Local SEO Case StudyNonprofit
How New Tech Network Became the Answer Google's AI Gives Educators
While most education nonprofits were still optimizing for the old version of Google, New Tech Network’s content was already winning the placement that matters now — Google’s AI Overviews — for the exact questions educators are asking.
The Results
The Traffic Got Better, Not Just Bigger
The Challenge
Mission Accomplished, Search Abandoned
Great content that nobody searches for might as well not exist. New Tech Network had just revised their entire website, but it was built around what the organization wanted to say, not what educators were actually Googling, so the right people never found it, no matter how good the writing was. The site said everything about the mission and nothing about what people were searching for.
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We’ve built a good relationship with them over these three years. They’ve supported us through busy seasons, staff changes, new hires, the ever-changing field of SEO, and AI gaining momentum
— Kelley McKaig, Director of Marketing & Content Alignment, New Tech Network
Our Approach
Built Around How Educators Actually Search
“Project-based learning” gets searched, but it’s broad; every education nonprofit and university teaching program is competing for the same page, and it doesn’t capture what an educator actually needs when they search it. New Tech Network’s audience wasn’t just asking “what is PBL”; they were asking how to run it in a kindergarten classroom, how to build a curriculum around it grade by grade, how it’s different from problem-based learning.
The site had the mission, but it wasn’t built to answer any of that specifically. So instead of starting with a content calendar, we started with the actual questions educators were Googling and built the site’s authority around them.
1
Found their biggest opportunity: Project-Based Learning
We identified the high-value topics their audience was already Googling and restructured existing content around them. The practice now holds #1 for “project-based curriculum” and owns the entire PBL-for-kindergarten search cluster outright.
2
Wrote content deep enough to compete with university teaching colleges, not just other nonprofits
Rather than settling for a surface-level explainer, we built resource pages that went as far into a topic as the university programs writing for teachers do, matching that depth was the target, on terms like “PBL” and “scaffolding in education” where the usual competition is Edutopia and PBLWorks, not academic institutions.
3
Free Money Most Nonprofits Never Claim
Google gives every qualifying nonprofit up to $10,000 a month in free search ads — and most never fully use it. We put that budget to work immediately, driving traffic to New Tech Network’s strongest pages, while the organic strategy built the kind of authority that keeps ranking long after any ad budget runs out.
4
Started fixing the exact problem AI Overviews create, instead of ignoring it
When more visibility didn’t fully translate to more clicks, we didn’t treat that as a dead end; we audited every resource page for impressions-to-click gaps and rebuilt the meta titles and descriptions on the highest-opportunity pages to actually earn the click Google was already offering.
THE EDGE
The Content Google Trusts to Answer the Question
When someone searches “project-based curriculum” or asks how to run PBL in a kindergarten classroom, Google doesn’t just rank New Tech Network — it uses their content as the answer. Across 41 tracked keywords, their pages hold the #1 citation in Google’s AI Overview, putting New Tech Network in front of educators the moment they ask the question, right inside the search results they’re already using.
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