See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.

net/publication/333014795

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) As Digital Marketing Strategy for

Internationalisation of Higher Education

Conference Paper · August 2018

CITATIONS READS

4 8,717

1 author:

Faisal Iddris
o
27 PUBLICATIONS   247 CITATIONS   

SEE PROFILE

Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects:

Smart Farming Innovations for Small-Scale Producers in Ghana View project

All content following this page was uploaded by Faisal Iddris on 11 May 2019.

The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file.

The 22nd McGill International Entrepreneurship Conference, 22–24 August 2018, Halmstad University, Sweden

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) As Digital Marketing Strategy for

Internationalisation of Higher Education

Faisal Iddris

School of Business, Engineering and Science

Halmstad University
Halmsatd, Sweden

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to examine the role of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) in internationalization of
higher education, and provide empirical and theoretical understanding for the use of SEO as a digital marketing
strategy. The main research question in this study was how can higher education institutions use SEO as digital
marketing strategy to increase their internationalization? Google search engine platform was used to retrieve
relevant data from Halmstad university website for analysis. In addition, other online tools such as
“searchmetrics”, “google trend”, “mozbar” and “yakarferci” were used for analysis. Keywords such as “Halmstad
University”, “international programmes halmstad university” and “masters in Sweden for international
students” were entered into the search engine to in order to search for relevant web pages. Busche’s [1]
conceptual framework was used as analytical tool for data collection and analysis. The finding of the study shows
that high percentage of visitors to the international business programme pages of University’s website for five
year period (2003-2018) were mainly from Asian countries, i.e. Bangladesh, Pakistan, India and Turkey. Second,
the analysis revealed that Halmstad University appeared in the 170th position of Google ranking, for potential
students searching for international master programme, which is an indication of inability of the search engine
to access and report the webpage to the prospective client. Thus, investing in SEO can lead to visitors locating
the content, programmes and other services. The analysis revealed that the social media platform such as
Facebook was used only for communication, but not well structured for digital marketing activities. Thus there
is need for management to take a holistic view of digital marketing strategy. Deploying SEO as part of the digital
marketing may contribute to the internationalization of the University’s programmes, courses, services and
external collaboartions.

Keywords: search engine optimization, SEO, internationalization, halmstad university, SERP, digital
.

1 . INTRODUCTION
Internationalization of higher education is an age old phenomenon. Knight [2] defined
Internationalization of higher education as “the process of integrating an international, intercultural, or global
dimension into the purpose, functions or delivery of postsecondary education. Earlier studies suggest that
internationalization of higher education may generate “access to international expertise, compensate for
inadequate domestic education capacity, support innovation and the economy by renewing the knowledge and
innovation system through an inflow of new methods, perspectives and technologies and mitigate the effects of
an ageing population” [4.p.9].Teichler [3] indicate that number of foreign students to economically advanced
countries is on the increase. But Swedish Government official report indicate that Swedish universities receives
slightly less than one per cent of the world’s internationally mobile students and produces slightly more than
one per cent of the world’s research publications [4]. Thus, the report urged Swedish universities to improve
their capacity to receive foreign expertise and contribute to the collective knowledge of the world [4]. This can

1
The 22nd McGill International Entrepreneurship Conference, 22–24 August 2018, Halmstad University, Sweden

be achieved by using several strategies including search engine optimisation (SEO) as a digital marketing strategy
to attract students around the globe into the higher educational institutions.

With recent advances in the Internet technologies, companies and educational institutions are adopting digital
marketing strategy to reach potential clients. The literature indicates that potential customers preferred to
search information through search engine platforms than going directly to the company’s websites. Thus,
developing a successful search engine optimization (SEO) strategy can help attract new customers [5]. SEO has
been one of the important tools in enabling organisations to achieve digital marketing strategy. Bhandari and
Bansal [6, p.25], defines SEO as a mechanism which allows the searcher to get most appropriate results of his
online search”. SEO has potential to alter multiple marketing variables and improves visibility [6]. And it has been
shown that 93% of internet traffic is managed by search engines [7]. Because of the importance attached to
digital marketing strategy in recent times, organizations are investing to have a stronger presence and position
on search engine platforms [8]. A study by Delgado-Márquez, Hurtado-Torres and Bondar [9] indicates that
educational institutions attached importance to search engine rankings. As a result, in the area of higher
education the use of SEO has become important for internationalization process. But the impact of the SEO for
internationalization of higher education is overlooked in the literature, although, some scholars argue that the
impact can be crucial [10]. Killoran [11] has called for more research with the aim of re-discovering what google
and other search engine companies can offer to companies in terms of visibility and customer retention.

Generally, there have been attempt to investigate SEO on business performance [7, 12]. But there is little
empirical work on the use of SEO for internationalization of higher education, with exception of research by
Isadora [13]. The author examined the use of SEO in higher education in Finland. Meanwhile internationalization
is perceived as “primarily a tool for achieving higher quality and national and global sustainable development”
Swedish Government Official Report [11, p.13.]. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to examine the role of
SEO in internationalization of higher education and provide empirical and theoretical understanding of the use
SEO digital marketing strategy. The main research question this study seeks to address is:

How can higher education institutions use SEO as digital marketing strategy to increase their
internationalization?

The paper proceeds as follows. The next section shows the literature review and conceptual framework. Next,
we outline the research method and data collection design. We present the results and analysis of the study. The
final sections of the paper provide conclusion, the limitations and direction for future research.

2. LITERATURE REVIEW

Commercial studies
SEO is completely organic and essentially free but takes time and consistency [14]. Egri and Bayrak [7] studied
the role of SEO on keeping the user on the site. Their findings revealed SEO as important competitive strategy.
Tomasi and Li [12] investigation of SEO Performance of SMEs revealed an increase in number of visitors to the
site, the average time users visiting the site, more user engagement and an increase of annual sales revenue.
Shih, Chen and Chen [5] developed SEO mechanism which companies can use to improve the ranking of website
in search engine results. Their findings revealed that well-designed SEO strategy couple with social networking
can enhance website’s exposure and visibility. A study by Evans [15] identify the most popular techniques used
to rank web page in Google. Their results indicate that several SEO approaches generate many pages to influence
rankings but provided limited success. SEO is noted to enhance website ranking, drive more traffic a website and
gradually increases revenue [16].

Academic studies

2
 The 22nd McGill International Entrepreneurship Conference, 22–24 August 2018, Halmstad University, Sweden

In the area of academia studies, Delgado-Márquez, Hurtado-Torres and Bondar [9] examined the
internationalization of higher education institutions through web ranking with the purpose of providing visibility.
Their findings revealed that internationalization indicators used in current university institution rankings, e.g.,
international faculty ratio and international students ratio, are far from reflecting the main variables involved in
their internationalization processes. A study by Solem, Bell, Fournier, Gillespie, Lewitsky and Lockton [17]
investigated the use of world wide web (www) for promoting internationalization of geography education. Their
result provides useful suggestions for managing pedagogical issues related to the process of online international
collaborative learning. Similarly, Isadora [13] examined on­page SEO of Oulu University of Applied Sciences’
international website. Her result shows that web content development and semantics are important for
internationalization. The above literature review shows that there is limited empirical work on SEO strategy for
higher education internationalization. And this study will contribute to the extant literature on SEO and higher
education internationalisation.

2.1 Conceptual Framework of Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)

This study leaned on Busche [1] conceptual framework as a guide for data collection and analysis. The framework
consists of 15 ranking factors classified in three main categories: (1) reputation, (2) relevance and (3) readability
(see table 1).

Reputation
Reputation refers to the factors related to the level of authority that search engines assign to a website's domain.
These factors are the inbound links (links that send visitors to the web site), the outbound links (links that send
the visitor away from the web site) and the internal linking (links that send the visitor from your website to
another page of your website). The inbound links help to ensure a higher ranking on Search Engine Result Page
(SERP) but their quality is very important [10]. Besides, there are also the domain authority ( the search engine
ranking score) and the visitors' engagement and traffic, that contributes to the reputation of a website.

Table 1-SEO content optimization: Reputation, Relevance and Rea dability by Busche, 2017
Category Meaning
Reputation Factors related to the level of
authority that search engines
assign to the website’s domain
Relevance
Factors that point to the way
search engines connect searchers’
queries with website’s content, to
ensure that it is appropriate to
satisfy their need.
Readability Factors related to the user’s
experience after he/she has landed
in a particular content piece of the
website.
Main factors
Inbound links: Outbound or
external links; Internal linking;
Domain reputation; Visitor
engagement and traffic; Social
metrics.
One-page keyword and semantic
keyword usage;
Heading usage; Title and “meta
description” optimization; URL
structure; Content freshness;
image and media optimization.
Page speed; Content quality and
length; Responsive design and user
experience.

Relevance
Relevance relates to how search engines connect searchers’ requests with the website's content in order to
ensure that it is appropriate to satisfy their need. The mains factors mentioned by Busche [1] for relevance are

3
The 22nd McGill International Entrepreneurship Conference, 22–24 August 2018, Halmstad University, Sweden

the on-page and semantic keyword usage, the heading usage, the title and “meta description” optimization, the
URL structure, the content freshness, image and media optimization.
The website content should use quality keywords and must contain natural and authentic word that captures the
page’s topic. The title tag should match with the page’s topic, each page should have an appropriate title and
URL should be short and meaningful and use natural keywords [10]. The best way for SEO is to optimize the
keywords within the website content. Therefore, companies must use appropriate words, long tail search and
then put the keywords into the website content or into the different tags of the website [18].

Readability
Readability shows the user’s experience after clicking and landing on a page of a particular website. This category
mainly concerns the page speed, the content quality and length, the responsive design and the user experience.

3. Methodology

A single case is adopted in this study, the rational for choosing case study is to enable in-depth understanding of
the event. The case study offers advantage of better understanding of a phenomenon which is hard to measure
(Roy, 2003). We applied Busche’s [1], conceptual framework to examined how SEO can affect digital marketing
strategy and internationalization of higher education, using Halmstad University as the case study. We derived
data such as the percentage of foreign visitors to the website, the SEO ranking, the percentage of organic SEO
and paid per click ads for the analysis. First, we use keywords such as “Halmstad University”, “international
programmes halmstad university” and “masters in Sweden for international students” to search for relevant
pages and analysed the page results from Google search engine platform. The rational for using Google search
engine as main source of data collection is that, Google accounts for 75.8 percent of the search in 2017 and is
expected to grow by 80.2 percent in 2019 [19]. In addition, we used online tools such as “Searchmetrics”, “Google
trend”, “MozBar” and “Yakarferci” for further analysis of the websites. Also, we conducted three interviews with
international student coordinator about the use of SEO as digital marketing strategy for attracting international
students to the university.

3.1 Presentation of the Case: Halmstad University

Halmstad University is described as an innovation driven university and it has the goal of becoming key player in
the international education. Since the implementation of tuition fee regulation in Sweden in 2011, a serious
discussion about how to attract international students into Swedish universities has been increasing, of which
the university is not an exception. Currently the University has around 10 600 students (5 100 full-time students)
and offers around 50 programmes and over 130 courses within several subject fields. There are 55 Professors
and around 90 doctoral students. The university conducts education and research within a broad field. But the
three profile areas are included: Innovation Sciences, Information Technology and Health and Lifestyle. Halmstad
University is an international institution; its website has pages dedicated to potential users from all over the
world.

4. Results of the study

In this section an initial situation analysis regarding Halmstad University’s website was done using the conceptual
framework consisting of reputation, relevant and readability [1] as the analytical tool.

4.1 Reputation

4
The 22nd McGill International Entrepreneurship Conference, 22–24 August 2018, Halmstad University, Sweden

Social metrics

We used search metrics ranking to analyse the website. The analysis revealed that the university is ranked at
position 2,598 for SEO, its link rank is 2,796 and its social rank is 10,870. This analysis shows that the university
website is behind other competitors on the market.

User engagement and traffic

We used the keyword “Halmstad University” in Google trend to ascertain the international reach of the website
for last five years (2003-2018). The result show that most of the search are from Sweden (100) followed by
Bangladesh (47), Pakistan (23) India, (7) and Turkey (4) respectively (see figure 1). The search result means that
most of the website hits or searches from outside Sweden over the last five years come from the Asian countries.

Figure 1: Visits to the Halmstad University website in the past five years (2003-2018) retrieved 1:6:2018 (
from Google trend)

This result is mainly for organics results and no pay per click, which means the university, does not pay for
advertisements on search engine platforms.

Figure 2: Trend of visit to the Halmstad University website in the past five years (2003-2018)
retrieved 1:6:2018 ( from Google trend)

The trend analysis shows that the highest search queries was in January 2014, after there was decline till october
2015 and there was another decline till January 2018. The pattern show that visitors to the sites reached it peak

5
The 22nd McGill International Entrepreneurship Conference, 22–24 August 2018, Halmstad University, Sweden

at begining of the year. The pattern shows that most visitors or prospective clients access the website at the
beggning of each year, usually in Janauary.

Inbound, outbound and internal links

Regarding the inbound links, there were lots of posts on social media leading to the website. These links are
mainly displayed on Facebook, the relative distribution of the domain’s mentions on queried social networks are
for 99% spread on Facebook (Mozbar). Then, there are 6319 linking root domain which are linking to the website.
About the outbounds links, Halmstad university has accounts and is active on social media such as Facebook,
Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube and the outbound links towards these social media are displayed on the
website. Finally, there are lot of internal links displayed in the page “information for international students”
which invite the visitor to discover the university and the city.

4.2 Relevance
The category relevance relates to how search engine connects searchers’ queries with the website’s content to
ensure that it meet the need of the individuals searching for information. It is important to first understand
search engine result page (SERP). The SERP refers to a search engine result page ( Ignitevisibility.com (2018). The
page that appears when a user type a search query into Google (or any search engine). The website which
appears on the first pages is the ones Google determined to be the most relevant and useful to a particular search
query. The keywords “masters in Sweden for international students” were entered in Google search engine. After
the analysis it was discovered that Halmstad University appeared on 170th position of Google Ranking. From the
results, we can see that Lund University appeared on the first page, while Halmstad University could not be found
by the prospective searcher in the first to 150 pages.

We further analysed the page authority (PA), domain authority (DA) and priority score (PC) of the page by
entering the keywords “international programmes halmstad university” into Mozbar (see figure 3). In general
“priority score” is conceived to help aggregate all the other metrics­ difficulty, opportunity, and volume. Higher
PA is good indication for the websites. In this search the PC of the website is 30 which mean the page is difficult
to find among competing universities in Sweden. Page Authority (PA) score is 32 and domain authority (DA) is
59. Page Authority (PA) predicts ranking potential of a single page in search engine, while Domain Authority (DA)
predicts ranking the potential of entire domains or subdomains or several pages (Moz, 2018). The scores range
from 1 to 100, with higher scores corresponding to a greater ability to rank. Both PA and DA score means that
Halmstad University website is not able to get high rankings in Google search engine, upon users’ request.

6
The 22nd McGill International Entrepreneurship Conference, 22–24 August 2018, Halmstad University, Sweden

Figure 3: SERP analysis of Halmstad University “international programmes halmstad university”, retrieved on
3.6. 2018

Furthermore, we conducted a deep on-page SEO analysis of the website using yakaferci online platform. The
Halmstad University URL (http://www.hh.se/en-US/5.html) was entered into Yakaferci page analyser. The result
indicates that the length is good (see figure 4).

7
The 22nd McGill International Entrepreneurship Conference, 22–24 August 2018, Halmstad University, Sweden

Figure 4: SERP analysis of Halmstad University “international programmes halmstad university”, retrieved
on 3.6. 2018

Even though the result is good, the URL structure, http://www.hh.se/en-US/5.html does not contain the words
Halmstad university, this is consistent with the findings of (Isadora, 2018). However, according to (Moz, 2018)
using a URL that includes the appropriate name of the organization can improve the site's search visibility. About
the content freshness, we identified that information for international student’s page has been updated on the
2nd February 2018 and exchange students page on the 17 April 2018. Which means Halmstad University pays
attention to updating its website’s pages to offer a fresh content to users. Furthermore, there is a consistent
snippet under the page title which invites the user to click on the link. This result offers also sitelinks in English
or related to the exchange student page. Sitelinks are hyperlinks that appear under some Google listings in order
to help users to navigate in the website.

Finally, Hamlstad University’s appearance on the knowledge graph is an indication of the website relevance.
“Knowledge graph” or “knowledge box” pulls data to commonly asked questions from sources across the web to
provide concise answers to questions in one central location on the SERP. The Google knowledge graph is a
database located in a box on the right of the page result (see figure 5) . The University’s knowledge graph provide
related websites, search by the website visitors, 36 reviews from former students and social media platforms.
This information provides rich source data for digital marketing strategy. The presence of organization on Google
knowledge graph can influence the reputation on the Search Engine (SEOValley.Com, 2017).

8
The 22nd McGill International Entrepreneurship Conference, 22–24 August 2018, Halmstad University, Sweden

Figure 5:Google knowledge graph of Halmstad University ”, retrieved on 3.6. 2018

Some of the quotes of the review from former students are shown below.

Just like its motto it's a "Innovation Driven University". Beautiful architecture which gives it a
charismatic look in sno (Google reviews, Asaad Umair 2017)

Halmstad University is a good choice to learn things, for your career and life. The University
offers a good infrastructure, for the students to learn and develop their skills. The labs are
equipped with modern computers and are provided with updated software’s, for the students
to work with their projects. The campus library is the best place to study and lend books.
Unlimited access to the high speed internet enables students to get access with lots of study
materials. (Google reviews, Narayanan Selvaraj, 20014)

A young university with lots of ambitions and close cooperation with industry
(Translated by Google) Reading programs: If you've made it into one of the most sought after
programs will have a few years of wonderful new friends, but also of tough trials. I worked for
many years before I began to study and can really recommend everyone to dare to drive
anyway!

9
The 22nd McGill International Entrepreneurship Conference, 22–24 August 2018, Halmstad University, Sweden

Reading courses: Are you assemble yourself your own candidate with the help of just picking
courses so I recommend you do it at another university. Here is the help you get poor and the
struggle for success is very real.

As workplace: Do some who work as graduate students and there seems to be a really good
and free workplace (Google reviews, J Jacob Wikner, 2016)

The data gathered from students from the Google knowledge graph indicate the relevance of SEO strategy for
Halmstad University

4.3 Readability

Readability concerns content quality, length and page speed (Busche, 2017). To ascertain the page speed,
another tool https://tools.pingdom.com was used for analysis. This results show that the page speed of the
website, with performance grade of C with 78 out of 100, appear to be good. In addition the load time= 1.42s,
page size =9.9MB, and speed is faster 81%. But there are other issues that need to be improved. Indeed, some
redirect chain, that occurs when there is more than one redirect between the initial URL and the destination URL,
must be removed (see figure 6).

Figure 6. Pingdom Website Speed Test (using the URL http://www.hh.se/en-US/5.html,)

retrieved on 3.6.2018

10
The 22nd McGill International Entrepreneurship Conference, 22–24 August 2018, Halmstad University, Sweden

5. Discussion

The results obtained from the web analysis present in the study revealed that the high percentage of queries to
the website from users searching for international business programme is from Asian countries namely:
Bangladesh, Pakistan, India and Turkey, with few searches from prospective clients from other part of the world.
Delgado-Márquez et.al, [9] Indicate that in the face of globalization and the knowledge society, international
competition in the area of higher education has become more intense, therefore adopting appropriate SEO
strategy can generate the needed traffic on the university’s website.

Another observation is that Halmstad University appeared in the 170th position of Google ranking, for queries
about “masters in Sweden for international students”. This means that it highly unlikely for prospective students
to search and find International master programs at Halmstad through search engines. The position of the
websites in Google page ranking might also mean that the website’s popularity, authority, and reputation,
[Killoran, 11], is less than other competing universities in Sweden targeting international students. And thereby
making the webpages difficult to be among the first ten pages appearing in Google ranking.

Another observation from the analysis shows that the University’s SEO activities do not lead to higher ranking in
google search engine platform. Eventhough the primary function of SEO is to drive more unpaid useful traffic to
a site that converts into sales [20]. Ghose and Yang [21] suggests that paid search can contribute to additional
consumer purchases beyond the original intent and thus generate a longer-term business value for the
organisation.

The organic search option used by the university reduces the likelyhood of being located by prospective students
in comparison to other competing universities in Sweden offering international master’s programme. Therefore,
there is the need to adopt appropriate SEO for as part of the university’s digital marketing strategy. This is in line
with the findings of Isadora [13] who indicate that universities need to develop relevant and meaningful
snippets, URLs, keywords, heading tags, titles & descriptions, backlinks, internal linking, images file name &
alternative text, and actual web content as part of their SEO strategy in order to achieve the objective of
internationalisation

5.1 Theoretical Implication

This paper has provided preliminary insights into SEO as digital marketing strategy by analyzing a university’s
website. First the paper contribute to digital marketing [22-25] and SEO [7, 12] literature by analyzing SEO as a
tool for digital marketing strategy for internationalization of higher education which is less examined in the
literature.

Second, this study supports the theoretical assumption that organic search produces less relevance, reputation
and readability of a company’s website [1], than inorganic search (paid search). Thus in order to be on top with
the search results with the aim of targeting a large audience [7] it is crucial for organisations to adopt both paid
and non-paid SEO strategies.

5.2 Managerial implications

The study has several implications for management: First, the Halmstad University website seems to have
updated content. However, the website doesn’t appear in the first result page for when searching “masters in
Sweden for international students”. Therefore it is important to consider search engine optimization as part of
their overall marketing plans [26].

11
The 22nd McGill International Entrepreneurship Conference, 22–24 August 2018, Halmstad University, Sweden

Second, the university could invest more effort on social media and also create a mobile app for the university.
Following the data provided by this study, it can be said that SEO has a great potential in improve international
visibility of the university.

Third, investing more efforts on SEO could be a good strategy to bring international students and collaborators
to the university’s website. As mentioned in the literature, SEO is used to improve the ranking position on Search
Engine Result Page (SERP). A high ranking in the SERP leads to a great organisation’s visibility [10]. The better a
website will be ranked; the easier it will be for international students to find it on internet.

Fourth, the trend analysis revealed that visitors on the university website are active during the first month of
every year. This means that there should be intensive SEO activities during that period. Because that is the time
users seems to be active on the university’s website.

Fifth, even though social media can generate visit to a company’s website. The analysis revealed that the social
media platform such as Facebook is used only for communication, but not well structured digital marketing
activities. There is the need for integration of the social media platforms with SEO strategies for enhanced
visibility.

5.3 Limitation and direction for Future research

The study used one case study it will be appropriate to compare with other universities in Sweden and other
countries outside Sweden. Another limitation is the use of few online tools, the results and the terms used for
SEO analysis can differ according to the tools used. However, it can be interesting to study other major
commercial search engines such as Yahoo, Bing, Ask.com, AOL.com, Baidu, Wolframalpha, DuckDuckGo.

References

[1] L. Busche, Powering Content: Building a Nonstop Content Marketing Machine. 1 edition.
Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media., (2017).
[2] J. Knight, Updated definition of internationalization, International higher education, (2015). [3] U.
Teichler, Internationalisation of higher education: European experiences, Asia Pacific education review,
10 (2009) 93-106.
[4] S. Sweidsh Government, Internationalisation of Swedish Higher Education and Research, Swedish
Government Official
Reports(https://www.government.se/48fc30/contentassets/4df6aeabd2bd4f5dbbf69210f786e133/intern
ationalisationagenda.pdf), (2018).
[5] B.Y. Shih, C.Y. Chen, Z.S. Chen, Retracted: an empirical study of an internet marketing strategy for
search engine optimization, Human Factors and Ergonomics in Manufacturing & Service Industries,23
(2013) 528-540.

[6] R.S. Bhandari, A. Bansal, Impact of Search Engine Optimization as a Marketing Tool, Jindal Journal of
Business Research, (2018) 2278682117754016.
[7] G. Egri, C. Bayrak, The role of search engine optimization on keeping the user on the site, Procedia
Computer Science, 36 (2014) 335-342.
[8] R. Aswani, A.K. Kar, P.V. Ilavarasan, Y.K. Dwivedi, Search engine marketing is not all gold: insights from
Twitter and SEOClerks, International Journal of Information Management, 38 (2018) 107-116.
[9] B.L. Delgado-Márquez, N.E. Hurtado-Torres, Y. Bondar, Internationalization of higher education:
Theoretical and empirical investigation of its influence on university institution rankings,
International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 8 (2011) 265-284.
[10] V.N. Gudivada, D. Rao, J. Paris, Understanding search-engine optimization, Computer, 48 (2015) 43-52.

12
 The 22nd McGill International Entrepreneurship Conference, 22–24 August 2018, Halmstad University, Sweden

[11] J.B. Killoran, How to use search engine optimization techniques to increase website visibility, IEEE
Transactions on professional communication, 56 (2013) 50-66.
[12] S. Tomasi, X. Li, Influences of search engine optimization on performance of SMEs: A qualitative
perceptive, Journal of Electronic Commerce in Organizations (JECO), 13 (2015) 27-49.
[13] N. Isadora, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) As A Digital Marketing Technique For
Internationalization In Higher Education:, Unpublished Bachelor's Thesis, International Business Oulu
University of Applied Sciences, (2018).
[14] A. Paraskevas, I. Katsogridakis, R. Law, D. Buhalis, Search engine marketing: Transforming
search engines into hotel distribution channels, Cornell Hospitality Quarterly, 52 (2011) 200-208. [15] M.P.
Evans, Analysing Google rankings through search engine optimization data, Internet research, 17 (2007)
21-37.
[16] S. Zhang, N. Cabage, Search Engine Optimization: Comparison of Link Building and Social Sharing,
Journal of Computer Information Systems, 57 (2017) 148-159.
[17] M.N. Solem, S. Bell, E. Fournier, C. Gillespie, M. Lewitsky, H. Lockton, Using the Internet to support
international collaborations for global geography education, Journal of Geography in Higher Education,
27 (2003) 239-253.
[18] M. Crowley, Take the guesswork out of your marketing strategy, Journal of Financial Planning, 27 (2014)
16.
[19] eMarketer.com, Company reports, www.eMarketer.com, (2017).
[20] A. Shaun, SEO Tutorial For Beginners in 2018, https://www.hobo-web.co.uk/seo-tutorial/, (2018). [21] A.
Ghose, S. Yang, An empirical analysis of search engine advertising: Sponsored search in electronic
markets, Management science, 55 (2009) 1605-1622.
[22] A. Parsons, M. Zeisser, R. Waitman, Organizing today for the digital marketing of tomorrow, Journal of
Interactive Marketing, 12 (1998) 31-46.
[23] K. Taken Smith, D. Pitta, Longitudinal study of digital marketing strategies targeting Millennials, *
Journal of Consumer Marketing, 29 (2012) 86-92.
[24] J. Wind, V. Mahajan, Digital marketing, Symphonya. Emerging Issues in Management, (2002) 43-
54.
[25] D. Chaffey, F. Ellis-Chadwick, Digital marketing: strategy, implementation and practice, Pearson
Harlow, 2012.
[26] R.A. Malaga, Worst practices in search engine optimization, Communications of the ACM, 51 (2008)
147-150.

13

View publication stats