Case Study: Teachers Pay Teachers Web Analytics and SEO

Teachers Pay Teachers 

Teachers Pay Teachers is “the world’s most popular online marketplace for original education resources”. According to Semrush, organic traffic tops 6.5M. Their business model allows individual educators to sell original resources to other educators and educational institutions. This creates stores under the umbrella of teacherpayteachers.com  with a search engine to navigate it all. It is similar to Etsy but targeted to educators. For this case study, store owners are customers and buyers are consumers. 

Tech Stack

TpT utilizes a stack including a variety of tools and widgets for analytics and tracking according to Built With. TpT’s estimated annual technology spend is $109, 604. The TpT stack includes among other tools:

Tools/Widget	Purpose
Full Story	understanding customer experience
Hotjar	heat maps, surveys, and funnels
Optimizely	A/B Testing
Heap	captures user actions, application performance insights
Sift Science	monitors traffic, identifies fraud
Google Optimize 360	website testing/personalized delivery
Social Media Analytics/Tracking Tags	customer behavior and audience targeting for ads
Google Analytics	Domain Statistics/goals and event tracking
Bing Universal Event Tracking	campaign tracking and conversion measurement
Crimson Hexagon/Brandwatch	Artificial Intelligence for consumer trends and insights, social listening
Google Global Site Tag	Adwords tags
Google Conversion Linker	connects ad clicks to conversions
Google Tag Manager	Sets up triggers for measurement on domains for analytics
Algolia	delivers search experience
Google Plus One Platform	Google and API

The stack enables TpT to monitor visitor traffic and customer behavior in a variety of ways. They are using data to improve consumer experience and provide a personalized experience. They have the capabilities to understand consumers, traffic sources and behaviors. They are able to track conversions and can get qualitative data from surveys. They also have the ability to do A/B testing on content and page optimization. TpT will have a wealth of data. They can pinpoint specific data through tracking tags to gain better analytics and targeted audiences. For example, they would have much more extensive details on interests and social media traffic that graphics from similarweb depict:

 

Current On-Page SEO Strategies

Keywords and Ads

TpT’s 437 paid keywords cost about $103.7K a month to rank according to Semrush. Five keywords rank in the top 100 with three in the top 20. These include teachers pay teachers, worksheets, marketplace for teachers, teaching ideas and resources for classroom. Estimated monthly paid traffic is at 113.1K. When compared to competitors, TpT gets more traffic with fewer paid keywords than competitors. This may be due in part to organic word of mouth among educators.

TpT runs ads that are triggered by keywords. A large number include variations and misspellings of teachers pay teachers. While ad copy looks similar, keywords that trigger them vary: 

 

Titles, Tags and other SEO Variables Present

• According to SEOquake, TpT has an optimal length 57 character title: "Teaching Resources & Lesson Plans | Teachers Pay Teachers”. 
• Their meta description states “World’s most popular online marketplace for original educational resources with more than four million resources available for use today.” At 137 characters they could lengthen a bit if desired and include more keywords. Kalyadina suggests 150 as optimal. 
• All images have alt descriptions that include the product name.
• While they do not have AMP they do have Meta Viewport which does work with many mobile browsers.
• A GTMetrix  performance test graded TpT at a B with scripts slowing total blocking time.

URLs

TpT’s URL is optimal at 28 characters. I performed a Google search for “music activity pdf” and the second result was this URL from TpT: https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Browse/PreK-12-Subject-Area/Music/Price-Range/Free/Type-of-Resource/Worksheets/Page:4  While long, it is easy to read and does include some keywords. Backlinko recommends that URLs not be unnecessarily long or be stuffed product numbers for example.

Additionally, TpT has put thought into clicks required to find products on their site. Kalyadina recommends three clicks to get from homepage to product. While TpT often requires more than three, the process is organized and the internal links follow a similar organizational structure to the example link above.

Robots and Sitemap

TpT’s robot.txt clearly states what it allows and disallows. Disallowed are pages not wanted in search results such as carts where purchases are made, for example. The sitemap is extensive but well-organized which will make crawling the site easier. The sitemap first includes main pages like “about us” then groups product items in batches of 50,000 totaling over 5M. Finally, it groups sellers in batches of 50,000 totaling over 330K. 

Customers Dashboard and Knowledge Base

TpT provides a dashboard with basic analytics about conversions, traffic sources and product specific customer behaviors. Store owners with paid membership rather than a free store have access to a UTM builder and can install Facebook Pixel. All customers are provided courses and templates for marketing strategies. This includes TpT University which covers topics from content creation to writing content descriptions and selecting categories to copyright to how to understand the dashboard. In order to help the consumer experience, TpT pours resources into the customers who own stores to make it a better experience for both.

Potential Improvements

Technical SEO and Keywords

TpT site health is currently 79% with some errors to fix according to Semrush. Their authority score sits at 75. Semrush’s On Page SEO Checker finds 248 ideas for 46 of the 100 pages crawled. Headings are also absent from the code so this is a consideration for improvement. So while they do have some visibility and do rank well for a few keywords, there is room to tighten up the technical aspects of on-page SEO. This also includes continuing  keyword research and implementation efforts.

Tools

TpT’s tech stack is comprehensive. A plan to regularly audit each tool to determine if it meets needs should be performed at regular intervals. They might consider options specifically for mobile first if mobile users become a larger segment of their customers and consumers as Semrush traffic analytics estimates 88% desktop traffic. In 2021 it was estimated that 53.9% of eCommerce transactions would occur over phone so it is an important consideration to remember.

Backlinks

A complicating factor involves store owners distributing links to drive traffic to their storefronts. This potentially helps explain a very small amount of 69.3% of toxic backlinks numbering 92.1K found by Semrush. There are many links not directly related to store owner properties, though. While this is an off-page issue, it may impact the authority score. It certainly merits some attention in my opinion as it looks as if some bot activity is influencing the toxicity.

PR

While again an off-page issue, Schwartz shares accounts of store owners on TpT using copyrighted materials in their products. This might include resources copied from Pinterest, for example, or even a character from a Disney movie. While TpT does have modules to train store owners about copyright considerations and strongly forbids the practice, they do not deal with the claims directly. Copyright claims are the responsibility of the copyright holder. TpT needs to continue keeping tabs on the issue by developing strong policies and procedures for preventing and/or addressing known issues.

Final Thoughts

TpT puts thought into their SEO and has tools for the job but can still make improvements in both their on-page and off-page SEO strategies. Having both customers and consumers gives them unique circumstances to consider. They should have a good understanding of their customers and consumers as well as traffic sources.