Furman brought me on as SEO Manager in December 2022. There was no content marketing program, so I built one from scratch: the strategy, the blog, and the operations behind it.
As a one-person SEO team, I built a repeatable pipeline. I found winnable questions around Furman’s degree programs and around college in general, and studied the top three results: the keywords they ranked for, what they covered, and the gaps none of them filled. I used ChatGPT to turn that research into an outline built to beat them, then edited it into a brief. Freelance writers I hired and managed wrote each post, and it went through the marketing editor and the relevant college before publishing. About 35 posts came out of it.
It paid off fast. The content contributed to organic search leads more than doubling in the first year. By the time I left in May 2025, the content had added $1M in traffic value, 257,000 new clicks, 48.2 million new impressions, and more than 6,000 keywords ranking on page one.
The blog was the center of it. Its first posts went live in November 2023, and one year in it was drawing 68,822 visits a month from just 35 pages, about 60 times the traffic Charleston Southern’s blog had at the same age. The full 2024 story is in the Furman content program case study.
