Best of CASE District VII Award
 

Institution: University of California, Davis

Title of entry: Expanding our audience through SEO

About this entry: Approaching Fall of 2025, the UC Davis College of Letters and Science Communications team launched a comprehensive editorial SEO initiative to strengthen website discoverability and expand public access to research, scholarship and student stories. Primary audiences included prospective students, alumni, donors and the general public seeking authoritative academic content.
Rather than treating SEO as a technical task, the team built a scalable, content-first strategy embedded into editorial workflows. This included developing a formal SEO rubric, implementing a two-phase review process (draft and post-publication), standardizing metadata and structure, and training writers and editors in search-informed storytelling.
In 2025, this work produced significant year-over-year growth: sessions increased by 72%, pageviews by 39%, and engaged sessions by nearly 55%. In addition, Google organic search became the leading traffic source, generating more than 39,560 sessions (34% of total traffic), compared to just 5,939 (14% of total traffic) the year before. Cross-platform engagement quality remained strong, with long-form features averaging a longer session duration.
This initiative strengthened the college’s digital presence while preserving editorial integrity and supporting UC Davis’ public service mission.