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To boost your chances of learners signing up for your course, you need to make it easy to find – on both your UCL website and search engines like Google and Bing.
Many people visit UCL web pages by following 'organic' (not paid) links in search results pages.
To increase the chances that users will click on a link to your course in a list of search results, try and use the same words your users do in your course information.
This is one element of search engine optimisation (SEO). SEO means creating your web content in such a way that it's more likely to rank highly for particular search terms.
Doing SEO work on a webpage can also include:
- 'technical' elements, such as making your webpage faster to load (for example, by reducing the file size of images)
- trying to persuade other websites to link to your webpage
1. Work out which keywords your audience(s) use
Think about the search terms or phrases (called 'keywords') that someone might type into a search engine to find your short course or CPD.
For example, for a course on drafting intellectual property (IP) licences, users might type:
- intellectual property licence courses
- drafting IP agreements cpd
- course on negotiating IP agreements
Free tools like Google Trends let you research keywords. You can filter your results by time period or country.
2. Use popular keywords to create a clear, descriptive course title and URL
Incorporate the most-used keywords into your:
- course title
- top-level heading on your course description page
- page URL
This is because search engines look at the words in a webpage's title, url and main heading to work out what the page is about. If you include the same keywords that users search with, search engines are more likely to rank your page highly for those keywords.
For example, you might call your IP course ‘Intellectual property (IP) licensing: advanced-level drafting workshop’.
The course page url might end with '/intellectual-property-ip-licensing-advanced-level-drafting-workshop'.
Include words that help learners decide if the course might be suitable for them based on the title alone, such as the course's main focus, level and audience.
However, be careful of putting in too many keywords. Search engines may treat this as 'spammy' behaviour and rank your page lower as a result.
3. Use keywords in your sub-headings and page content
Include alternative search terms not included in your title in your page content (as long as they accurately describe the course).
For example:
"This CPD course on intellectual property licensing will help you to draft and negotiate IP-related agreements."
Try to use plain English. Academic terms might not be the words your target audience will naturally search for on Google.
Find out more about how to create a description of your course.
4. Check users can navigate to your course on your department/faculty site
Get a colleague or friend to test if your course can be found easily online. They could try navigating to it from your department, institute or faculty home page.
If it's not easy to find for someone who doesn't know the site, talk to your website editor about changing the navigation to make a simpler user journey.
Other ways to boost SEO
According to an article about SEO from the Content Marketing Institute:
"Your page is not optimised for search just based on what content is on the page, but rather the impact the page has on a reader.
"Google’s web crawler measures how quickly a person clicks to your website page, how many other people click to the same page, how long they spend on that page, how far they scroll on that page, and where they go after viewing that page."
Create content beyond your course description
You could create other, relevant and useful content for your target audience to engage them and keep them on your web pages.
Find out more about creating content-based marketing.