The 80/20 Rule Behind Panorama Educations 126,000 Monthly Visitors

In this Case study, we'll be looking at Panorama Education.

And you'll discover.

• The 80/20 approach to SEO.
• A few formulas that allow you to do the same.
• The keywords that I go after when trying to use the 80/20 approach.

Let' dive in.

What is Panorama Education?

Panorama Education is a technology company that helps schools measure and improve student outcomes through data. It provides data-driven insights and tools to help schools develop better strategies for understanding their students and improving student success.

Let's see how they're doing online.

What are their domain scores and traffic?

They have a DR of 70 and a UR of 30 and currently have 126,000 monthly visitors from 35,000 keywords.

Interestingly, Ahrefs has this showing having a PPC equivalent value of $126,000.

Now, I always take that with a pinch of salt, but I do like the idea that every visitor to your site is worth at least $1.

There is never much talk about the cost of discovery for a business. I mean, how much would a business want to pay to be placed in front of its ideal customer?

$1 seems fair.

Moving swiftly on, we can see a breakdown of their traffic per page, obviously, they get a lot of brand traffic, but you can see that 100 of their pages generate 44% of their traffic.

This is pretty common, but I want to pull out of this case study something actionable for you.

So let's dive in.

How they use the 80/20 rule of SEO

If you're not aware of the 80/20 rule in SEO, it basically means that 80% of your traffic comes from just 20% of your pages.

And that's pretty normal for many sites.

I don't want you to get hung up on the traffic split.

Traffic can be split in loads of ways. The 80/20 rule applies to a lot in life. With SEO it's just saying that the most traffic comes from a few pages.

The trick of the SEO, is finding which pages will bring in that traffic and whether they are relevant on a commercial basis.

For this website, traffic looks like follows:

As you can see, the vast amount of traffic to their site comes via a few pages.

With this page generating 22% of traffic.

It's a good article, and while it weighs in at just over 2000 words, the article has plenty of nice design elements.

I don't want to go over much more on this site, instead I want to show you how to leverage the 80/20 approach.

Because honestly, there isn't too much going on here.

It's got a lot of pages and some do well, with others generating a few visitors.

So, let's take a look at the 80/20 approach.

How can you use the 80/20 Rule?

The 80/20 Rule states that 80% of the output comes from 20% of the input.

For this website, a small number of blog posts are doing the heavy lifting of the traffic.

But how can you do the same and what does this look like in practice?

Well, to do this properly, you need to go to Google's messy middle thesis, which gives the journey of search engine users in 2 core phases.

The first phase is exploration, where users search for information.

The second stage is evaluation, where users assess the quality of the information.

If you're going after an 80/20 style approach, usually you'll be looking at content in the exploration stage of search.

Exploration Phase of Search

If we're to apply the 80/20 rule, you're looking for the highest traffic topic that you can write about, which customers early on their search journey would use.

A good way for you to find keywords like this is to go back to the customer journey.

And for a saas model, ask yourself,

"what do customers do when they don't know about us?"

For example, let's say you sell teacher lesson plans.

Well, teachers probably go online and search for 'free lesson plans for...'

80/20 SEO isn't the only method of SEO, and it might not be right for you, but it's one approach to add to your toolbox.

The best way to think of the 80/20 approach to SEO is that you're building something that is useful for people that could become your customers or who know your customers.

Fast-tracking the 80/20 Approach

The formula I use is often the most effective for fast-tracking this process is:

FREE + Useful

Let me explain.

You should be thinking, what's of use to our target audience? Can we make it free?

For some businesses, this is quite easy to do.

For others, it can be tricky, but here are some examples.

Veed created free versions of its software and ranked with landing pages.

Slidesgo gives away free Google slides and powerpoint templates.

I could go on because if someone charges for something, giving away a free version is quite powerful and always a go-to keyword for your industry.

Again, this person isn't in the market for paying for software or anything. They are just looking for a solution to their problems.

And generally when it comes to using the 80/20 approach, free + useful is always my first roll of the device.

There are others.

But can you do this with content and not tools?

Free Content Products

If I was to give a glimpse into the future of search, I'd say content products are going to rise. Especially with AI.

So, what's a content product?

Content products are collections of content or even a single page that is of high utlitlity.

It can be marketed itself to generate links/ traffic.

And even in low traffic keywords, if it's of use, you'll get traffic eventually. People just might not know it exists.

OK, so you'll want some examples...here goes.

Back in 2005 supermarket Sainsburys used TV ads and celeb chef Jamie Oliver to create a campaign around meals.

Their try something different campaign increased their market share that year.

It was basically a collection of recipes.

Bored of Lunch is an instragram page that is a collection of recipes with videos that has now led to a book range.

It's a shame they haven't created a website (that I know of) because that would be the next place to house their content.

But the theory is the same. The channel is now a 'content product'.

The question I always ask myself is this, why didn't a major player in the food industry come up with this idea?

Bored of lunch could have been launched by anyone.

Bored of breakfast?

The Family Meal Club?

Saturday Night Fakeaways...

That last one is great.

So, for example, if I was say 'Tescos', I'd build a website. 'Saturday Night Fakeaways' and have a top chef or influencer show people how to make great home cooked takeaway style food for the weekend.

Do some PR, do some TV ads and voila, you have a brand of it's own that you can always redirect and house on your site later on.

Content products are really powerful for creating search.

Here's another example.

Runners World have a great collection of places to run.

Hopefully you get the idea behind this.

And maybe you're having a few ideas of your own.

But think, ideas, examples and challenges.

These do well.

Key Takeaways

As we've seen with this site, you can generate a lot of traffic with a few blog posts, and often that's the case with many sites.

You see big traffic graphs online, but when you delve, you realsie it's one or 2 articles lifting.

As an SEO, the 80/20 approach to keyword and content selection can be very rewarding.

But this is one of many ways to do SEO. So add it to your tool box and give it a whirl.

Thanks for reading.

Andy