32% Higher on Google: Inside Great Lakes Institute of Management’s SEO Transformation

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The brief

Objective

Set up in 2010 in the commercial capital of Delhi-NCR, Gurugram, Great Lakes Institute of Management serves a pan-India target audience of aspiring business professionals. Organic search is the primary channel through which students discover and evaluate B-schools. Therefore, for the institute :

• Maintaining visibility on the search engines is mission-critical. Especially, in the era of AI-powered search, it is more important than ever for the institute to stay ahead of the peers across a wide range of search queries.
• With no in-house tech and SaaS capability and a marketing-lean team, Great Lakes needed a partner who could own the strategy end-to-end, move quickly and deliver clarity where there had been none.

The problem

Challenge

Until 2025, before collaborating with 6S, the institute worked with another agency and struggled with a clear roadmap or a vision for the long-term direction. Great Lakes faced two challenges in establishing their digital presence:

• No visibility into how the institution was positioned against competitors across different search queries.
• A lack of visibility into various metrics to measure relative performance in the market.
• No framework to understand how much organic traffic was being intercepted by AI search, what queries were being redirected, and how to respond.

A unique challenge for the institute was its long sales cycle, with prospective students spending months researching across community forums like Quora and Reddit before making a decision. Great Lakes needed a strategy to support community-driven search behavior.

The approach

Solution

In 2025, following a competitive pitch process and based on the quality of the strategic roadmap presented, 6S worked with the institute on three fronts:

• Core SEO performance: Focusing on the structured approach to keyword targeting, the institution’s average search rank moved from position 38 to position 12, organically, giving a decisive lead in visibility.
• LLM visibility strategy: To address the emerging challenges of the AI-generated search results, 6S identified longer, intent-rich queries answered by LLMs.
• Community and search ads: The institute’s performance marketing team worked closely with the agency to sharpen their search keyword strategy and create a synergy between organic and paid channels, while also extending their remit to include community visibility.

The outcome

Results

• Average search results improved from 38 to 12 within 12 months of engagement.
• A clear, actionable strategy to understand and address LLM-driven traffic loss.
• Expanded presence on community platforms where prospective students do their research before applying.