Discoverability and digital marketing: making sure people can find your work

The way that people do research and read books is rapidly evolving. Our marketing approach has evolved in kind and will continue to respond to a changing marketplace. Though our marketing looks different today from even ten years ago, our commitment to your work’s success hasn’t changed.

• Marketing aims

• Discoverability and SEO

• Supporting authors as the best advocates for their work

• Raising awareness and driving engagement

Marketing aims:

• Increase discoverability to help connect research to the right audience

• Support authors as the best advocates for their work

• Raise awareness of your research as part of OUP’s high-quality brand and publishing portfolio in a subject area  

• Drive engagement with content

More than 65% of research journeys now start with a search, either on a library site, specialist abstracting and indexing service, or with a general search engine. As this proportion continues to grow year on year, discoverability and search engine optimization (SEO) are at the heart of our marketing and digital strategy.

In addition, our Marketing team works to build OUP’s reputation and presence within discipline communities. Our aim is to make OUP’s publications the go-to sources for quality, trustworthy, and cutting-edge research in any given subject area.

This marketing approach gives each new work we publish a strong foundation for success, and helps researchers to access relevant, high-quality resources.

Discoverability and SEO

Before research is read and cited, it must be found. Discoverability is the cornerstone of 21st-century academic publishing, the make-or-break factor for the long-term success of new works.

What authors need to know about discoverability and SEO

The majority of research journeys begin with a general or specialist search engine, but further discovery can also happen in sites all over the internet, from online library catalogues to research hubs, from Amazon’s website to OUP’s.

Discoverability describes the potential for your work to appear at the top of any search results. Improving discoverability makes titles more visible online; this raises awareness of research, increases readership, and ultimately leads to more opportunities for impact. Discoverability of new work builds over time. We find that visits from Google to the Oxford Academic version of books continue to increase for a further five years after publication.

Search engine optimization (SEO) supports discoverability. SEO refers to the activities and strategies that ensure our research outputs are prominent on major search engines like Google, Bing, and Baidu.

The expertise, authority, and trustworthiness of our publisher brand and website, combined with the high quality of your work, are other key factors to Google’s assessment of where a work should appear in search results.

How we support discoverability and SEO

The best opportunity to connect with your audience is at the exact moment of their search. We understand that it is essential for your work to appear near the top of a relevant search, and we work hard to ensure this happens. On an annual basis, content published on the Oxford Academic platform appeared in billions of search results, driving over 100 million of visits to our content pages.

Discovery also happens within the Oxford Academic platform. Our site design facilitates easy searching and there are related content listings and reference links to help readers find new chapters and articles from OUP’s books and journals. Last year more than 300,000 people read both a journal article and a book chapter during their visit to Oxford Academic.

Site design

Our Oxford Academic platform provides robust search, browse, and SEO capabilities, and expert SEO and Discovery teams work in partnership with Google, Google Scholar, and leading discovery services to adapt to constantly evolving standards

Since our Oxford Scholarship Online (OSO) digital books were added to the Oxford Academic platform, they have benefited from an 82% increase in traffic from Google.

Brand signals, marketing, and links

Google uses brand signals to assess a website’s authority—it looks at how many other websites and sources mention a particular brand and how highly they rate the links being generated by that brand. Our Marketing team aims to drive engagement with our published content, getting people not only reading, but citing, sharing, and recommending our authors’ work. This benefits all works on the Oxford Academic platform.

Supporting authors as the best advocates for their work

At OUP, we do the heavy lifting to ensure that your research is easy to discover for a global audience.

As the author, you are the best advocate for your work and the most directly connected to your field. We find that an author’s personal touch in promoting their work can make a real difference. For that reason, part of our marketing strategy is to support you in your self-promotion.

Raising awareness and driving engagement

Our Marketing team makes sure that OUP continues to be a familiar and trusted name to readers in each of our academic fields. To do this effectively, we listen to how the academic community likes to hear about new research.

With years of experience, our Marketing team skilfully blends modern marketing methods with those that are time-proven. In this way, we have established a dynamic presence across traditional, online, and social media channels to promote your content to a global audience. We can also leverage the traffic we drive to Oxford Academic by providing further routes to discovery within the platform.

Our marketing campaigns leverage the quality and breadth of our published titles, chapters, and articles, raising awareness of our publishing in a subject area or specific topic. We position your work as part of our trusted, authoritative catalogue, encouraging people to read, share, cite, and recommend.

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