At Grand Canyon Education, I own the SEO side of the Grand Canyon University blog. Each month I research about 15 posts: roughly 5 new pieces built around E-E-A-T, and 10 refreshes, one for each of the university’s colleges. The content team writes them; I decide what they target and how they’re built to rank.
The process
Every post starts with the same research:
- Find the topic and choose a primary keyword plus close secondary keywords.
- Write the page title and pick a keyword-aligned URL slug.
- Find an emulation link: the top-ranking page we want to beat.
- Build the outline with the same pipeline I created at Furman. I export the keyword lists of the top three results and build an outline that covers their common themes and fills the gaps none of them cover.
- Map internal links to and from related pages.
Then I review every draft for internal links, slug, and keyword usage, and do the final QA once it’s built in Drupal, testing every link on the page.
To keep up the pace, I built custom ChatGPT skills for the repeatable parts: one turns the top three keyword exports into an outline, and others find refresh candidates and uncovered topics.
Results so far
Of the 135 posts I’ve researched, 75 weren’t ranking in August 2025 and are ranking now. Together they draw about 15,700 estimated monthly organic visits, worth about $9,600 a month in equivalent paid search. Of the 93 posts with rankings, 87 have their top keyword on page one.
| Post | Est. monthly visits | Top keyword (monthly searches) |
|---|---|---|
| Types of Quantitative Research Design | 3,046 (new) | #4 for quantitative research design (6,900) |
| Qualitative Research Methods and Designs | 2,174 (new) | #5 for qualitative research design (8,200) |
| What Is Contemporary Dance | 1,474 (new) | #8 for contemporary dance (10,000) |
| Should College Athletes Be Paid | 1,097 (up from 456) | #2 for why should college athletes be paid (600) |
| What Is Secondary Education | 620 (new) | #4 for what is secondary education (6,900) |
Ahrefs estimates for gcu.edu/blog/ as of September 30, 2026, compared with August 1, 2025. Excludes a long-standing post that was already at about 13,000 monthly visits before my work. 42 posts, many published in the last few months, don’t have tracked rankings yet.
Credit where it’s due
These are team results. I do the keyword and SEO research and the SEO reviews; GCU’s content team writes the posts, and each one moves through the team’s review process before it goes live. What the numbers reflect on my side is topic and keyword selection, and outlines built to beat what already ranks.