In the US alone, there are more 4,000 colleges and universities providing a wide variety of academic offers. With so many schools to explore, it’s easy future students to get overwhelmed during the search process. Students often trust popular search engines like Google to narrow down their college options and find one that fits what they’re looking for. To ensure that your university’s website has strong online visibilityit’s reaching its target audience, and it cuts through the noise, staying strong search engine optimization (SEO) it is essential. Ready to make your university website more search engine friendly to increase student enrollment? Get started with these higher education SEO tips to increase your higher education institution’s organic rankings.
1) Implement a strong keyword strategy, especially for individual programs
First, let’s take a look at how a potential student would use a search engine to find a college or academic program: this is known as search intent. Students would go to a search engine like Google and enter a keyword, such as “best college for data analytics,” and they would see relevant web pages in the search engine results pages (SERPs). So you should find the more effective keywords that describe your university or theirs degree programs and is likely to seek them out school students to get the best organic search rankings.
There are several types of keywords you may want to use for your university. These include location-specific keywords (“Tampa universities”) and program-specific keywords (“major journalism”). Keyword Tools, Google Trendscompetitor analysis and existing analytics can provide solid insight into what students are searching for and how you can incorporate those keywords into your website to increase your organic traffic.
You want to find words with decent or high search volume that aren’t hard to rank for. While simple search queries like “universities” see incredibly high organic search traffic, they are very difficult to rank for. Try to be more specific with your long-tail keywords and use relevant search terms like “best college for broadcast journalism.”
Make sure your keywords are integrated into your website copy, as well as your tags, headers, meta descriptions and more.
2) Use long tail interrogative sentences
More than ever, when people use search engines, they are asking literal questions. This is known as natural language search. For example, when targeting program-specific keywords like “journalism degree,” questions like “what can you do with a journalism degree” see high search volume and are easy to rank for.
Consider using tools like AHREFS to help you find these types of keywords. Another excellent source would be Respond to the publicwhich takes two to three word queries and shows you what questions Google users are asking in relation to that search string.
These long-tail phrases present a great opportunity to use as keywords and topics in your blog posts.
3) Use Google Trends to find where search terms are trending
You should always understand where and when your traffic is coming from, and more importantly, what potential students are looking for. This is especially important in higher education, as most of your traffic will be seasonal and niche.
Google Trends provides a 12-month summary of search traffic for a given search query. It also breaks down which regions are seeing the highest search volume for the given search. Google Trends also provides information on related queries and topics that could be useful for getting potential keyword ideas.
4) Leverage an effective content strategy
Content creation is very important. Constantly publishing new content tells Google that your site is relevant and causes Google to crawl and index your site’s content and pages. Search engines reward university websites that often post news, compelling content, such as blog posts or videos, reindexing those web pages more often and improving SERP rankings. publication high quality contentsuch as news, event summaries and student life Featured videos are examples of content that can be used not only to inform students about what’s happening at your university, but also to improve search rankings.or your education website.
Remember that for any visual media, such as images and videos, it’s important to include alt tags and keyword-rich descriptions so that your site is more likely to rank for that keyword.
In the following example, Florida Tech Online maintain an online presence frequently publishing blog entries on careers related topics, student stories and study tips. The content is not only useful for current students or professionals, but also for their potential candidates. This blog is an excellent example inbound content marketing i SEO strategies for universities.
5) Address duplicate content
At first glance, it may seem like having multiple pages with identical content can be useful because it means that prospective students can find the information they are looking for in different places. Despite this, duplicate content can be a big problem for SEO for higher education.
Duplicate content confuses search engines because they won’t know which content is most relevant and which page should rank first in search results. Your marketing team or agency partner can perform a site-wide audit for copy text, URL variations, and the same web pages reproduced as HTTP and HTTPS sites.
You can fix these problems by creating 301 redirects or canonical tags to give the original page the best ranking.
6) Take advantage of local search, college directory listings, and review sites
Aside from Google, students often use college directories and review sites to research potential schools. Examples of college directory listings include the NCAA Directory, the College Board, and US News & World Report. Similarly, college review sites may include College Confidential, Cappex, and GradReports. Keep an active profile on these sites whenever possible, as these reputable sites are an excellent place to host backlinks to your website.
Also, location is often a key factor in a the potential student choice of university. Colleges and universities often recruit from local high schools and using local SEO for higher education can also capture a larger part of this audience. Do a local keyword search that incorporates location names, such as “business schools in Miami” or “engineering programs in Florida.” Your location can be as granular as a city or neighborhood, or as large as a state.
As with local businesses, your university should also create one Google My Business (GMB) account., which will include your college’s name, address, phone number, photos, description, directions, and category, for Google’s search engine to index. When a prospective student searches for your college, the GMB listing will appear in the top right corner of the screen.
In 2018, Google also started attaching statistics such as acceptance rate, notable alumni, average cost after financial aid, and graduation rate, pull data from the College Scorecard and the Department of Education’s Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. Below is an example of what the final list looks like Saint Thomas Aquinas College.
7) Optimize your website for speed and links.
The kiss of death for any website is being too slow. In 2018, UMBC website famously crashed after the men’s basketball team defeated top-seeded University of Virginia in the first round of March Madness. With a shorter attention span, potential candidates will leave your website if it takes too long to load, a positive user experience is a key ranking factor.
Likewise, Google will rank slow websites lower rankings in search engines. Make sure you optimize your site’s speed by using techniques like using smaller image sizes and hosting your site on fast servers. For your mobile website, you can also use Google’s mobile testing tool to test individual pages and determine which sections need improvement.
8) Get more backlinks
Another way to optimize your website is to link to other relevant websites and have those websites come to you. This is known as off-page SEO. Examples of high-quality sites that can provide “backlinks” to your website include social media pages, local listings, guest blogs, and third-party media sites that may host advertisements. you can too create internal links to other pages on your website, such as if your online press releases link to faculty profiles, department websites, or other relevant content.
9) Build your citations
Citation building is an important part of SEO, and it’s no different in the education industry. We’ve already talked about the importance of a local SEO strategy, but citation building adds a ton of value to the SERP. you are going to fly as many dates as possible.
Use sites like Brightlocal to add local appointments for your university. This way, your college appears in some of the most trusted databases like Yellow Pages, Yelp, Facebook, Apple Maps, etc. These tools are important because they not only create your citations, but also clean them up and address duplicates so you don’t come across as negative. affected by them.
10) Leverage Wikipedia for authority links
For better or worse, wikipedia is an “authoritative source” of information online and has great authority. You can use this to your advantage by creating and updating your university’s Wiki page and linking back to your website.
Wikipedia often appears alongside and in some cases above official company websites. This is an untapped source of content for many smaller schools on Google.
Pacific54: Higher Education SEO Done Right
SEO is not a one-and-done; it is constant and critical to marketing success. Fortunately, an agency partner can help you improve your higher education SEO plan. contact Pacific 54 today to schedule a consultation.
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