We were recently doing some SEO work for a school in the Northeast.  We were reviewing their top unbranded keywords. Branded keywords are anything that contains some combination of your school’s name (Notre Dame, Notre Dame University, University of Notre Dame, ND).  Unbranded keywords are those words that people type in the search bar that do not contain your school’s name. “Catholic college in the Midwest” for instance, or top design school in New York.

One of the top unbranded keywords for this school and the fourth most popular search word overall was the name of one of their political science professors. That was curious to everyone. Although the professor had been with the university for a while, what was she doing to show up before several of the top branded keyword searches? Why were so many people searching her name? Did she publish recently? Was there a scandal? No.

As it turns out, she happened to share the same exact name with a well-known Brazilian super model. Mystery solved!

Do you know your school’s top branded and unbranded keywords? You should. Knowing your top unbranded keywords helps you understand what your school is known for. What keywords or phrases are being typed in the search bars that you rank for.

At Converge, we believe there are six essential parts to building a successful SEO strategy. If you’re lucky, you may even have a professor that shares a name with a super model as well.

Here are 6 tips that will help you to get your SEO strategy off in the right direction.

1. Have you done a crawl on your site to see what technically is wrong with your website that can be fixed to impact SEO?
2. Have you done keyword research to understand what keywords rank best when creating new content for your site and where you are currently ranked for keywords?
3. Have you thought about thematic SEO and developed three to four overarching brand messages that your institution uses?
4. Do you have an institutional understanding of the “new” way to do SEO that focuses on answering questions?
5. Do you have an SEO evangelist on your campus that is leading the effort with ongoing SEO best practice.
6. Do you report on SEO or have an SEO dashboard that you discuss monthly at your marketing meetings?

Contact us to discuss your institution’s specific SEO.