SEO Strategy Development for a U.S. Flight School - the My Digital Family Case

Written by Iurii Nemtcev

SEO expert and My Digital Family founder and CEO

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SEO expert and My Digital Family founder and CEO Iurii Nemtcev describes how to boost a U.S. flight school’s website to the very top of Google search results and blaze past all competitors, including reputable aviation academies.

Commercial aviation pilots are known to say that “Takeoff is dangerous, flight – beautiful, and landing – difficult”. Takeoff is not without reason considered the most challenging part of a flight, because even a small pilot error can result in a hazardous situation.

Developing a website promotion strategy is like preparing for takeoff. Just as the pilot calculates alignment and rudder position in order to successfully make the flight, a SEO specialist builds a model of action to maximize the number of target users to a website.

“With a precise plan, we reduce the time required to complete project tasks, monitor progress, and instantly eliminate problems,” SEO expert Iurii Nemtcev says. “That is why work on a project begins with drawing up a promotion strategy,” he says.

Why Does a Flight School Need a SEO Strategy?

The strategy becomes a “roadmap” on the basis of which a work plan for a month, six months, or a long-term period is subsequently drawn up. SEO work should be broken down into stages and each of them approached systematically, optimizing the time and cost of the project. Thanks to the strategy, the client sees and understands exactly what the team will do to achieve the desired result.

Before beginning strategy development, we studied the market and competitors: flight schools in the United States, as well as those in the Florida region, where our client’s flight school operates. We identified strong competitors and evaluated the website’s starting position.

Competition in the U.S. flight school search segment is intense. According to SimilarWeb, the U.S. market includes pilot school sites with both low and significant traffic, approaching 900,000 visits per month.

At the same time, the search demand for queries on the topic of “flight schools” in the U.S. tops 69,000 queries per month (according to Ahrefs data). The service evaluates competition in the subject area as high and very high (the most competitive queries are highlighted in yellow and orange). Competition in the subject area is also high in the Florida region, where our client’s business operates and which is a promotion priority.

Stages of SEO Strategy for a Flight School

The strategy defines the stages of work on the project and their sequence. We have divided the work into the following blocks.

Working With the Semantic Core

The gathering of thematic search queries is the basis of each project. The success of achieving the goals set by the client largely depends on the implementation of this stage. The collected queries will be clustered (divided into groups and topics) and a separate page created for each cluster.

Despite the “limited” topic, we set out to gather several thousand search queries within it to retrieve all the semantics that could generate relevant traffic for the project. The core consisting of many thousands of queries will include the following types:

Commercial Queries

These queries are the first we focus on, as they reflect the willingness of the potential client to buy. Commercial queries include keywords:

“Enroll in flight school”, “Enroll in a pilot course”, – these get the most conversion traffic, because potential customers have already made a decision to buy and are looking for a place to purchase the service.
“How much is flight school”, “Fight school cost”, “ATP CTP course cost” – the visitor definitely wants to buy, but is still shopping around and choosing the cheapest, most advantageous or most convenient option.
“Cheapest ATP CTP course”, “Flight school discounts” – Pages with promotional offers attract visitors who are looking for the best prices, and it’s important to promote these. However, the visitor should also have easy access to the main service catalog, as the dates and terms of a particular promotion may not suit them.

A separate pool of commercial queries are those with dates or a specific time interval, such as “December,” “summer,” or “vacations.” If a user knows and specifies a date that is convenient for them, then they are ready to buy. Therefore, such pages must be promoted to generate the hottest traffic.

General Semantics

These are high-frequency queries without commercial and informational “tails” (“buy” or “what is this”). With such queries, one cannot say in advance what a potential customer wants to do – order a service or simply gather information on the topic.

Despite the fact that high-frequency queries almost never convert “readers into buyers,” you should not discount them because of the importance of the completeness of the semantic core for Google. In a semantic core for a flight school, examples of general semantics include queries like: “APT-CTP”, “Flight school”, “Pilot’s courses”, “Pilot’s license” and others.

Local Semantics

These are queries with geolocation. As a rule, these semantics are commercial, that is, they attract visitors who are ready to buy. Local semantics can employ the name of the country, state, city, district or street, because people can easily forget the name of the school and will search for a location convenient for them. For example, “ATP CTP course Florida,” “Pilot’s license California,” or “Flight school near me.”

Local semantics can also be handled more aggressively by using competitors’ geolocation. For example, a user might google a school in Dallas, but end up on our site. We have mere seconds to convince them via content that our school is better (we offer a better price, better training conditions, not to mention the Florida beaches). As such, we determine which cities have competing schools, create and optimize pages for these cities and pull that traffic to our site.

Brand Semantics

People can seek out a particular aviation school in completely different ways. Even if a person remembers its name, they may make a mistake or typo when putting it into the search bar, or they may input the name of an instructor who was recommended by an acquaintance.

When doing SEO for the website, it is important to ensure that branded search traffic is not diverted to competitors, so pages must be developed for all branded queries.

All client brands. A flight school may have several, as well as the names of the training centers or training programs used.
Names of instructors. In the service sector, potential clients may not go to a specific company, but to a particular professional who is recommended by friends or who has trained their acquaintances. Successful instructors themselves become brands in their field, and their names may well bring in targeted and relevant traffic.
Competitor brands. These, too, can serve as a source of traffic, but such queries must be handled carefully and only within the legal framework of the country and state. The use of competitors’ brands is possible when compiling rankings or other “general pages” to which additional traffic can be driven.

Image Semantics

This includes high-frequency queries, as well as those associated with the reputation of the company or brand.

High-frequency queries
As mentioned earlier, high-frequency queries can generate a lot of traffic to a site, but there is usually not much use for it. But if such a query leads a person interested in buying our service (the pilot’s course) to the website, it gives the impression that our company is a niche leader, because it tops the Google rankings. This increases the likelihood that the client will choose us.

Reviews
There are two sides to this coin. On the one hand, few people take reviews on official websites seriously, as any number of them can be written, and a visitor forgets within a few minutes where exactly he saw the review. But on the other hand, if reviews are present and are real (recorded on video, with the reviewer easily identifiable), they will be indexed by search engines and work for the company’s image. These are the reviews to be expected:

about the company itself – whether everything went smoothly for other clients and whether the training posed any difficulties;
about the service – did the schools prior customers receive the license they sought, what were their impressions upon conclusion of the training;
about employees – what others say about the flight school instructors, whether the learning experience a positive one;
about the training program – is is worth it to choose this course or is it better to look for another one;
about infrastructure – what devices and simulators are used in this school, whether they are modern.

As a rule, if a user is seeking reviews of the company, its employees or program infrastructure, he is interested in training, meaning that such traffic should also be gathered.

Reputational queries
Work must be done on brand reputation. The reputation requirements for the brands behind websites are articulated in Google’s Guidelines for Evaluating Search Quality. According to Google’s official guidelines, SEO specialists should carefully review search results for negative reviews and publications about a brand. If there is information online suggesting the site is owned by a fraudulent organization or has a history of customer fraud, the site will be downgraded in search results or removed from them altogether. At the same time, positive reviews about the company are a signal that the company is reputable and worthy to be presented at the top of Google search results.

Work with reputational queries should include the following stages:

Correcting negativity. Processing of negative feedback: preparation of well-founded company responses to negative feedback, suggestions for solving the user’s problem, resolving the problem.
Strengthening positivity. Boosting the company’s positive reviews on thematic platforms and review aggregators.
Boosting frequency of brand mentions. Preparation of publications about the company and its activities in industry and socio-political media outlets.
Positioning in Google Business. Creation, filling and regular updating of information in the company’s Google Maps card. Incentivizing customers to leave reviews of the company on Google Business.

Working with reputational queries has a positive effect on a site’s growth dynamics in Google search results. Its absence, on the other hand, can have a negative impact on SEO.

Informational Semantics

Informational queries can bring a lot of traffic to a website. It is not convertible, because it is unlikely that a person looking for information about how much pilots earn in the U.S. is ready to buy a flight school course today. However, processing the the pool of informational requests can achieve the following results:

Capturing traffic at the top of the sales funnel, where people are still “getting acquainted” with the topic and product.
Expanding the query index of the site. Using the fullest possible semantic core to amplify business-relevant commercial queries.
Working on brand reputation. By responding to targeted user inquiries on the topic, the company builds credibility in the eyes of potential buyers and the search engine.

Apart from that, working with informational semantics allows for processing of the maximum volume of low-frequency queries. The more content on the site, the more low-frequency queries can be processed, and it is low-frequency queries that generate up to 80% of search traffic.

Semantic Expansion

“Semantics expand continuously, throughout the whole duration of the project,” – SEO expert Iurii Nemtcev.

Semantic expansion is done via synonyms, parsing of competitors’ sites, expanding the directory, when, for example, one service includes several sub-services, with a separate landing page created for each.

Semantic expansion also becomes an element of a strategy to generate demand for the company’s services. Often it’s a long-term effort at the top of the sales funnel, where people who are only interested in the topic are found. Today they’re looking for something on the topic, and tomorrow they’re already deciding to get training and become a well-paid commercial airline pilot.

It is important for the brand to be present in the potential customer’s field of vision during the entire period of its promotion through the sales funnel, and this requires work in the following directions:

Blog. Preparation of detailed, expert articles that answer all questions from potential customers. For example, those that discuss the specifics and attractiveness of pilots’ work and their income level and give useful advice on training and future employment.
FAQ. Answering questions that users ask in the search network, as well as preparation and posting on the website of answers to the questions that potential customers most often ask the sales department.

International SEO

The potential customers for a U.S.-based flight school could be located in a variety of countries around the world. These are pilots from European or Asian countries who are planning to move to the U.S. to seek employment. The language barrier often becomes an impediment to dealing with such traffic, and therefore international SEO should be factored in at the outset in order to operate on an international scale.

This work is built around the following stages:

Creating language versions of the website. Language versions are provided for European, Asian, African, and other countries that are considered the target audience. This eliminates the language barrier and allows audiences from different countries to seamlessly receive information about the flight school.
Creation and promotion of individual sites in domain zones of target countries. Google prioritizes local sites in local search for commercial queries. Therefore, in order to top results in the most interesting countries that are recognized by businesses as a priority for attracting the target audience, it is rational to create separate sites in local domain zones, such as .fr or .de.

Flight School Website Promotion

Completion of a large cluster of work with semantics means one can move directly to working with the site and implementing those changes that will achieve the customer’s goals and objectives. This block of work is also divided into stages, but these should be performed simultaneously rather than sequentially to accelerate results from SEO and their high quality.

Content Optimization

Filling the site with relevant, high-quality content is the client’’s main investment in the project. The content must answer the question or solve the problem with which a potential customer turns to Google. If we give a person the solution to his problem through content, our page will top Google search results, if not – we will fall short.

Content optimization is based on the semantic core drawn up earlier, and the website pages themselves are divided into the following:

Service cards. We pay maximum attention to the catalog of flight school services, because it is a priority section of the website. We prepare the most complete and detailed description of each service: the start, the process, terms and conditions, stages of training, guarantees, what the future client will come out with. It is important to make information comprehensive and detailed enough that the user will not have a single question about the service, its conditions and features. While working on service cards, we analyze the top of Google search results, paying attention to the completeness of the information provided by competitors and the professional terminology they use.
Informational pages. We plan the content of the website’s blog and consulting pages. We focus on the completeness of the information provided and its usefulness to the visitor.
Legal information. The site must contain all the information required by applicable law. These are data access agreements, offer agreements and other legal documents.
Information about the organization. In line with Google requirements, companies must disclose as much information about themselves as possible, and the completeness of the presentation on the site serves as one of the signals to the search engine about the credibility and reliability of the brand. As such, we expand the “about” block with information about the school, the training center, and the simulators used. We prepare informative cards for each of the school’s instructors, indicating their experience and personal achievements. A section on the location of the business will also be useful, helping potential customers to assess the convenience and attractiveness of the training area in terms of “what to do”, “where to go” and “where to spend your free time”.
Review pages. An additional source of relevant traffic to the site will come from pages with reviews and ratings: for flight schools, various training programs and courses, as well as reviews of the courses themselves, the school, the staff.

Technical Optimization

We optimize the website’s html code: from finding and eliminating errors to improving and updating the site to make it as user-friendly as possible and consistent wit the quality standards of Google search.

Eliminating errors. We analyze the site, identifying and eliminating all the bugs that hold it back or do not allow it to develop.
Meta-tags. We optimize page meta-tags: titles, descriptions, h1-h6 titles, noindex tags and others for correct indexing of each page.
Micromarking. We implement micromarking, which makes the presentation of the site attractive in search engine results. On the relevant pages we introduce micromarking about the company with contact data, reviews and ratings, prices, and breadcrumbs. We use all kinds of micromarking that aligns with the purpose of the site pages and makes snippets in SERPs more attractive.
Structure. We fine-tune our own website and analyze competitors’ sites, expanding the structure of the site based on the analysis and the collected semantic core. We monitor the hierarchy of folders, elaborating levels of nesting based on the principle that important pages should be as close to the main page as possible. We increase the number of pages on the site by creating valuable content.
Navigation. Many new pages will be created on the site, so we think through the correct navigation to important pages, making site navigation convenient for users and functional for search engines.
Internal linking. Internal links are no less important to Google than external links, so we create a clever system of internal linking for the promoted semantics.
Website speed. Google likes fast and easy sites, because they are user-friendly. There’s no need to become the fastest among competitors, as this is technically difficult, but moving from the red PageSpeed zone into the yellow zone is imperative.

Links

Links remain an important ranking factor for Google, so it’s important to work on your site’s link profile. It is important to remember that low-quality links (from low-grade and spam-heavy sites) not only provide no benefit for the site, but can indeed harm it. That is why we plan to place only high-quality and thematic links from reputable sources.

Media. We select high-quality media with high traffic and prepare news and articles for placement. Such links are also good because they allow the name of the company to be googled, which has a positive effect on the brand’s reputation.
Bloggers and influencers. As with media, we select useful thematic blogs, negotiate with bloggers, and prepare articles for posting. Guest posts on authoritative and high-traffic resources serve as a source of quality links.
Client partners. Our link building strategy includes working with the client’s partners, former customers, and current students. We ask them to place a link to our site. The technique of affiliate links has proven to be excellent in retail, where links are placed from the official sites of manufacturers. Placing affiliate links in the niche of flight schools is also a possibility.

YMYL Factors

A flight school website is one example of YMYL (“Your Money, Your Life”) sites. Google considers all commercial websites as such and therefore has particularly high requirements for the quality and accuracy of the information posted on these sites.

We work with YMYL factors based on the following principles.

Company image. We build a positive brand reputation through guest postings and external placements. Google verifies information about the company, and we must convince it of our credibility.
Reviews on Google Maps. Despite the existence of numerous review aggregators on the web, there is reason to believe that Google puts more trust in reviews that are posted on its resources. As such, we clean up the Google Maps card and keep an eye on the reviews that users post there.
Expertise of authors. The texts posted on the YMYL website must be prepared by experts. We attract expert and authoritative authors to write website content. We prepare a card for each author with a detailed description of his/her competencies, merits and achievements.

Retargeting

Combining SEO with other digital marketing tools creates an effective marketing mix that allows you to bring more customers to your site and give a final “nudge” to those who are hesitant to buy. Retargeting is also valuable in the area of flight school services, because after seeing a course offer today, a person may not remember where he saw it on the following day. Retargeting advertising will jog his memory, and a special offer for such a client will accelerate the decision to buy.

We use three approaches in working with retargeting ads:

Standard offer. We determine how long it takes, on average, for a person to buy a course and then run ads for the entire decision-making period targeting everyone who showed interest in the school’s offer.
Special offer. If we see that a user remains unconvinced by the regular offer, we attempt to convince him with a discount.
Offer for the “sleeping” audience. After some time, we make another offer to a potential customer who has not yet bought a course from us. There is a chance that he has not yet enrolled in any flight school. By reminding the customer about us and making a good offer, we increase the likelihood of them buying a course from us.

Analytics in Flight School SEO

Analytics allows for evaluating the effectiveness of work performed and adjustment in areas where there is “slippage”. As such, we constantly analyze all the data that we can calculate, and which have an impact on the final result (positions, traffic, sales).

Positions. Once a week we monitor the position of each promoted query in the Google top 100. We track position trends, look at graphs, and draw conclusions. We are pleased with growth of positions, but also take steps to eliminate slippage. We do not focus on each query individually, but set up analysis by query mask (for example, all queries with the word “price”) or url (for example, all service cards). We look at trends in each segment and draw conclusions. Simultaneously, we estimate competitors’ positions in the Google top 100, compare it to ours and are happy when we take the leading spots.
Competitors. We frequently monitor our competitors and outperform them, focusing only on the strong competitors and their strengths. We don’t make things “faster and easier,” even if that’s how our competitor implements it. We always strive to be better and more efficient for the user.
Baseline web-analytics. We carry out regular analysis of traffic, entry and exit pages, and conversions. We regularly adjust the promotion strategy to maximize the impact of SEO and other advertising channels.

Takeaways

SEO strategy for a flight school’s website is the starting point for the development and promotion of the project. It is based on an analysis of the current state of the site, the market and competitors. It includes all types of work and their stages necessary to achieve leading positions in Google search results for the queries significant for the client’s business.

The basis of SEO strategy is relentless work with the site and its improvement for the convenience of the end consumer, as well as working with the company’s image and brand, which is also an important signal for Google. It is with this strategy that the My Digital Family team plans to work with the website of the u.S. flight school.

Written by Iurii Nemtcev

SEO expert and My Digital Family founder and CEO