Client Background
Polygence is an academic mentorship platform connecting high school students with research mentors and passion project guidance. Organic search is a primary acquisition channel for the company, whose student audience is actively searching for research programs, pre-college opportunities, and subject-specific project ideas.
Challenge
When Polygence started working with JDM, they had solid brand traffic but limited non-brand visibility — meaning students who didn’t already know the platform weren’t finding it. The goal was to build non-brand organic traffic through targeted keyword strategy, content optimization, and a stronger internal linking architecture.Strategy
- Conducted keyword grouping, competitive analysis, and on-page optimizations for high-intent target topics including research mentorship, high school research programs, and passion project ideas
- Developed and implemented an internal linking strategy to cross-link topically related pages and consolidate authority across the site
- Identified and executed content consolidations — replacing fragmented pages with authoritative hub content to improve both rankings and user experience
- Created new field-of-study content to target specific educational verticals and drive topic-relevant traffic to high-converting pages
- Refreshed and optimized underperforming content including writing competitions and subject-specific pages in biology, history, and medical research
- Cross-promoted new content on social media to expand reach beyond organic search
Results
- Non-brand organic traffic grew by over 1,000% across the engagement, with many core non-brand keywords moving from unranked or poorly ranked to top-5 results on page 1 of the SERP
- Total organic traffic increased by more than 5x from the start of the engagement
- Blog content accounted for 81% of the site’s total organic traffic by the end of the engagement — validating the content-led strategy and the investment in ongoing publication and optimization.