Over the last year, we’ve spoken to a number of universities and educational institutions about SEO and digital marketing and the key point we took out of every meeting was that the education sector as a whole was lagging behind in SEO. On top of this, nobody knew how they compared to the competitors and who was winning in the landscape and why?
As a result of this, we decided to conduct and launch the Iff Education SEO Index!
What is the Index?
The Iff Education SEO Index ranks all the universities based in England on their SEO optimisation and is made up of 25 different independent scores grouped under Engagement, Brand and Reputation. These consist of factors such as content, local optimisation, meta data, site speed and crawlability, which are all weighted based on the importance within the education sector.
The scores are then created into an index to rank the universities on each of the three groupings and by total score.
The Iff Digital Education SEO Index provides…
- A health check of current SEO performance
- Peer to peer comparison across all of the universities based in England
- Practical, actionable advice and opportunities to improve
- Education specific data, information and insights
Get in touch today to understand what this means for your university.
Who comes out on top?
The best scoring University once all scores were weighted and added up was…..The Open University!
Even though they didn’t come out as the highest scoring university in Experience, Brand or Reputation, they had the most consistent scores across the three and performed the best in the elements that mattered most.
Highest scores:
- Total score: Open University
- Experience: University of Surrey
- Brand: Loughborough University
- Reputation: Cambridge University
Who needs to improve?
All of the universities scored have some room for improvement across different areas of SEO and at differing levels, but some more than others. The bottom three sites in the index were:
These all scored low in different areas for different reasons, but primary factors included content, meta data and offsite SEO performance.
Get in touch
Want to know more about how you can improve your score or not currently featured and want to be? Then please get in touch below.