Widening Organic Reach with Academic Content
Case study
Perlego is an online learning platform, giving learners and educators access to over one million academic textbooks for an affordable monthly fee.
In my time working at Perlego we wanted to enhance the website's visibility for informational searches on important concepts, topics and theories in academia.
We delivered this through two core projects, Study Guides & Index.
Read on below to learn more about what we did, how we did it, and what happened after we did it.
DR 90+
Backlinks
100k+
Informational Keywords
AI +
Huge increases in LLM coverage
Services:
Content Management
CMS Build Project Management
Stakeholder Management
Academic Expertise
Internal Linking Optimisation
Metadata Targeting
The Goals
The core goal was to find new ways of acquiring users to the site. We also wanted to do this in a manner that provided benefit for the website as a whole; bringing in high quality backlinks and high quality traffic in equal measure.
Study Guides
Perlego had great traction online with its extensive library of books, but we wanted to find ways of capturing search interest before people knew what book they wanted to read.
To do this, we needed to build up a bank of content that was faced towards high opportunity topics in academia, such as Absurdism. Crucially, each topic needed to be something that Perlego could provide a great servie around with its available catalogue of books.
We launched Study Guides as our solution to this. Designed as a one-size-fits-all introduction to some of academia's most engaging topics, these are intended to give learners a great introduction to a given topic, whilst pointing them towards some of the most engaging literature on the topic available on Perlego, per the below screengrab from a study guide on Epic Poetry.
All of the authors we partnered with for this content had either a Masters or a PhD to their name in a relevant topic, and we worked with them collaboratively on a wide array of topics.
Study Guides not only set a new benchmark for what quality content looked like on Perlego, but these guides helped deliver backlinks from the likes of Stanford University, and other Ivy League institutions.
Whilst these guides rank very effectively in traditional search, they have gained particularly strong traction in LLMs, as you can see below.
Index
Leaning into the success we'd found with Study Guides, we wanted to find a programmatic alternative that would compliment the curated and bespokely written nature of them.
This is where the Index project entered the chat. I identified tens of thousands of research topics, which we then queried the Perlego catalogue of books against to surface the most relevant quotes on those concepts.
Designed to operate like the index of a textbook, each of these pages directs researchers to some of the most relevant quotes and books on a given topic - streamlining their research journey.
From the African City Model to Newton's First Law by way of the Properties of Waves, these pages have proved an instrumental new acqusition lever for Perlego - opening new avenues for how people find and interact with their catalogue of books.
StartupSEO
Precision-tailored organic growth strategies for ambitious brands. We’re here to help you drive traffic, convert visitors, and scale to new heights.
+44 (0) 7980463832
toby@startup-seo.com
LinkedIn
®StartupSEO 2025