{"id":928,"date":"2020-07-16T08:30:34","date_gmt":"2020-07-16T08:30:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.southampton.ac.uk\/blog\/digitalteam\/?p=928"},"modified":"2020-07-16T09:25:58","modified_gmt":"2020-07-16T09:25:58","slug":"why-we-are-prioritising-seo","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.southampton.ac.uk\/blog\/digitalteam\/2020\/07\/16\/why-we-are-prioritising-seo\/","title":{"rendered":"Why we are prioritising SEO"},"content":{"rendered":"

SEO is short for search engine optimisation, which simply means making your website easy for people using search engines to find. The more optimisation we apply, the higher (in theory) we should appear in search engines such as Google<\/a> or Bing<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Search engines have changed the way we find information, conduct research, shop, and connect with others. Content that contains relevant keywords leads to better user experience and brings more of the right users to our website.<\/p>\n

\"Mac<\/p>\n

Almost everything on the World Wide Web \u2013 whether it\u2019s a website, blog, social network, or app \u2013 can be found via a search engine. Search engines have become a connecting force and directional guide to everyday life.<\/p>\n

Did you know that the majority of our website visitors come from search engines? This is thanks to a mixture of the University’s brand and the efforts of the SEO team. A strong intertwined SEO strategy is challenging but rewarding. It gives us a competitive edge against some of the biggest universities online, which can feed successfully into user experience testing, content writing and marketing in general. By contrast, a poor strategy leads to higher pay-per-click costs, lower on-page interaction, and less traffic to the website as competitors focus their efforts.<\/p>\n

SEO is about discovering opportunities and ensuring that we offer the best experience for both search engine crawlers and users.<\/p>\n

Definitely easier said than done!<\/p>\n

How do users find us on search engines?<\/h3>\n

This is something that we refer to as \u2018search visibility\u2019, literally: \u2018how visible are we in Google\u2019. This starts with a specific query a user has searched, for example undergraduate degree course<\/em>, indicating our variable ranking position (which changes daily!). <\/em>The majority of users only ever click on links from the first page of search results, so it is hugely important to climb to or maintain a high spot on the page.<\/p>\n

To increase our search visibility, we need to ensure we are following best practice. The University competes against some huge websites – other universities, NHS, WhatUni – it\u2019s not an easy task to increase our position by simply changing a few words. It requires a lot of effort, collaboration, and understanding of how our website is currently used.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s also worth noting that search positions do not change overnight, it\u2019s gradual and all about trust of an information source. The more users visit our website and take actions on particular pages which are reflective of their initial query, the better the potential position for that query.<\/p>\n

Below is a snippet from a dashboard of subjects categorised within Languages, where we\u2019ve targeted 380 keywords to date. It\u2019s worked out by:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Taking all rankings for all tracked keywords.<\/li>\n
  2. Applying an estimated click-through-rate (CTR) based on each ranking position. The CTR calculation ensures that higher ranking keywords are appropriately weighted in the score.<\/li>\n
  3. Adding all CTRs and dividing by the number of keywords we are tracking in that campaign, which gives a single metric of 0% -100%, calculated to 2 decimal points.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    It is typical to aim for around 35% search visibility on average for targeted keywords. By using this indicator, we can measure search visibility over time to understand our impact in Google. We have some way to go, but there is a strong opportunity here and we have an ambitious goal.<\/p>\n

    \"Moz<\/p>\n

    *Search visibility can be represented through a scoring percentage using SEO analytics tools. <\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

    There are three main ways we are aiming to improve search visibility scoring:<\/p>\n