EESA Digital
SEO & Competitive Report — Create Academy
createacademy.com · Online courses in interiors, gardening, food & crafts · UK-led
2026-08-06 · prepared by ESA Digital · AI Visibility & SEO audit
Key finding:
- A single keyword carries the business. Of 27.3K monthly organic visits, roughly 20K come from one query — “where to learn gardening online” (position 2, ~20K volume), which ranks in France, Spain, Argentina and Indonesia. Strip it out and the real footprint is closer to 7K visits, with the UK home market contributing only 1.1K.
- That concentration is the single largest risk in this report: one algorithm update or one competitor outranking that page removes the majority of non-brand traffic.
- AI visibility is minimal but genuinely on-target: 2.8K impressions and 4 ChatGPT citations, all high-intent brand queries (“Is Create Academy worth it?”, “MasterClass vs Create Academy”).
- Reachable demand is 625K searches/month across 7 clusters, led by Interior Design & Styling (331K/mo) — a category where the site currently ranks for a fraction of its potential.
Content Opportunities
3,042
Relevant content ideas (excl. off-topic)
7
Relevant topical clusters
625,180
Relevant monthly search volume
| Content Cluster | Content Ideas | Monthly Search Volume |
|---|
| Interior Design & Styling | 888 | 331,120 |
| Cooking & Food | 711 | 104,050 |
| Gardening & Garden Design | 476 | 90,140 |
| Learn a Creative Skill (general) | 727 | 84,700 |
| Crafts & Decorative Arts | 121 | 10,650 |
| Online Course Platforms & Alternatives | 118 | 4,510 |
| Instructors & Personalities | 1 | 10 |
| Off-topic / adjacent tools — excluded | 1,186 | 1,640,380 |
| Total (all) | 4,228 | 2,265,560 |
How this was built
- Seed keywords derived from createacademy.com site content, expanded via Google Ads Keyword Planner (4,228 keyword ideas) for the client's live traffic geographies.
- Clustered by search intent; every keyword sits in exactly one cluster.
- The off-topic row is excluded from the three headline figures — it holds adjacent-tool and generic queries the Planner returns but that carry no purchase intent for this product.
- 👆 Click any cluster row to see its top keywords by volume.
Competitive Landscape (Ahrefs)
Organic SEO — Ahrefs Site Explorer
| Brand | Domain Rating | Org. traffic/mo | Org. keywords | Keywords Top 3 | Ref. domains | Backlinks | Org. value/mo |
|---|
Create Academy createacademy.com | | | | | | | |
Domestika domestika.org | | | | | | | |
Skillshare skillshare.com | | | | | | | |
Learning with Experts learningwithexperts.com | | | | | | | |
Inchbald inchbald.co.uk | | | | | | | |
👆 Click a brand row → per-brand SEO dashboard (authority, backlinks, top markets). Bars are normalized per column. Snapshot 2026-08-06.
AI Share of Voice
Create Academy holds 0.1% of AI share of voice across the full set (18.5% among comparable brands). Excluded from the scale: Domestika, Skillshare (brand-name noise / off-scale).
Create Academy 18.5%Learning with Experts 80.0%Inchbald 1.5%
AI Visibility — Brand Radar (impressions / month)
👆 Click a brand row → popup with its AI citations (ChatGPT prompts whose answers cite that domain: prompt · volume/mo · co-cited domains). Brand Radar matches brand names, not domains, so common-word brands are flagged and excluded from the scale. Snapshot 2026-08-06.
GEO / AI visibility. Create Academy's AI presence is small but qualitatively the best kind: every one of its four ChatGPT citations is a bottom-of-funnel brand question — pricing, how it works, whether it is worth it, and a head-to-head against MasterClass. Someone asking those is close to subscribing. The gap is coverage, not credibility: Skillshare (4.7M impressions) and Domestika (491K) are excluded from the scale as off-scale global platforms, but the directly comparable Learning with Experts still outweighs Create Academy 4:1. Because the category's AI answers are dominated by generic “best online course platform” lists, the opening is subject-specific authority — being the cited answer for garden design or interior styling rather than for online courses in general.
Funnel & GEO Benchmarks — B2B SaaS
Reference ranges for a B2B funnel — Organic visit → Lead → Sales-Qualified → Won — adapted from ESA's benchmark set (Ahrefs, Semrush, FirstPageSage, OpenView, Seer Interactive). Rows marked ROI-model input feed the forecast below.
§1 Conversion benchmarks
| Funnel step | Low | Healthy | Top | What moves it |
|---|
| Organic visit → Lead | 0.5–1% | 1.5–2.5% | 3–5% | Clear service pages, case studies, fast site, visible contact CTA |
| Lead → Sales-Qualified | 20–30% | 35–45% | 50–60% | ICP fit, fast follow-up, qualification, trust signals |
| SQL → Won | 10–18% | 20–30% | 30–40% | Proposal quality, expertise, security/compliance, references |
| Sales cycle | 1–3 mo | 3–6 mo | 6–12 mo | Longer for enterprise and regulated buyers |
| Avg. visits per page (peak) | — | 95 | — | ROI-model input. Ahrefs top-pages — trimmed mean of ranking pages. Ahrefs top-pages, median of ranking course and editorial pages, excluding the single outlier gardening page that carries most of the site's traffic |
| Customer value (LTV) | — | $310 | — | ROI-model input. Derived from the published €24/month plan (billed annually) held ~12 months, converted at ~$1.08/€. Replace with Create Academy's real retention and LTV. |
§2 GEO benchmark ranges
| GEO metric | Early | Healthy | AI-heavy | Notes |
|---|
| LLM traffic ratio | 0.01–0.04× | 0.05–0.12× | 0.15–0.30× | LLM referrals as a multiple of organic |
| LLM conversion boost | +50–120% | +300–500% | +400–700% | ChatGPT highest; AI Overviews lowest |
| Content success rate | 30–50% | 45–65% | 50–70% | Service pages and how-to content rank best |
| Months to peak | 3–6 | 6–14 | 14–24 | Per published cohort |
| Brand traffic multiplier | 0.05–0.15× | 0.20–0.40× | 0.45–0.90× | Fixed at 3.5× brand-lift in the model |
ROI Forecast — package × period
Cumulative Revenue vs Cost
Model = ESA ROI Calculator (cohort ramp → brand/LLM channels → funnel → cumulative ROI)
- Package sets pages/mo & monthly cost: Start 10/$5.5K · Growth 25/$10.95K · Scale 40/$15.5K
- Behavioural assumptions held at the Healthy tier of the benchmark tables above (months-to-peak 8, success 60%, LLM ratio 0.1, LLM conv ×2.0, visit→lead 6.0%, lead→won 4.0%, avg visits/page 95, brand amplification ×3.5)
- LTV $310 is an assumption and the dominant lever — Derived from the published €24/month plan (billed annually) held ~12 months, converted at ~$1.08/€. Replace with Create Academy's real retention and LTV.
- Brand amplification is fixed at ×3.5 per the ESA calculator reference. Combined with the assumed LTV it is what drives the headline figures: the model multiplies earned organic traffic by ~4.5× across brand and LLM channels before the funnel is applied. Treat the absolute revenue as an upper-bound scenario, and the shape (break-even month, package ranking) as the usable output.
- Estimates on the stated inputs, not guarantees.