If you wanted to buy a new smartphone, what’s the first thing you’d do? Google it, right? Look for the latest and best models that fit your price range, look for product reviews and stores that offer the best discounts, right? This is the predominant trend today! Not only with smartphones, but for just about everything.

As the eLearning industry continues to grow at a rapid pace, competition is fierce! To stay at the top of your game, you must ensure that your customer base continues to grow. Search Engine Optimization is one of the best ways to enable potential customers to find your unique eLearning product or service.

Research shows that 85% of buyers begin their journey by doing an online search! And guess what, 75% of these internet researchers, never move past the first page of the search engine’s results page! What’s even more surprising is that an average of 28.5% of people click the first search result that comes up.

You see, Search engine optimization (SEO) is not a manipulative marketing tactic! Google’s search algorithms have made sure that no one can manipulate the search results without offering real value anymore. So, if you have a great eLearning product or service, and you want to improve business revenues, you absolutely must optimize your website and any of your online content for search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo or Amazon.

Six Building Blocks of SEO

Here are some ground-rules that constitute the foundation for SEO Best Practices. Implement these and you will have begun your journey to search engine stardom! 

  • Use keywords:

Keywords are the first step when you begin optimizing your web content. A keyword is the main theme of your page. If your page talks about your product such as a Learning Management System, then your Primary keyword should be ‘Learning Management System’. Secondary keywords are words or phrases or even questions, related to the primary keyword that a potential customer would be looking for. Using keywords ensures that your page will appear in the search results when a potential customer searches for the primary or secondary keywords.

  • Use the right format

Search engines use a number of algorithms to ‘read’ and assess your webpage. In order for the search engine to classify your webpage as being high in quality, providing value to readers and is definitely not spam, your content should have clear headers. Each paragraph should have more than one but not more than ten sentences. Each sentence should ideally be not more than twenty words, not longer. This enables the search engine to understand what your webpage is about and rank your page higher.

  • Steer clear of heavy media

While media is excellent in engaging readers (and you must have various media forms on your website!), if it’s not uploaded properly into your website, it can slow your page loading time – lowering your search engine’s ranking. Google’s latest search engine update is an algorithm that evaluates the page experience. If your webpage’s loading time is longer than expected, your ranking will drop too. Pages that load slowly can bounce and that does not provide great user experience!  

  • Choose an ideal length of content for each page

What does length of content have to do with SEO? Well, an ideal length tells the search engine that your page is an authoritative source of information. Too short and you may not be authoritative enough, too long and you’ll probably slow the search engine down as it evaluates your page. From the reader’s perspective, you need to keep them engaged but not lose the readers because of sheer volume of content. Find the right balance between short and long rambling page content. If you do have content that needs to be long, don’t use it as a web page or an article, consider packaging it in a form that’s meant to be long such as an e-book or a whitepaper.  

  • Use content that can’t become outdated

If your page talks about an LMS feature update that was rolled out in 2015 and was a breakthrough back then. It would not really be relevant in today’s scenario where massive changes have taken place in the industry and probably within your product as well. Search engines do like fresh content so keep all your pages updated. Make sure that the content you put out is useful at any point in time. This means avoiding publishing news clips (unless you intend to archive news posts that are more than a month old and replace it with recent news). If your business won an award or recognition, use award logos on your website to highlight your accomplishment, rather than creating a webpage around the award.

  • Use Competitor Analytics

Your Competitors use SEO too! Studying what tactics they use to steal your rank can help you win top search engine ranks back. A Global Market Insights Report states that the industry is set to reach One Trillion dollars by 2027, from $250 Billion in 2020, growing at a CAGR of 21%. Naturally with growing demand comes growing competition! To stay ahead, you need to be seen by your audience as being at par with cutting edge trends. What your customer base is looking for today may not be the same tomorrow. This ties in with business innovation, as well as updating your content so that you have what your audience is looking for today! This means conducting a competitor analysis on a regular basis. 

Take an SEO deep-dive!

These Six building blocks of SEO are just the beginning! Newcomers to the world of SEO will find that it’s a daunting task to get all their content optimized. Unless you’re familiar with SEO Best Practices. Framing an SEO Content Strategy is not easy either. Without an expert by your side, you won’t be seeing a ton of improvements in traffic or revenues.

So if you’re short on time and want to see results as soon as possible for your eLearning business, without falling short of your targets, enlist the services of an SEO Consultant. Choose one that specializes in your industry, that way you’ll have someone who knows exactly what works in your industry. A specialist will have already conducted their trial runs, having a depth of knowledge that you can take full advantage of.