Competition in the culinary world is fierce, especially if you compete on an international level. The Prue
Leith College however, has more than succeeded through a combination of marketing techniques which also include
the Internet. The Prue Leith Group has recently re-designed their website specifically to stay ahead of
competition and to ensure that their visitors get to a user-friendly website that encompasses the style and
quality which set them apart from other culinary schools. They have received numerous comments from users
showing that the effort was worth the while.
Apart from a user-friendly and elegant website you also however, require search engine optimisation to
ensure that your website ranks amongst the top culinary schools on the Internet. iLeadOnline has long been
involved in the online marketing of Prue Leith through a complete online marketing mix which involves:
- Site optimisation including keyword density analysis and placement, meta tags, headings, and sitemap to name, but a few;
- Link generation to ensure growing link popularity;
- Affiliate marketing through articles at iLeadOnline to generate sales leads;
- Article writing for the Prue Leith website to ensure that informative content is available and to create entry points to the website;
- Ongoing statistics and web traffic monitoring;
- Website maintenance;
- Google Adwords campaign set-up and maintenance;
- Newsletter set-up;
Page Ranking
Prue Leith has a history that goes back to 1996, but their online presence has a much shorter history. The
website has a current Google Page Rank of 4/10 and ranks under the top ten search results for most of the
sought after keywords relevant to their business. Their link popularity is another indication of just how
successful the online marketing strategy is. Since Google and Yahoo! are the two search engines which
count when it comes to traffic generation it is vital that a website has numerous links from the mentioned
search engines.
Incoming Links
Prue Leith succeeds with a current total of incoming links from Google standing at 40 and 321 from Yahoo!
More than 1400 incoming links are present from MSN. The site also boasts more than 200 incoming links from
AlltheWeb. The links from the search engines are extremely important as this indicates how many entry points
exist and in view of this the Prue Leith website is doing well.
Increased traffic to their site
The Prue Leith website received a staggering 5740 visits in October 2008 which is almost 33% better
than the previous month which stood at 4317 visits, in it self quite substantial. More than 83% of their
traffic comes from organic searches at search engines. Affiliate or referring sites generate 8.64% of their
traffic, whilst direct traffic accounts for 7.87% of their traffic.
From the search engine referrals Google organic searches make up almost 50% of the traffic generated while
the Google CPC contributes 30.85% of the visits. iLeadOnline has sent 213 visits to their website in October
alone which is just over 3% of the overall traffic generated. From this it can be seen that a well planned
online marketing mix that includes incoming links, SEO for organic searches and a solid pay per click plan
as well as affiliate marketing ensure a steady increase in traffic. Visits from more than 98 countries have
been received, overcoming any geographical limitations while the main country still stays South Africa. Just
under 300 visits came from the UK and 145 visits came from the USA. If you want to reach the international
market then online marketing is the only truly successful method you can use.
The Prue Leith Group has grown tremendously with expansion in the catering and placement divisions of the
culinary industry as well as being noted internationally as one of the top culinary academies in the world.
Their online branding is just as important as their actual campuses and services since the Internet presence
serves as a window into the level of excellence that has become synonymous with the name of Prue Leith.
As Prue Leith is situated in Gauteng South Africa it important that their main demographic market will
also be targeted online. iLeadOnline has succeeded in this as is evident in the statistics of users which
indicates that 89.9% of their users come from South Africa.
Keyword Relevance
Traffic means nothing if it is not targeted and thus relevant to a website's main business. iLeadOnline has
thus taken the necessary steps to ensure that the visitor that comes to Prue Leith via affiliate marketing,
PPC and organic searches is in the market for one of the products or services offered by Prue Leith.
In October 2008 for instance, the website received 490 visits through searches on catering specifically.
The site received 132 visits for the keyword "food" and 112 for cooking courses. These are just a few of
the keywords targeted in the industry. The site performs well for each of its main keywords ensuring that
every hit counts.
Prue Leith has only really started to get a foothold in the culinary education world when they commenced
with search engine optimisation. Their July intake of students is growing every year. The most successful
part of their online marketing strategy is the Google Adwords campaign, set-up and managed by iLeadOnline. In
the words of Murray Barnetson from Prue Leith to succeed with online marketing:
"Initially, use a carefully crafted Adwords campaign backed up by a properly designed SEO site."
