Book SEO: How to Optimize Academic Books Publications for High Visibility

For many academic book authors, making scholarly works visible in a digital world presents unique challenges. Book SEO for academic publishers can be a tightrope between the intellectual ethos of scholarship and the commercial imperatives of digital marketing (Ale Ebrahim et al., 2014; Ebrahim, 2016). Marketing an academic book may be far from commercial book marketing in its methods and techniques. Unlike other types of SEO that target general consumers, academic SEO is all about finding those scholars, researchers, students, and institutional libraries. The first objective is to increase discoverability via academic databases, institutional repositories, and scholarly search engines, such as Google Scholar. The first step in effective academic book SEO is understanding the way your target audiences search. Those types of researchers are probably more likely searching with very specific academic terminology, along with author name, institutional affiliation, and subject-specific keyword searches. Your SEO strategy should correspond to academic search habits while making sure that what you publish meets the demanding expectations of being academic–rigorously vetted and held to high standards.