The trend for online education has significantly grown throughout the last year, therefore it became challenging for the brands to conquer the leading positions in the Google search engine. The search engine works by simultaneously gathering information from web pages, public databases, user-submitted content, and other available sources (Google, 2017). The research for educational brands was conducted via entering “Education top brands,” and the first result retrieved the industry’s top 10: Blackboard, Byju’s, Teachers Pay Teachers, Dreambox Learning, Coursera, Instructure, Knewton, and Chegg.
Although the companies named above represent different education sectors, such as online courses, homework, and experience exchange, the keywords they apply to improve their search engine optimization (SEO) is similar. Google prioritizes the links that contain most of the top 100 keywords related to an industry, and the best composition is these words combined with the identification of locations, subjects, or topic-related adjectives (Moz.com, 2017b). Search phrases commonly used for educational SEO are: “school”, “high school” or other combinations naming the facilities, “home depot”, “degree”, “learning”, “decor”, and “education portal” (WordSteam, 2021). Top brands include these terms in multiple places, such as article titles and subtitles, courses’ names, descriptions, and websites’ URLs.
Coursera is the leading company in the modern educational industry, and it applies SEO to get noticed by potential clients. If the searching command “site:coursera.org” is used, Google reveals more than one million results; that significant number of indexed pages gives the company leading positions due to its high ranking (Moz.com, 2017a). Coursera has multiple marketing campaigns, develops and promotes new courses, and continuously adds new content to its main website. It is crucial for Google search recognition because the engine evaluates a site’s reputation by checking the updates’ frequency (Search Engine Land, 2011). Moreover, Coursera applies its brand name to each page’s title created on the platform, thus it becomes easily identified by the engine.
Coursera’s marketing strategy includes the newest approaches such as targeted advertising, referral programs, and social media management. Ziakis et al. (2019) claim that “search engine algorithms tend to change often, and new factors are added while outdated or not effective factors are excluded” (p. 32). Coursera considers the algorithms’ inconsistency, therefore its strategy is to dedicate equal attention to multiple advertising approaches that make it a top educational brand promoted by high Google ranking.
References
Google. (2017). How Google search works. Web.
Moz.com. (2017a). Chapter 1: How search engines operate. The Beginners Guide to SEO. Web.
Moz.com. (2017b). Chapter 5: Keyword research. The Beginners Guide to SEO. Web.
Search Engine Land. (2011). What is search engine optimization?. YouTube. Web.
WordStream. (2021). Education keywords. Web.
Ziakis, C., Vlachopoulou, M., Kyrkoudis, T., & Karagkiozidou, M. (2019). Important factors for improving Google search rank. Future Internet, 11(2), 32. Web.