SEO at Huddersfield

University SEO benefits

Being a university provides a number of baseline SEO benefits that a business might not benefit from. 

The .ac.uk top level domain is a restricted and controlled domain extension.

This means only vetted organisations can operate a domain name that uses .ac.uk 

Because it's regulated, the .ac.uk domain is considered an authoritative domain extension. Search engines know this and may take it into account when ranking our website.

Our brand has strong reputation

Naturally, we attract backlinks from other high authority websites along with many news outlets. This is due to the nature of our organisation, we have world-leading academics publishing original research. 

World-leading original research is of interest to both search engines and journalists.

So SEO at Huddersfield is easy?

On the surface, because of these benefits it may seem that SEO at Huddersfield should be easy. And for some search terms it is.
We're especially strong for any search term that includes Huddersfield, because these are often branded searches or very relevant to us as an institution. 

But consider this.

For many business critical search terms we're often competing against other universities or research institutions. 

For example:

• Open Day
• Undergraduate
• Postgraduate
• Apprenticeships
• Online courses

This means the University of Huddersfield is competing against other respected brands with powerful domains. 

So you will still need to follow best practices and promote your content, where possible, to rank for competitive terms.

Plus, there are other complications.

University SEO complications

As you know, universities are large organisations with thousands of staff arranged in many departments, services and internal teams.

The organisation also serves a wide range of users and customers.

And so, universities often have large and complex websites that grow independently and organically. 

This creates a complication for SEO best practices.

The scale of the website makes it impossible for one team to update and maintain. Which means at any one point there can be hundreds of people making updates to the website. And these people are spread across every department and team in the University. 

As you can imagine, hundreds of people making website updates provides an opportunity for technical SEO issues. From quality control and training through to technical SEO such as site structure, internal linking and META data. It's no ones fault, just the nature of having a large website.

Howver...

Good guidance, processes and support make all the difference. 

Here are useful resources and guides.

The Central Marketing Guidance team – The main hub of guidance from Central Marketing. It’s also the place where any business sensitive information will be posted as it’s behind a login. Analytics data and keyword analysis/targets are two examples.

SEO category – All of the articles related to SEO are collated on this webpage. 

Link tracking manual – While the manual relates more to advertising, email and promotion it can impact our SEO reports if your tracked links are incorrectly tagged. 

And of course, both the Digital Content Team and WebTeam are available if you need someone to speak to. 

Website and Web Content workshops

We run fortnightly drop-in sessions where staff can come and ask questions or receive specific support with regards to the website. Please view the 'T4 User Forum' inside Microsoft Teams for details about the workshop.