Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a complicated beast. Hundreds of websites, tools, blog posts – even whole conferences – focus on the topic.

As with almost anything in the digital world, it’s easy to get overwhelmed, particularly if you’re working in an organisation which has limited time and resource. How do you know which of the many pieces of advice you should focus on so that you get the maximum impact from your time?

Let’s come back to this after we’ve taken a quick look at what we actually mean by SEO – and why it’s important to your museum.

What is SEO?

SEO is actually conceptually simple: it’s activity that improves the position of your website or other web real estate on search engines. Why would you want to do this? Because unless you run a very unusual sort of website, the vast majority of your traffic comes from Google. Take a look at your Google Analytics right now if you don’t believe me (Acquisition > Overview) – you’ll see maybe 60-70% of all your traffic comes from “organic search”. Translated, this is “people who search for a thing on Google and then end up on your website”.

Now let’s look at a graph – this one shows Click Through Rate (CTR) for each Google position:

From advancedwebranking.com – but search “CTR by position” and you’ll find hundreds of similar bits of research

Again, let’s translate this: “People click on the first few results on Google WAY more than they click on anything else”.

The net outcome is this: you need to be in those first few results for important phrases or keywords. The absolutely ideal outcome if you’re running, say an exhibition about the history of pencils is that someone searching for “the history of pencils” sees your exhibition web page in the very first Google result. The result turning up on that first page is also good; then after that (as the graph above shows) it rapidly becomes a non-effective source of traffic.

The issue is that there is a huge amount of competition from organisations of all shapes and sizes to get their results into that first page, and this is why SEO is such a fiercely competitive thing. The SEO industry itself is worth more than $65 billion dollars a year – and when you consider that if you’re an online shop there is a direct, measurable correlation between your position in Google and the number of sales you do, you can start to understand why.

Sadly, museums and other cultural organisations have to compete in this rather nasty, murky world too – there is only Google, really, and we’re left trying to get our lovely but often beautifully uncommercial (and not very well funded!) web content seen in a world full of well-funded commercial types. Don’t despair, though, because museums have got one really, really big thing up their sleeve that many other organisations and companies don’t have. It’s…

Content

Once upon a time back in the dim distant days of the web, we used to say (without cringing!) that “Content Is King”. Actually, although the phrase itself has been rightfully relegated to Office Bingo, it is still true that what sits at the heart of your digital strategy, your marketing plans, your social activity and your museum itself is content – really great, blindingly interesting, well-written, authoritative content: the words, images, timelines, thoughts and history that go into every exhibition, display and event your museum has ever produced.

Museums are brilliant at writing great content – and the fact is that people are desperate to read, engage with and otherwise consume that content, too.

Google realises this and is keen to connect great content with readers. Although in the past there have been times when spam sites and other commercial nasties have managed to manipulate SEO in order to get their sites on the first page, Google is getting increasingly wise to this. The actual search algorithm itself is frequently tweaked by Google. Although this is highly complex (not to mention secret), all the time these tweaks are focusing in on bringing really good content to the top of the listings.

So the first practical win (perhaps not “easy” but without any shadow of a doubt the one thing that will have the most impact) is this: write and publish more great content and then link to it from your social profiles. Put content planning and writing at the heart of your strategy and regular marketing activity, and publish consistently as much as you possibly can.

Links

At the heart of the way Google works is the link. Put very simply, a link from site A to site B is considered by Google to be an endorsement (or vote) by site A of site B. The more votes you have, the better you do in the rankings. Layer on top of this that a vote by a site that is itself more voted for carries more weight: so if the BBC has a link to you then this is considered much more important than a link from some other site out there on the web. Simply put (and actually it is hugely much more complex than this, but it still helps to think in this way): the more in-links you have, the better your site will do in the rankings.

Gone are the days when you’d email a bunch of other web people and ask them to link to your site in exchange for a link back – but the basis of this is still in play. Every time you create a Tweet, post on Facebook, write a newsletter, write a blog post or create some other form of content, you are (or should be!) linking back to your main site. All of this helps.

Geeky structural stuff

Google (and humans) like structured content. This means your main site should have good menus, human readable URLs, and various HTML tags in place. These all give Google (and probably your readers) a good sense of what a page is about. This, in turn, helps align the great content you’re writing with the search index that is constantly being compiled.

Ask your web guys to run through your main site on a regular basis and check that you have these things in place. There are many automated tools and reports that can be run against your site in order to check this side of the SEO game.

Further reading

There is so much written about SEO that it’s hard to point to specific resources – but sites like moz.com provide lots of free guides and blog posts that give practical ideas for how to stay on top of SEO. We also have some free guides – but most of all, ask your museum peers what they are doing and how it works for them!