Universities are knowledge-generating machines; large, complex organisations with specialisms extending across teaching and research, sustainability, global partnerships, and professional services. And as in many large institutions, the biggest inefficiencies are rarely caused by people working badly. Rather, they are caused by people working well. In parallel, independently, and without visibility of one another.
This is the silo problem in higher education (HE). Structurally complex with a tendency to fragment into a labyrinthine network of self-contained units, universities are increasingly looking to tackle the efficiency drag that silos create.
With teams often developing their own workflows, channels, and definitions of success, one result of this problem is an over-generation and under-utilisation of content. With well-documented HE sector pressures in the UK and around the world, doing more with less has never been more important.
As part of Digital Visibility 2030, the University of Exeter’s strategic initiative to optimise and increase our presence on traditional and AI search platforms, we are discovering that search engine optimisation (SEO) and silo-busting are more intertwined than they might first appear.
An unlikely strategic asset
Our Digital (Web) Team manages the central University website, ranging from our corporate and information pages, through to tactical research and student recruitment content. Our centralised web management structure, whilst seeming unremarkable on the surface, is significant in practice.
In a sector where web governance is frequently and inconsistently devolved to various levels of organisational units, we have a single team with full oversight of the institutional web presence.
That means we sit at the intersection of huge swathes of the University’s content generation. Whether it’s research communications, marketing campaign assets, sustainability commitments, partnership announcements – all of it passes through, or is at least visible to, our team.
This is an unparalleled breadth of organisational visibility, and one we are increasingly exploiting for strategic value.
Digital Visibility 2030
Digital Visibility 2030 is the University of Exeter’s strategic SEO initiative. Launched as a one-year sprint project with ambitions to embed lasting change, what has emerged as one of the most productive strategies within the project was not something we planned from the outset.
As the project has developed, it’s become increasingly clear that the central position of our team, combined with an SEO framework for evaluating our digital estate and content portfolio, has given us a powerful tool for identifying and exploiting content that was already sitting elsewhere in the University.
In short: we are hunting down collections of pre-existing content, that has genuine search value or potential, and that either is not optimised for search and discovery or hasn’t been put onto the web at all.
SEO as Organisational Glue
The reason SEO works so well as a silo-busting mechanism is that it provides a neutral, evidence-based framework for evaluating content across teams. Search data tells us exactly what our stakeholders are looking for. It does not care which team owns the content, or what internal structure it sits within. It simply shows us the types of content being searched for, and how well we are meeting that demand.
That framework gives us a legitimate reason to reach into every corner of the organisation. If keyword data or search trends show us that prospective students, potential collaborators, or other stakeholders are asking questions we aren’t answering, we can explore and work across teams to find whether those answers already exist.
Few organisations can credibly claim expertise across as many subjects as a university. Turning that breadth into visibility, and visibility into reputation, is the overarching ambition of Digital Visibility 2030.
Content repurposing in practice
The practical manifestation of this approach is content repurposing. Rather than generating new content from scratch, we are identifying content that already exists in one part of the organisation and working with the relevant team to adapt and publish it on the web in a search-optimised form. This is a sustainable and scalable way to expand our web visibility, rather than slow and resource intensive.
Since August, Digital Visibility 2030 has seen us work with our International Student Recruitment team to repurpose non-indexable* entry requirement and agent contact databases into search-optimised by-country landing pages for prospective students.
We’ve also repurposed long-form and blog content from across a range of to-be-decommissioned websites by conducting pre-decommission SEO audits. One such piece of recovered content has since become one of our most visited pages in 2026. Bonus points if you can work out which page it is!
As this strategic framework has become more embedded in our project planning, we’ve begun work on several further content repurposing projects including:
- Collaborating with colleagues from our Sustainability team and across Communications to repurpose our Sustainable Development Goal reports for the web.
- Working with colleagues across Student Recruitment, Marketing, and Admissions to leverage prospective student enquiry data as FAQs on our course pages.
- Maximising the value we obtain from video assets through optimisation for YouTube and other video platforms in collaboration with our Strategic Marketing team.
What these examples share is the same basic logic: valuable content existed. It was not reaching the people looking for it. A small amount of effort optimising and publishing closed that gap.
Why this matters beyond SEO
The most powerful argument for this approach is efficiency. If content already exists, repurposing it is faster and cheaper than commissioning new content. This is especially persuasive at a time where the HE sector is under sustained financial pressure.
But the more significant outcome is cultural. We’re finding that, by proactively reaching out across divisional and team boundaries, we’re becoming a connector rather than an endpoint, helping others to extract more value from work they have already done.
That shift in perception is one of the most underrated benefits a centralised web management structure can deliver, which brings us back to where we started. Silos are not broken down by wishing for them to be broken. They are broken down by finding practical reasons for teams to work together with shared goals.
SEO, as it turns out, is a surprisingly effective reason.
The Digital (Web) Team needs you… and your content
Are you a colleague or team at the University of Exeter? Do you have content that could be repurposed for the web? We want to know about it. If you are sitting on unused reports, databases, blogs, or FAQs, we can help you put it to work. Get in touch with the Digital (Web) Team at digitalteam@exeter.ac.uk.
Glossary
Non-indexable: Where content has been put onto the web in a form that isn’t accessible to search engines. A greater sin than not putting it on the web at all.