Upskillist is a global online education platform offering 100+ accredited courses spanning photography, coding, marketing, interior design, and more. With 6.5+ million students worldwide and partnerships with major companies like Vodacom, the brand needed organic search to become a sustainable, compounding growth channel.
When Upskillist engaged Angleout in October 2024, the platform had a near-zero organic footprint — averaging just 0.5 clicks per day, an average ranking position in the 40s (page 4-5 of Google), and almost no visibility for high-intent, course-related keywords, all while competing against established EdTech giants like Coursera, Udemy, and Skillshare.
Rather than chasing high-volume, low-intent keywords, Angleout focused exclusively on bottom-of-funnel search queries where users were ready to decide — creating ‘best alternatives’ and comparison content such as ‘[Competitor] vs Upskillist’ pages, ‘best online course platform’ roundups, and optimized course category landing pages. This captured higher-intent traffic with less competition than broad educational keywords.
Using Screaming Frog, Angleout conducted a full site crawl and structure audit, then uploaded the crawl data to Claude AI to identify orphan pages, anchor text opportunities, and topical clusters that should be connected. Strategic internal links were then added between related course pages, from high-authority pages to newer content, strengthening topical authority and improving site-wide crawl efficiency.
Angleout drove Upskillist's organic search from virtually zero to a consistent, compounding growth channel — growing average daily clicks from 0.5 to 350+ in just 8 months and lifting average ranking position from 40.2 to under 10, entirely through on-page optimization and content strategy, with zero backlinks built.
14 monthly clicks, 2,813 impressions, average position 40.2
2,477 monthly clicks, 359,895 impressions, average position 31.9
7,970 monthly clicks, 1,878,129 impressions, average position 24.2
9,407 monthly clicks, 5,178,632 impressions, average position 10.1; peak day of 481 clicks on Jan 12, 2026