The Importance of SEO in E-learning: Top 7 Benefits
Originally published at Importance of SEO in E-Learning
From all the search engines, only Google processes over 3,5 million searches per day. This is a huge number, and your services may also appear on these search results.
Do you know what is SEO? Probably you do but even if you don’t, you should get familiar with this aspect of digital marketing and make use of it.
The term SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. Everybody, provider or searcher, is somehow related to SEO but not all of us know it.
We make searchers on Google or other search engines, don’t we? Of course, we do! In this digital era, all of us depend on the Internet and we search for the required data on the net. This is how the search engines work. People type any keyword or phrase searching for information they need and the engine shows results that best match the search word or expression. In the present article, I’m going to consider the importance of SEO in e-learning.
Why is SEO Essential in the Elearning Industry?
This is the industry that is continually developing through digital channels. Imagine people search for the courses or pieces of training you offer and they reach your competitors’ content. You lose potential students. But what if you optimize your educational platform and your courses are also displayed on SERPs (search engine result pages)? Doesn’t it sound awesome?
Now let’s go on and take into consideration the top 7 benefits of SEO that support your eLearning platform success. Come on!
#1 Availability for a Wider Market
These days people look for any kind of information online. For instance, if I need to buy something, I search for this product in different online shops and find out which one offers the best quality for an appropriate price. In this way, I save my time and energy but may be I miss some shops that have a better collection but do not have an online platform or have not optimized it for search engines.
When you have a personal educational platform and you have optimized it for search engines, your website appears in the search engine results when potential learners search for similar services or information you offer. In this way, you do not miss your opportunity of reaching students and neither do they miss learning from you. Accordingly, your valuable knowledge content reaches a wider market.
#2 Increasing Website Traffic
Of course, SEO is not the fastest approach to increasing the number of your website visitors. But if you get started creating high-quality, valuable, magnetic content you may find the winning combination that helps you stand out from the competition. Effective SEO requires implementing extensive research. Many people don’t take the time to research the required points and elements necessary to properly build their strategy.
If you are a beginner, you may find this somehow complex and confusing. But I’m sure you may do this if you choose the right platform. The best point to start with an SEO campaign is to use a keyword research tool to select target keywords. These are keywords that are most likely to appeal to your target market. These keywords are used in your website pages, blog posts, and other content marketing. Targeting the right keywords is a crucial factor in getting search traffic. Trying a variety of strategies will help you determine what works for you.
An essential strategy offers to focus your content around long-tail keywords. These have click-through rates that are up to 5 percent higher than broad searches. That means in addition to faster traffic; you may see slightly higher conversions. Alternately, you can see if your small business gains more traction through blog posts or video, or whatever form of content marketing you try out. Once you know what works for you, you can tailor your content and SEO methods more appropriately to see the most significant results.
#3 Increase in Brand Awareness
The more people learn about your online courses, live lessons, or any kind of educational content, the better your brand is processed. Brand awareness refers to the peoples’ view and understanding of your services. In this case, this is about your knowledge content.
Reaching a wider market, you increase the possibility of increasing the number of people who are aware of your e-learning educational services.
#4 A Long Term Traffic Generation
Although SEO is not the fastest way of generating traffic, it is the one that provides better and continual results. If you place the links of your online courses on social media platforms or different forums, you may immediately gain a lot of traffic. But the main part of them (if not all) will leave the platform after a few minutes and even seconds. However, if you optimize the pages of your online courses for search engines covering appropriate keywords, people will remain on your pages as they come here according to their will and requirement.
#5 Growth of the Revenue
When people find your services and the quality content you offer on the top results of search engine result pages, you get real website visitors who may be converted into course buyers. It depends on you, your knowledge and skills, as well as the way you offer this knowledge content. If you do it in an attractive and trustworthy way, people who are interested in learning the subject matter will follow you and pay for your valuable knowledge.
#6 SEO is Cheaper and Continual
When your colleagues and competitors pay for different formats of advertising content to reach the target market, you should invest in SEO. As I have already mentioned above, you do not see immediate results, but SEO shows its efficiency along with the time. And instead of the advertising content, this is continual.
If people pay for a day of advertisement placement on any platform or social media channel, you may optimize your website pages and let them appear on the results when potential learners search for them. People may be interested in an online course you offer through an advertising post. But when they search for a course you offer and reach it, they are more likely to pay for it.
#7 Better Understanding of the Target Audience
One of the biggest challenges for education providers is to define their target audience — learners. Surely, you may have a general idea of who your ideal students are, but it takes some trial and error to determine who will enroll in your eLearning courses and how to attract those individuals.
Once you begin gaining website visitors, you may analyze this data to dig up valuable information, such as:
- What keywords does your audience search to reach your content?
- What are the most popular landing pages on your website?
- How much time do people spend on your educational platform?
- What time of the day is the most active for your audience?
All forms of this information may be used to your advantage. Accordingly, you will understand when to launch promotions, what your customers are looking for, and what kind of content attracts them the most. You can also use it in your engaging digital training videos to identify the learners’ problems and lead them to find solutions. Data helps you optimize your SEO with less guessing to drive even more conversions and set up effective pay-per-click advertising campaigns.
SEO Tools to Consider When Optimizing Your eLearning Platform
These days, when search engine optimization is one of the most common ways to reach the target market, tech people are more likely to come up with SEO tools and solutions to help businesses reach their potential success. Small business SEO services may become the basis of the digital success of course, with the help of effective tools. Below you may find some of the most popular ones.
- Keywords Planner — this is Google’s free tool that helps to learn the volume of the keyword (how many times the word or expression is searched on Google) in the target location
- Ubersuggest — Nail Patel’s offer to make keyword research. The tool has both free and paid versions. The second one offers some more features besides keyword research, for instance, competitive analysis
- Keywords everywhere — this tool provides monthly search volume, CPC, and competition data of keywords on multiple websites
- Ahrefs — This is my favorite one. It offers quality data that makes keyword research easier, providing an opportunity to audit the website, implement competitive analysis, and many more features
As you see, there are many SEO tools that help to be chosen by search engines. However, first of all, your personal teaching platform should be developed in an SEO-friendly way so that you can optimize it easily. If you have not still found such a platform, then I should offer you to try with Uteach. Here you get an opportunity to optimize the website pages, providing metadata for almost every page, including your home page, courses, live lessons, blog articles, and so on. By the way, the blog is considered to be the prompting point of SEO. The importance of an educational blog is great for your SEO results. Thanks to the blog content you may easily rank on the search engines, reach the target audience, and convert them into your happy students.
Good Luck!
