Analytics Assessment · Findings
Analytics Assessment · Findings
Its traffic and sign-ups are program-seekers; the site hierarchy effectively pushes users directly to programs, but the employers, organizations, and schools it’s actually for barely find it via search or engage with the partnership story as written. The interim job is to redefine the site’s purpose around those three audiences — and let the consumer site own the program search.
The partner site’s job is to convince, convert, and enable the relationships that start elsewhere.
The traffic is real — but it’s program-seekers, and they convert on program pages, while the pages built for partners go unused. The B2B buyer won’t arrive through search: almost no one searches these terms, and for the terms people do search, the consumer site wins the click. So the interim job isn’t to chase traffic the site can’t win — it’s to give the partner site a clear purpose, speak to each audience in its own terms, and carry the partnership story through the content itself.
The individual-program pages get most of everything: most of the site's views, most of its search clicks, and — most importantly — most of its form sign-ups (where the B2B form is submitted). The rest of the site, including the partner pages, gets very little. The pages built to speak to partners (who-we-serve, how-it-works) are barely visited: each audience page drew roughly 1,500 visits over the year against the catalog's ~270,000. The few who do arrive are reasonably engaged (~30s, low bounce), so the shortfall is in how many people reach these pages — not in the pages themselves.
| Page / section | Views (12 mo) |
|---|---|
| Program catalog (/programs*) | ~270,000 |
| Homepage (/) | ~48,400 |
| /how-it-works (hub + sub-pages) | ~5,500 |
| /who-we-serve — Employers | 1,507 |
| /who-we-serve — Job Training Organizations | 1,493 |
| /who-we-serve — Education Providers | 773 |
| /who-we-serve (hub) | 328 |
Each partner-audience page draws ~1,500 visits a year against the catalog’s ~270,000 — the arrival gap behind “barely visited.”
Of 2,446 B2B form submissions over the year, 82% happened on program pages like medical billing & coding, electrician apprenticeship, and sterile processing. The partner-focused pages produced about 5% between them. One caveat to carry: some of these are likely individuals using the B2B form, not organizations — the form itself asks “Myself vs. Others.”
Entry vs. conversion: the homepage’s small share here understates its role — it’s a bigger front door than its sign-up count suggests. About 18% of all leads begin their visit on the homepage, even though only about 5% of sign-ups are actually submitted there. People land on the homepage and then move to a program page to convert — so the homepage’s job is to bring people in and point them onward, not to close the sign-up itself.
Program pages get 45% of all clicks from Google; the two partner-focused sections get under 3% between them. Views, search clicks, and sign-ups all concentrate on the same pages.
The partner site isn’t short on traffic. It draws a healthy, steady stream of engaged search visitors — about 64K from Google over the year, averaging ~99 seconds on the site. The catch is who they are: people shopping for individual programs, who land on program pages. What needs to change is the fit between that audience and the site’s purpose — not the volume.
Averaging ~99 seconds on the site — real, engaged people.
Program pages fill the top of the most-visited list.
A single ~3-day spike — 291K “users” at 0.1-second engagement, ~85% of the year’s Direct traffic — pooled on /high-school and /who-we-serve/high-schools. It has been excluded from every figure in this report; Penn Foster’s team should filter it by date going forward.
Following real visitors through the site (late-May junk spike excluded) shows where attention flows — and where it doesn’t. From the homepage, people head to program pages rather than the partnership content; and visitors who reach the program catalog almost never cross into the partnership pages either.
Its headline — “Online Education and Career Training for Your Workforce” — frames the whole site for employers, so it’s not clear to a high-school counselor or a nonprofit director (two of the three target audiences) that they are in the right place. The click-through itself is healthy — about 37% of homepage sessions go on to another page (the ~63% who leave is normal for a homepage). The point is where that 37% goes: program pages take more than half of the onward clicks and out-draw the partner pages nearly three to one. The partner pages aren’t invisible — together they pull about a fifth — but from the homepage the catalog is the first door people take, and the partner story is the second.
Program pages take at least 53% of onward clicks — the catalog’s long tail of program subcategories spills into “Other,” so the true share is higher. Even ignoring “Other” entirely, programs out-draw the partner pages nearly 3 to 1 (6,369 vs 2,235). The partner pages aren’t invisible — together they pull about a fifth of onward clicks — but from the homepage the catalog is still the first door people take.
From a program page, people move to the homepage, search, or other program pages — but essentially none cross into the who-we-serve or how-it-works pages. The partnership story isn’t just under-visited; even engaged visitors never reach it.
The site struggles to be found for two different reasons.
Only about 2% of clicks come from employer or workforce searches (roughly 550 over the year). Terms like "employee upskilling" or "workforce training provider" barely get searched at all. So the partner site can't win new partner leads through search — that demand doesn't really exist. The partnership story has to be told through the site's own content, not through search traffic.
Example — someone researching "penn foster high school": the partner site was shown 307,670 times and got ~1,300 clicks, while the consumer site got 76,977 clicks for the same search. And it is not just brand searches — for a plain program search like "medical billing and coding class," the partner site was shown ~19,600 times and clicked twice.
Because partners.pennfoster.edu and the consumer site pennfoster.edu look alike and use the same page addresses (/high-school, /programs), they show up for the same Google searches. When they do, the consumer site wins nearly every click and the partner site just piles up views it can't use.
A third of the partner site's top searches (324) are shared with the consumer site — and the pattern holds even for prospective-student searches, not just brand terms. This is the norm for its most visible searches, not an edge case. And it isn’t only these two: Ashworth College, CareerStep, and pennfoster.com — all Penn Foster Group brands — rank among the partner site’s top organic competitors (competitive section), so the whole portfolio splits the same search space.
The only terms with real search volume are specific programs and certifications — and those are individuals looking to enroll, i.e. consumer intent. The partner site ranks for many of them, but that intercepts people who actually want the consumer site. The partnership and workforce terms a B2B buyer would use barely get searched at all.
Program and certification searches (phlebotomy, medical billing) have real volume, but they’re individuals looking to enroll. The partner site ranks for many, which mostly intercepts consumer-bound traffic — and likely inflates the “B2B leads” on program pages. Penn Foster should own this demand on the consumer site; on the partner site, program content is proof of what an organization could offer, not a search play.
The partnership words, by comparison, are nearly empty: the most-searched employer term we tested is only about 140 a month, the best high-school-partner term about 320. So the partnership story should be carried by clear on-page content — not by chasing those search terms.
These are the employer, workforce, and partner-audience terms we checked in SEMrush (US). Almost none get meaningful search volume. For contrast, program and certification terms run 27,000–165,000 searches a month.
Source: SEMrush Keyword Overview · US. “<10” means no measurable US search volume for that term.
It sounds counterintuitive — why remove our own pages from Google? Because both Penn Foster sites show up for the same program searches, and the consumer site wins about 99% of the clicks. The partner site isn’t gaining that traffic — it’s intercepting people who wanted the consumer site, and turning some of them into “B2B leads” who are really individuals. Ceding the term means we stop making the partner site compete, and let the consumer site — which already wins — be the single front door.
A search for “phlebotomy” returns both sites.
The consumer site owns the search; organizations get handed to the partner site.
Nothing is lost: the traffic goes where it actually converts, and organizations still reach the partner site. This applies only to the duplicated program/catalog terms — the partner site keeps its own brand and “for organizations” searches. Net: the consumer site becomes the shared front door, and the partner site becomes the destination for buyers who arrive by referral, sales, brand, and AI — which is how they arrive anyway.
Almost no one in this space earns their traffic through search — they earn it by being known. Strip out brand names and the demand that’s left is people looking for individual credentials or jobs. No one ranks for B2B buyer terms, because buyers aren’t searching them.
| Domain | Est. organic visits/mo | Organic keywords | How they earn traffic |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stepful | 128,235 | 48,805 | Its own name + healthcare-credential demand (medical assistant, surgical tech) |
| MedCerts | 67,796 | 32,441 | Its own name + healthcare-certification demand (CPC, CCMA, surgical tech) |
| Guild | 65,028 | 2,470 | Almost entirely its own name — near-zero non-brand demand |
| Stride / K12 | 46,798 | 3,892 | Its own name + job-seeker and investor terms |
| Interplay | 23,235 | 5,683 | Its own name + skilled-trades demand (HVAC) |
| Udemy Business | 17,776 | 2,598 | Its own name + login — existing corporate accounts |
| InStride | 10,817 | 6,460 | Its own name + client program names |
| Penn Foster (partner) | 4,169 | 7,203 | ~85% its own name — the Penn Foster partner site |
| Coursera for Business | 2,518 | 1,244 | Its own name + product/pricing terms |
Organic visits are SEMrush estimates (ranking position × search volume × modeled click-through) — a stand-in for the Search Console data we can’t see for competitors. Use them for comparison, not exact counts.
Every competitor’s traffic is mostly their own name.
Between 85% and 100% of every competitor’s organic traffic comes from people typing the company’s own name — not from generic “corporate training” or “workforce” searches.
What’s the non-brand demand, then? Individual credentials and jobs — not B2B buyers.
| Competitor | Top non-brand keyword | Est. visits/mo | What kind of demand |
|---|---|---|---|
| Penn Foster (partner) | pharmacy assistant course online | 322 | Individual credential |
| Stepful | medical assistant salary | 1,782 | Individual credential |
| MedCerts | surgical tech programs | 948 | Individual credential |
| Interplay | study hvac online | 101 | Individual credential |
| Stride / K12 | remote education jobs | 429 | Job-seeker |
| Guild | career mapping | 63 | Generic HR info |
| Udemy Business | technical skills | 297 | Generic HR info |
| InStride | diversity training for staff | 46 | B2B buyer term |
| Coursera for Business | corporate e learning platform | 13 | B2B buyer term |
Penn Foster’s partner site is no exception: its own top non-brand term is “pharmacy assistant course online” — an individual-credential search, not a B2B one. The healthcare and trades schools (Stepful, MedCerts, Interplay) capture real demand too — but it’s individual learners, the same consumer demand pennfoster.edu already owns, not the partner side. The only B2B-buyer terms anyone ranks for at all are Coursera’s “corporate e learning platform” (~13 visits/mo) and InStride’s small diversity-training cluster (~40–60 each).
Stepful and MedCerts pull the most organic traffic in the set — driven by high-volume healthcare-credential terms (phlebotomy, surgical tech, CPC/CCMA). That demand is consumer-side and belongs to the pennfoster.edu conversation, not the partner site.
Guild, InStride, Udemy Business and Coursera for Business are near-100% brand. They win by being the named education-benefits partner for specific employers — relationships and sales, not keywords.
USCI runs the same dual model as Penn Foster — a consumer school plus a workforce-partner arm (Employer, Non-Profit, Academic Partner Solutions). Its B2B terms (“healthcare employee training,” “staff training in healthcare”) pull ~0–1 visits/mo. Same model, same near-zero organic result.
Who else shows up in the space — including names Penn Foster may not track.
When we ask which domains rank for the partner site’s terms, the names that come back are all direct-to-consumer career schools: US Career Institute (the closest, and it has its own B2B arm), Ashworth College and Career Step (both Penn Foster Group sister brands, splitting the same space), plus Ultimate Medical Academy, CalRegional and Alison. Not one is a B2B workforce partner — and even the closest overlap shares only a quarter of its keywords with the partner site. There is no organic B2B competitor cluster to find, because there is no organic B2B demand to compete over.
Across the set, organic traffic is overwhelmingly brand navigation (85–100%), and the non-brand demand that exists is individual-credential and job-seeker searches — not employers shopping for a training partner. The domains that share the partner site’s terms are all direct-to-consumer career schools, none of them B2B partners.
The partner site’s small organic footprint isn’t a fixable SEO gap — it’s what the B2B model looks like. The opportunity is clarity and conversion, not chasing search demand that isn’t there.
The partner site is built for three very different audiences — enterprise, workforce and community organizations, and high schools — and each finds Penn Foster in its own way. Here’s how the data plays out for each, starting with how they even arrive.
Sources: GA4 · Google Search Console · SEMrush.
The data: Near-zero B2B search demand (best employer term ~140/mo); Guild and InStride earn their organic traffic from their own brand and named client relationships, not from search terms.
Takeaway: Enterprise buyers don't discover Penn Foster through search or generic content — they arrive through sales, referral, and brand.
The data: Its who-we-serve page is the most tailored of the three — it names placement rates, economic mobility, wraparound support, and grant-funded partners. Term search volume is still low.
Takeaway: This is where Penn Foster has its strongest existing page — a base to build on, not fix from scratch.
The data: A three-site journey — partner marketing → consumer HS pages (~1.09M views) → enroll subdomain (~205K completions). Partner HS pages are thin (real traffic ~4,800 once the junk spike is stripped out). The winnable HS search is consumer and informational (US Career Institute wins it); the B2B HS terms (credit-recovery program, etc.) have ~0 volume.
Takeaway: The B2B buyer (counselor/principal) and the end-user (student/parent) diverge, and the journey spans three properties — the hardest of the three.
Early direction from the data — where to focus the interim work.
Traffic and sign-ups are program-seekers today. The interim work is to give employers, workforce and community organizations, and high-school partners each a clear purpose and path on the site — instead of routing everyone to the program catalog.
The two Penn Foster sites compete for the same program terms, and the consumer site wins. Point program-seekers to pennfoster.edu and free the partner site to focus on the partnership story.
No one in this category earns B2B through organic search. Invest in on-page proof, clear storytelling, and an easy way to start a conversation — not in chasing search demand that doesn’t exist.
The partner journey spans several properties — the partner site, the consumer high-school pages, the enroll subdomain, and workforcedevelopment.edu — and small trust signals carry across all of them. As a quick win, add favicons to enroll.pennfoster.edu and workforcedevelopment.edu, which currently load without one, so every step reads as one legitimate Penn Foster brand.
Today both sites lean on one lead form that asks people to self-identify — individual or organization — only after they’ve arrived, so it pools the two audiences together. The stronger move is to re-architect the journey so it captures intent up front: steer individual learners onto the consumer path and organizations onto the partner path before the form, so each side converts the audience it’s built for. Cleaner intent means cleaner data, too — filter the bot and returning-student traffic, keep partner, consumer, and enroll reporting separate, and the real B2B lead count finally becomes visible.