guiding users from initial interest toward course enrollment pages.
-The site lacked dedicated course collection pages that grouped offerings into clear thematic or categorical landing pages.
The bottom line: The website did not meaningfully support a browsing experience for prospective students. Users were primarily limited to searching the course catalog, which assumes prior intent and familiarity with Udacity’s offerings. The proposed content strategy aimed to address this gap by introducing a structured browsing experience, enabling users to explore courses by category and more easily understand the breadth of Udacity’s course catalog.
Course Collections:
Similar to e-commerce websites, the most effective way to improve both organic performance and user experience was to introduce structured collection pages.
These collection pages enabled course discovery at scale and played a critical role in improving navigation across Udacity’s catalog, ultimately supporting higher enrollment rates by helping users more easily find relevant programs.
I worked closely with the internal development team to design and implement new page templates for both collection pages and topic-based landing pages. These templates were built to support scalable deployment across the site while maintaining consistency in structure and user experience.
Once the templates were finalized, I led the creation of 50 collection pages designed to organize and surface Udacity’s 568 course offerings in a more intuitive and discoverable way.
Below are some examples:
- Application deployment and CI/CD
- AI Integration in the Google Workspace
- Mobile design and developmenT
- Embedded systems programming
- Animation and Multimedia
- C programming
Beyond improving the browsing experience, the course collection pages also had a direct impact on organic visibility and enrollment performance. Each page was optimized to rank for keywords aligned with Udacity’s ideal customer profiles (ICP), allowing the site to attract high-intent learners through search.
This significantly expanded Udacity’s entry points from organic search, enabling new users to discover the platform directly through category-level queries rather than relying solely on individual course or catalog navigation.
Topic pages:
Topic pages were designed to capture top-of-funnel users, those seeking to learn more about a subject but not yet ready to commit to a course. Engaging this audience was critical for building a sustainable pipeline of future learners.
These pages served multiple strategic functions: establishing Udacity’s credibility, educating users, and fully satisfying informational search intent. At the same time, they were structured to guide users deeper into the funnel through strategic internal linking to relevant courses and collection pages.
Examples:
- What is full-stack development
- What is product development
- What is a cloud engineer
- Agentic AI vs. generative AI
- Python vs. JavaScript
A key advantage of this approach was the ability to target high-volume, non-branded search queries. As a result, topic pages acted as scalable entry points from organic search, effectively functioning as lead magnets that introduced new users to Udacity’s ecosystem.
In parallel with the content strategy, we implemented a series of technical SEO enhancements to improve crawl efficiency, indexation, and overall site performance. Priority was placed on optimizing course pages, as they serve as the primary conversion points for user enrollment.
Key initiatives included:
- Rewriting meta descriptions across the site with clear, persuasive copy, while ensuring adherence to character length best practices to improve click-through rates.
- Implementing crawl and indexation directives to prevent search engines from accessing filtered URL variations, preserving crawl budget and prioritizing high-value pages.
- Identifying and executing internal linking opportunities to strengthen connections between topic pages, collection pages, and course pages—improving both discoverability and indexation.
- Applying self-referencing canonical tags sitewide to mitigate duplicate content risks and consolidate ranking signals.
- Removing low-value blog content by 404ing pages that had generated little to no traffic over the previous two years.
- Consolidating highly similar pages by redirecting those with over 90% content overlap to their primary counterparts, strengthening overall page authority.
By the end of the eight-month engagement, Udacity’s non-branded organic search traffic had increased by 18% compared to month one. In parallel, enrollment rates improved by 28% over the same period, reflecting stronger user engagement and more effective conversion from organic search traffic.
