Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for associations is ensuring that your association’s content is found when your audience searches for your brand and your content. It’s an ongoing process that includes a strong technical foundation, well-written content matched to your searcher’s pain points, and a great user experience. The end goal should be to increase the online footprint and visibility of your association brand, journal articles, meetings, and other offerings.
SEO for Academic Journals
More members will use your website than any of your other program offerings and members want to contribute to journals that have high impact scores – where their articles will be seen and recognized. It’s not enough to just publish anymore when in 2022, Google doesn’t index everything.
Having an SEO who understands academic journals on board during moments of transition (web migrations, new designs, etc) is critical to academic journal success. Being on a Google Scholar platform is not enough, you need an SEO who understands the interplay between Google Scholar and Google Search.
With Google Search’s algorithm changing nine times a day, an SEO consultant can help you build your organic traffic strategy, train your staff, develop implementation plans, and ultimately ensure that you’re confident in running your own SEO strategy.
Why technical SEO is critical for academic journals
For associations with academic journals, technical SEO is a foundational element that can sink or boost the impact factor of your journals. While associations should be natural thought leaders in their topic, top rankings on Google are not guaranteed no matter who you are (and I’ve worked with three federal .gov websites, and three academic journals so I know this first hand). Often technical issues can limit your organic visibility traffic, and your impact factor score (the calculation of all incoming citations — divided by the number of regular research articles).
Being discovered in Google Scholar is not the same as Google Search – Google Search is more competitive and your indexing and ranking are not guaranteed.
Citations are Inbound Links
A citation is a link from another website linking to your article or front matter. And I’m not about to suggest that you should engage in any sort of non-natural way of building your citations (as “citation stacking” can negatively affect your impact factor) but, when moving web platforms I’ve seen most journals lose traffic and rankings due to a lack of 301 redirect mapping and testing those redirects to make sure they work.
They lose those citations because Google Search sees EACH URL individually in all of its glorious format (uppercase, lowercase, dashes, protocol, etc), and applies those inbound links accordingly. This often gets missed if the publisher of that article changes the URL. For instance, if you moved from HTTP to HTTPS (new URL due to the new protocol) or combined subdomains into the main domain (also, a change of URL).
? Here’s the kicker – best practice SEO can save your citations:
If an SEO consultant was on board, there would be a 301 redirect for each of these valuable URLs to the new destination, it would be tested to be accurate and functioning, and organic rankings and traffic would stay the same.
What does a loss of citations look like? Here’s an example of an association site that lost citations due to technical issues (possibly a migration) where redirects were not executed.
The power of technical SEO fixes for journal sites
Conversely, here’s an example of how technical SEO alone can directly improve your journal’s rankings, traffic, and eventually citations/impact factor.
Here’s the traffic impact of fixing a technical issue – a crawl trap – on a journal – the crawl was infinite and no 404 page (or status) was triggered. We fixed the relative link issue and ensured a 404 page was generated, and this is what happened with just that fix – 40K additional keywords (1,500 on Google page one) just one month later.
SEO can enhance a journal’s online footprint
All associations and journals have an opportunity to create strategic content for ranking purposes based on Google’s understanding of the domain’s authority and the brand’s subject expertise. With an SEO on board during a web migration, journal managers can limit the organic traffic impact, and become savvier about how to manage their presence in Google search, as well as enhance their own professional development.
Academic Journals’ additional content & ranking opportunity
Beyond the migration moment, if the journal has collection pages, blog posts, podcasts, and YouTube videos — those can be strategically created with search rankings and traffic in mind.
Strategic content involves more than meta tags and keywords “sprinkled” throughout the text. Great content is based on answering your audience’s questions and creating something better than what is already ranking.
We not only help journals with the technical SEO consulting services above (which includes technical SEO training) but also with the content strategy to expand their organic traffic footprint even further.
SEO Services for Associations
We also work with associations to develop effective Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategies to enhance online visibility, attract new members, and engage existing ones.
Our Tailored SEO services for associations focus on the following key areas:
- Technical SEO Audits: We conduct thorough technical assessments to identify and resolve issues such as crawl errors, broken links, and site speed problems to ensure that search engines can efficiently index your website. Addressing common errors like 404s and crawl traps is crucial for maintaining optimal site health.
- Keyword Research: Unlike traditional businesses, associations should prioritize keywords that reflect the interests and needs of their target audience while focusing on terms that highlight the association’s benefits and where it should appear online based on its mission. This involves analyzing its existing search presence, exploring trending industry questions, and incorporating industry-specific keywords into website content and landing pages.
- On-Page SEO Optimization: Optimizing on-page elements, including meta titles and descriptions, header tags, and content structure, is vital. Crafting clear and concise meta titles that accurately reflect page content and include relevant keywords can significantly improve search rankings. They are a ranking factor and an element that captures the search click. We know from the Google algorithm leak that Google watches searcher’s Chrome behavior, so capturing the click and then getting the searcher to stay on your website is critical.
- Content Strategy and Creation: Developing high-quality, relevant content that addresses your audience’s specific needs and interests (and uses their language) establishes your authority in your field. This includes creating blog posts, articles, YouTube videos, podcasts, and resources that provide unique insights and value and align with the topics your audience is actively searching for.
- Link-Building and Off-Page SEO: Earning links from reputable websites to build a robust backlink profile from other URLs that receive organic traffic enhances your site’s authority and credibility. Many associations don’t need to work on this element of SEO as they are already well known, but engaging in digital PR and collaborating with industry influencers are effective strategies to strengthen your association’s online presence as more social media posts are displayed in search. Additionally, being found where your topic is being discussed is key to LLM search ranking.
- User Experience (UX) and Mobile Optimization: Ensuring your website is mobile-friendly, loads quickly, and offers a seamless user experience is critical, as search engines crawl mobile-first and prioritize sites that provide positive experiences across all devices. They are watching how users interact with your site via the Chrome browser. Optimizing for mobile usability and page speed improves search rankings and is essential so that they don’t bounce back to search.
By implementing these tailored SEO strategies, associations can significantly improve their search engine rankings, increase organic traffic, and effectively connect with their target audience, fulfilling their mission and objectives.
