Case Study: Monash University achieves more than 100% organic traffic growth with SEMrush

Australia’s largest university delivers >100% organic traffic growth to all of its websites

Monash University, one of Australia’s largest public research universities with over 65,000 web pages across faculties and campuses, struggled with poor search visibility after outsourcing SEO—course pages were receiving almost no traffic and the study site domain had little authority. The sprawling site architecture and fragmented subsites made coordinated optimization difficult and ineffective.

Bringing SEO in-house, Monash adopted SEMrush (starting on Business, then Enterprise), ran competitive research, migrated study.monash to monash.edu/study, completed a full technical audit (HTTPS, redirects, canonicals, broken links) and filled content gaps (notably adding an ATAR calculator). They also trained 100+ staff and set up 30+ SEMrush projects. The result: organic traffic rose from 460k to over 1M visitors in 12 months (>100% growth), with improved visibility, crawlability, rankings and user experience.

Monash University

Shefali Joshi

Marketing Optimization Analyst