SEO for universities
Course discovery for students, research visibility for everyone else: tech SEO, structure and clear on-page SEO matters more than anything.
The problem
A university is not one site. It is a marketing domain, a course catalogue, forty department sites, a research repository and a student intranet, all on overlapping subdomains, all owned by different people, all competing with each other for the same queries. The technical problems are real but the governance problem is bigger, and no audit that ignores it survives contact with the institution.
Internal cannibalization is the first fix
When a department page, a course page and a prospectus page all target the same course name, the institution splits its own authority three ways. Deciding which one wins is a political act as much as a technical one.
Course pages carry the recruitment
Entry requirements, fees, duration, mode of study and start dates are the fields every comparison uses. If they are rendered as prose rather than as structured data, the course is invisible to the tools applicants now use first.
- One canonical page per course, per level, per campus
- Entry requirements and fees as structured fields, not paragraphs
- Clear separation between undergraduate, postgraduate and international routes
- Repository records that link back to a readable summary page
Research visibility is recruitment too
The research a department produces is the strongest evidence of its quality, and it is usually locked in a repository that no prospective student will ever find. Surfacing it in readable form feeds both citation and applications.