SEO for research centres
SEO for a research centre means making findings legible to non-specialists without distorting them, so that funders, journalists and answer engines can reach the work rather than the press release someone else wrote about it.
The problem
A research institute is not recruiting students. It is competing for funding, for collaborators, and for the attention of journalists and policymakers who need to understand a finding in ten minutes. The work is world-class and the website is a list of publication titles. When a policy question comes up, the institute that wrote the paper is not the source that gets quoted.
A publication list is not a website
Every finding deserves a readable landing page: what was asked, what was found, what it does and does not support, and who to contact. That page is what gets linked, quoted and cited. The DOI record cannot do that job.
Write for the person one step outside the field
Not the general public and not a peer reviewer — the science journalist, the policy adviser, the programme officer at a funder. That register is the one that earns links, and it is the one almost nobody writes in.
- A plain-language summary page per published finding
- Named researcher pages that establish who is authoritative on what
- Data and method availability stated explicitly
- Media and enquiry routes that a journalist can use on deadline
Answer engines and the citation problem
Assistants asked about a research question assemble an answer from whatever is readable on the open web. Institutes that only publish behind a paywall or inside a repository get summarised through secondary coverage, accurate or not.
Talk it through
Thirty minutes, no deck. If search is not your constraint, I will say so on the call.