The Company

Memrise is an app that’s anti-textbook, making language learning enjoyable and effective. Since its inception in 2010, Memrise has proven itself to be a highly effective tool for language acquisition, blowing the traditional textbook approach out of the water. Memrise’s influence has spread like wildfire to 189 countries–where individuals from all walks of life harness the power of language to enhance their personal growth, expand their social connections, and connect to the vast world around us.

The Challenge

Although Memrise had made a name for itself as a top-notch language-learning tool for Romance languages like French and Spanish, it was failing to penetrate the booming Asian language market. Specifically, the team’s goal was to corner the market on Japanese language learning. Despite its prior successes, Memrise was completely invisible on the UK search engine result pages for any “Learn Japanese” keyword. None of the industry keywords ranked in the top 20. Thus, it was vital for Memrise to secure a top-10 position for these keywords. Additionally, Memrise’s sign-up rates for ‘Learn Japanese’ was disappointingly low. Therefore, their aim was to significantly boost organic conversions.

The Outcome

Extensive research and understanding of various audience personas, including travelers, business professionals, students, and those seeking to navigate life in Japan. This informed our content strategy, complete with a well-planned keyword map designed to target the different personas with various content types.

We developed cornerstone content that is all about learning Japanese, with optimised copy that answers the user questions while simultaneously immersing readers in the language and culture. We also researched and provided supporting content to target long-tail and common search terms for the most common Japanese conversation.

The content was crafted in a cluster format to position Memrise as an industry leader in the Japanese language learning space. All content pieces were optimised to demonstrate Memrise’s expertise, authority, and trustworthiness. while keeping the brand’s tone of voice. We deploy new call-to-actions at various touchpoints to entice users to convert, while constantly tracking performance with customised KPIs.

Results

• Top 3 Google UK rankings achieved for key industry keywords
• Learn Japanese content saw a mammoth increase of 1,875% in organic sessions year-on-year
• The Japanese cluster’s total organic keyword ranking escalated from 10 to over 750
• Visibility scores increased by an impressive 396% 
• Astonishing 1637% surge in sign-ups (conversions)
• CTR for organic conversion rate upsurged from 1.95% to 4.67%.

Award

We take immense pride in being recognized as the winner of the prestigious UK Search Awards 2022 for this outstanding SEO performance, achieved through a cost-effective campaign. Our team’s remarkable efforts have been duly acknowledged with the top honor, fueling us with greater motivation to continue delivering exceptional results in the future.

Judges remark: “The Volvox Digital and Memrise campaign has a well-thought-out and creative approach. Fantastic results were achieved, especially whilst competing with big, localised brands”.