Here’s How Ranking on Google…Can Lead to LOWER Sales.
And how a few smart SEO changes got us back in front of the right people—just in time.
When most people think about SEO, they assume higher rankings equal more traffic, which leads to more conversions. But what if you’re showing up for all the wrong searches?
That was the situation with Olivet Nazarene University’s Driver Education Endorsement page earlier this year. Historically, the page ranked #1 on Google for Teachers looking for a Driver’s Ed endorsement program. However, the page had inadvertently gone through some small changes when the latest version of the website launched, and started to rank for terms around students and parents searching for Driver’s Ed classes for 15-year-old high school students.
It was a subtle difference in keywords, and easy to miss while managing 1700+ pages of a higher ed website. However, the bounce rate on the site increased, as visitors looking for a course for a high school student…we’re quite disappointed.
Talking to the Wrong Audience
To remedy this, Manx stepped in and used AI to split hundreds of keywords into two lists—keywords to rank for, and keywords to avoid. The copy of the page was completely rewritten to avoid any accidental rankings for the “wrong” kind of Driver’s Ed classes (the kind for students, not teachers).
This is a more common issue than most professionals realize. If your website is attracting the wrong kind of visitors, they’re not going to stay. They’re not going to go past one page. This, in turn, is going to crush your site with Google—because the algorithm will start to believe your website has nothing of value to offer.
What We Did About It
We got to work with a simple but effective strategy:
✅ Rewrote the page copy with a clear focus on endorsements for licensed educators—not classes for teens
✅ Integrated target keywords into headers and body text to signal stronger relevance to Google
✅ Interviewed alumni of the program and published stories on both olivet.edu and a high-authority partner site to boost backlinks and engagement
✅ Clarified the CTA so educators could easily understand their next step
The Result? A Return to the Top
Just five days the new content was published and crawled, the page rebounded in the rankings:
#2 for “Driver’s Ed Endorsement Illinois”
#2 for “driver’s ed endorsement”
#4 for “Driver’s Ed teacher certification”
#5 for “Driver’s Ed Teacher certification”
Not only are we back on Page 1, we’re in front of the right audience—teachers ready to advance their careers.
Why This Matters
If we hadn’t caught the issue in time, we could have seen a dip in applications and risked losing part of an entire summer cohort—with no chance to fill the course again until the summer of 2026.. SEO isn’t just about traffic—it’s about qualified traffic. Getting more clicks from the wrong users just causes a website—and a business—to fail faster.
Many SEO consultants push ONLY a dollar amount of traffic coming to the site as the sole metric of success. Unless keywords are carefully reviewed, tracked, and adjusted, (temporary) high traffic to your website will actually drag down your sales in the long run.
Need help supercharging your SEO…and purging bad hits on your website? Click the button below to get the conversation started.
