A Different Class of SEO

The EdTech revolution has been percolating for some time now and Twinkl, along with a subset of its start-ups and new ventures, is leading the way from The Hive: a new accelerator hub that’s designed to capitalise on emerging education trends.

Based in The Hive, you’ll find Beyond, Twinkl’s dedicated secondary division who provide secondary teachers with cutting-edge, age-appropriate lesson materials. Comprising a splinter group of teachers, designers, illustrators, and marketeers, Beyond often finds themselves exploring new avenues when it comes to production and marketing.

So much so, that they were invited to speak to Sheffield Springs Academy, a school not far from Twinkl’s HQ, and provide a “real-world” taste of marketing to Business Studies students…included in real-world marketing: the dark, often overlooked art of SEO.

As uniquely positioned individuals to whom Google is second nature, what exactly do the emerging new optimisers of 2020 already know about SEO? Is it time for SEO to emerge onto the EdTech scene in a blaze of rankings, metrics, and glory?

Damian Bullock: one of Beyond’s SEO specialists, was invited to find out…

SEO Meets the Classroom

As a two-strong party representing Beyond / Twinkl, my manager and I met with the class’ teacher before receiving our final brief. We had exclusive use of one of the school classrooms for the morning and were set to deliver a presentation that, roughly speaking, was divided up into two sections. The latter of these two sections was the most intriguing part for me — the part where I got to test the waters of SEO with three different groups of pupils.

To my knowledge, this could be the first time that SEO has been taught in the classroom by an SEO expert (if I were to glorify my own professional description). It seems to be something that is still unheard of and any information to this end is terribly hard to find. This, possibly unprecedented, concept excited me particularly as we went into our first group’s presentation.

After a session learning about the inception and development of Beyond from our Manager, it was time for me to break some SEO ice with the class. I’d like to think that I was as curious about their knowledge of SEO as they were about my forthcoming presentation, and my introduction began an interesting trade-off of exchanges.

I was very aware that these students use search engines — primarily Google — on a daily basis. They will have had access to a relatively advanced version of Google for their entire lives and will have experienced subtle amendments to the engine throughout that time. What was interesting for me, however, was to find out how much they had critiqued the process, if at all.

Rather than head straight into an SEO jargon-fuelled monologue, I thought that it would be a good idea to initiate a ‘soft-entry’ into the talk by gauging their perception of general search figures. To do this, I decided to ask them to guess how many searches per month — based on google.co.uk — two separate search requests fielded. One went well, one went not so well….

As an attempt to relate to the younger generation and use something outside of the classroom, I asked them to guess how many searches per month the words ‘Playstation 5’ would return. This worked very well in terms of engagement from the classes and also highlighted their knowledge of how influential search engines can be. Whilst one answer of ‘a billion’ may have been a little enthusiastic, they could read into the directive of the activity.

My second task in the same vein fell, regrettably, very flat! Whilst asking them to guess search volume for Serena Williams, I had little idea that their answer would be qualitative rather than quantitative. I believe the phrase ‘who is that?’ was used almost as many times across the morning as Serena Williams has Grand Slam titles. Serena Williams has a lot of Grand Slam titles…

However, the opening task was a success in illuminating two things: 1) Year 10 pupils (14–15 year-olds) are aware of the vast levels of visibility for some search requests (though their estimates of search volume are on the extreme side) and 2) I’ve almost completely lost touch with young people’s pop culture (how do they not know who Serena Williams is?!).

The introduction also served its purpose for opening up a wider conversation about SEO. Now that the pupils had considered search volume in relation to specific examples, they were ready to move on to the purpose of keywords.

Current SEO Knowledge

Many pupils were aware that certain words were used as a filtering system and this happened every time that a search was made. A couple of pupils per group — there were three groups of approximately 18 pupils — knew what keywords were and felt confident enough to give an explanation that was close enough to its true meaning.

When asked how a specific page of Beyond’s had reached position 1 in the rankings, they were unable to offer much in the way of an explanation outside of highlighting its relevance to the user intent. Naturally, this is the point that many adults will also be at unless their daily job necessitates some form of SEO specialism. Simply put, they don’t need to know more because the search engine works perfectly well for their own needs at this moment in time.

However, we could make this statement about a great number of topics taught in schools whilst simultaneously being aware that we are aiming to prepare these students for the future, not the present.

SEO Innovators of the Future

SEO specialism comes from businesses / groups / individuals wanting to promote their name, so SEO as a process has often been tacked on as an afterthought. One could argue, therefore, that the students who I spoke to might not think about SEO until they have decided upon their career. From there, it would become a side skill much like it has for people across the world.

At this point, most people involved within SEO innovation have learnt from the mistakes of an already established company — a company that has caught on late to the vast benefits of SEO or a company that has sought to build up its resources before being in a position to think about SEO. Detrimentally, this side-lining of SEO specialism has held back top-quality practice and, in turn, stunted many companies’ growth.

SEO in Further / Higher Education

This line of thinking could also explain the current position of SEO in further and higher education. It seems, at present, that SEO tends to be taught as part of some university courses when the lecturers have gained some form of exposure to it. At most, this could stretch to a single module although the reality is that most SEO professionals will not have come into contact with SEO until a few years into their careers.

However, for a world that is rapidly becoming more and more digital in almost every facet of life, one would argue that students need more instruction to be properly equipped for their digital futures.

The current generation of secondary school pupils will become the SEO innovators of the future and they will be highly advantageous to their respective organisations/companies when the right time comes. For this reason alone, it feels strange to talk about a concept that they currently use daily, will continue to use daily in the future, are likely to have embedded into part of their career, and yet they are given no information on it.

As a former teacher, I know that learning flows much more naturally when students are able to attach new information to relatable items already stored in their brains. When we know that they have the roots of SEO planted in their subconscious from the nature of their digital upbringings, I feel that I need to come back to my point regarding the lack of any kind of SEO recognition in the classroom.

From this point of view, I feel privileged to have tested the waters by providing them with a brief snippet of SEO information whilst awaiting the inevitable change of how we guide young people on their journey towards SEO specialism.

If the specificity of some of the SEO-related questions I received are something to base the success of the morning on, then that alone left me feeling positive about their abilities/motivations in such a field. Multiple pupils even asked if Beyond / Twinkl offered apprenticeships in SEO specialism.

The direct address of apprenticeships was a welcome and motivating line of questioning. Although at this present moment, the organisation is not ready to offer SEO apprenticeships, the concept challenges the ‘norm’ pathway into SEO via journalism degrees or qualifications of a similar nature.

What’s more, the apparent interest in this — albeit from a relatively small sample group — made me excited at the enthusiasm shown for what we at Beyond / Twinkl are doing and for a more direct pathway wherein people specialise in SEO from the off. On the conclusion of the final group, I left the school feeling that the potential for these pupils in future SEO is vast, even if their knowledge of famous sports stars could use some work.

Taking SEO Beyond

We’ve touched upon how SEO specialism can be taught in the classroom, but how do we use these practices in the real world?

Here at Beyond our goal is the same as the larger Twinkl organisation — to help those who teach. But we can’t do that unless teachers know who we are and that they can trust us. To help with both of these aims we turn to Google and the art of SEO.

At Beyond we believe in an SEO-first approach. As we’ve discussed in this article many companies use SEO as an afterthought: ‘we’ve made this, now what?’. At Beyond we put SEO at the forefront of our marketing, it is our means of communicating with our audience and how our audience understands who we are and what we stand for.

The way we do this is to integrate a small, agile SEO team into the production flow of every single product that makes its way to the website. This means that by the time our products go live they have had best-practice SEO baked into every aspect of their public profile.

This lets us do two things. Firstly, it helps get the news out about the great teaching resources we produce. By integrating comprehensive keyword analysis and targeting we can make sure that teachers and educators looking for assistance in or out of the classroom find what they need amongst the noise.

Secondly, by aligning our approach using Google’s EAT (Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) principle we make our website a place educators can trust. We make sure we don’t waste our customers’ time, we ensure that anything we optimise is relevant to customers’ search intent, and we use expert knowledge of both SEO and teaching to enhance the customer experience.

It’s this two-pronged approach that is deeply embedded within our production cycle that we make sure that what we create gets seen by the right people. It means that if a teacher comes to Beyond for assistance they can trust that both we and Google have done our jobs correctly by bringing us together.

Which we suppose brings us back around to our initial enquiry. Does SEO specialism have to be learned “on the job” or can it be taught from the classroom? Honestly? It’s hard to say…what we do know, however, is that Beyond, and the whole of Twinkl Hive, are ready and waiting for when it can…

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