As per the data, approximately 93% of people use search engines to gather information regarding colleges and universities. It encourages the majority of educational institutions to improve their online presence. Search engine optimization (SEO) plays a vital role in this. SEO for universities is necessary to improve its position in search engine ranking pages (SERPs).
SEO enables organizations to increase enrollment, which is the primary aim of any educational institution and university. Therefore, if you don’t focus on optimizing your website for SEO, you are indeed losing opportunities to entice prospective students and remain competitive.
In this post, we have explained clearly how to do SEO for higher education. We have discussed every SEO strategy in detail, right from the basics.
What is SEO for Universities?
SEO for universities is a process of making changes to your website to help it rank high in Google and other search engines. It’s an effective method of improving organic search results.
SEO is a process that involves researching those keywords that prospective students use in their queries, optimizing websites, and creating important content. These are useful to attract prospective students and increase organic traffic to your website and thus boost its engagement rate.
Google and other search engines often follow a complete set of rules, popularly known as search engine algorithms. Based on the algorithms, search engines determine how and also whether to index web pages. If users type some search queries, the search engines rank these pages if they think searchers find the most relevant.
The most interesting fact is that getting an “.edu” domain indeed makes it convenient to rank your website on the top in the first page of SERPs. Meanwhile, many top-level domains (TLDs) including “.edu” need to meet several specific criteria.
Importance of SEO for Universities
SEO is a reliable and result-oriented technique that ensures a robust online presence of universities. It also ensures educational institutions are credible, competitive, accessible, and more. Following are some other reasons why SEO is important for universities;
- Boost Credibility
Once your university appears in SERPs, it reflects both trust and authority. The majority of students and parents relate high search ranking with quality and reputation. A better-optimized website with positive reviews, updated content, and authoritative backlinks boosts the credibility of the university. It builds great confidence among academic professionals, students, partners, and others who consider collaboration.
- Improve Online Visibility
As mentioned, SEO is an important technique to boost search engine visibility. With this, universities make their programs, courses, research centers, and others easily discoverable and noticeable among users. By targeting the relevant keywords such as ‘top MBA universities in Texas’, an education institution finds it convenient to lure the more relevant audience.
- Maximize Enrollments
An effective SEO strategy is important to boost organic traffic to the admission pages of your websites. It increases both application and enrollment numbers.
You can capture the attention of those prospective students looking for these opportunities through optimization of queries like ‘online degree in data science’. SEO is useful to highlight various unique selling points (USPs), which can be placement rates, campus life, faculty achievement, and more.
- Get More Funding Opportunities
Universities that have user-friendly and informative websites can grab more opportunities to get the attention of grant providers, donors, research sponsors, and more.
Apart from this, another important advantage of SEO is it maximizes the reach of academic content to a broader audience. The academic content can either be research breakthroughs, publications, etc.
Best SEO Practices for Universities
Universities can get most of the SEO to make their online appearance impeccable only with the right strategies. We have discussed some of the best practices you can consider to implement to get the best search results;
- Select Keywords Based on Your Universities Goals
Keyword research is one of the vital things that you always need to take into account before performing SEO for higher education. As we already mentioned above, keyword research is the process of finding out and targeting those terms that are helpful to attract prospective students seeking various academic programs.
You need to use the relevant keyword tool for the same. Of course, you will come across various tools Google keyword planner, Aherf, etc. These tools facilitate you to perform keyword research based on many factors such as keyword difficulty (KD), search volume, and more.
It’s advisable to use the Keyword Magic Tool by Semrush to get better search results. You need to just open these tools and type one of the search phrases in one of the programs run by your universities.
After inserting everything, you need to push the ‘search’ button. The result appears as follows;
In the above result, you get a complete overview of several metrics, keyword ideas, filtering options, and more. You can see a number of keywords. Since we explore program-specific ideas, it’s advisable to look for relevant groups to narrow your focus to a digestible list.
While picking the right keyword, you need to always keep in mind factors like search volume, KD, etc. And once you shortlisted the right keywords to target, you need to use them on the following elements to get the desired Google search results;
Content
You need to use your targeted keywords in a variety of content, including program pages, home pages, blog posts, FAQ pages, and more. Apart from this, you should consider the following important factors;
- While using keywords on the home page, you should not forget to insert them on headings, subheadings, etc.
- You should always use keywords for many individual programs based on their respective pages.
- You need to use the targeted keywords when it comes to optimizing blog content.
- Make sure you include keywords in both your questions and answers.
Meta Tags
Your meta tag is incomplete or ineffective without the use of targeted keywords. You need to use the primary keyword in the title tag and meta tag.
Headings and Subheadings
As we already mentioned, you should always use your primary keyword in H1 of your website page. You can use secondary or related keywords in subheadings including H2 and H3 of the pages. It’s also necessary to organize content most effectively.
URLs
Make sure the URLs of your website are easily readable and clean. It should include a primary keyword. For instance, instead of using university.edu/page 123, you should use university.edu/mba-degree.
Internal Linking
Using a keyword in the anchor text of internal links is always helpful for both search engines and users to be aware of the importance of the linked page.
- Create Quality Content
Quality content ensures the guaranteed success of your SEO strategy for universities. While talking about quality content, it’s impossible to forget long-form content which is one of the important factors of quality content. Long-form content includes a minimum of 1000 words and includes multiple benefits for higher education institutes.
Comprehensive and Accurate Information
One of the key advantages of long-form content is it offers more in-depth information with a higher accuracy. It offers complete information regarding campus life, academic program, local areas, facilities, and more. It thus facilitates prospective students to make a good decision related to their education.
We have taken an example of the Master of Business Administration program at Howard University. It’s the best example of long-form content that includes the following important details;
- Why an MBA degree from Howard
- Full-time MBA program
- Dual degree program
- Program curriculum
- And more
Higher Engagement
It’s really important to let your visitors engage with content that provides crucial insights including course details, program requirements, and alumni testimonials. It maximizes the possibility of prospective students exploring many other pages on websites or also submitting apps.
Improved SEO
Your long-form content is incomplete without using the targeted keywords. It boosts usefulness and breadth. It works effectively to let your content rank high in search results for a range of keywords.
This kind of informative content is beneficial in attracting backlinks from other websites. It works effectively to improve both the search ranking and authority of your website.
- Analyze Competitors
The next important step you need to do is to spend enough time going through your competitors and analyzing their SEO strategy. To make a competitive SEO analysis, you need to start recognizing your major competitors in higher education horizons.
Of course, your competitors should be institutions that offer the same academic programs as yours. Make sure they are situated in the same regions.
The best and easiest way of finding competitors is using the Organic Research tool, which a professional SEO company often leverages.
All you need to do is to open the tool and enter your competitor’s domain. Once you select the right country. And then, press the ‘Search’ button.
Once you hit the ‘Search’ button, the above result appears.
You are willing to gather details of keywords that rank for, right? It’s advisable to choose the ‘Positions’ tab and then scroll to the ‘Organic Search Positions‘ section.
Above are keywords your competitor’s website ranks for. Apart from keywords, it also reflects what pages they rank for and also various metrics such as position, intent, and volume.
You will get an option to filter keywords, URLs, and more.
Moreover, if you wish to get details about various top-performing pages, you need to hit the ‘Pages’ tab. It provides you detailed and structured data for the number of keywords the pages rank for, estimated traffic, breakdown of keywords by intent, etc.
Apart from this, you can find more competitors related to the one you entered for. To explore more competitors, you need to search for the ‘Competitors’ tab. Here, you can explore the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors’ presence in organic search results.
Here, you can observe data for every competitor based on the numbers of common search ranking keywords, competition level, traffic, etc.
If you wish to analyze keywords, you need to go on ‘Common Keyword’ your competitors rank for. It allows you to find out some of those websites that rank for academic program keywords.
Once you get details of your competitor’s keywords, you can use the same to create top-quality content. Apart from this, you can use those keywords to optimize blog posts, program pages, FAQs, etc.
- Optimize Content
Apart from creating quality content, you need to also focus on its proper optimization. It’s essential to tailor your content to match both the needs and interests of your prospects. You can do it in the following ways;
Be Aware of Student Personas
It’s advisable to create a detailed audience persona according to interests, demographic details, goals, etc. Using these personas works as a guide when it comes to content creation. You can consider the following important content ideas;
- Explain details about various programs such as admission requirements and course offerings.
- Share blog posts related to campus events, student life, extracurricular activities, housing options, and more.
- Share videos and blogs along with tips on how to write personal statements and how to apply them.
- You can share written testimonials and videos from current students sharing their experiences.
Address Questions and Concerns
You need to always create content that should be based on various common concerns, questions, pain points, and more. It’s advisable to provide detailed answers to eliminate any doubts.
The cost of attending a university is something that is one of the major concerns of many prospective students. It’s advisable to consider the following important types of content to address various concerns;
- You need to write articles that explain additional costs, tuition fees, etc.
- You can offer a complete guide on available grants, scholarships, loans, work-study programs, and more.
- You need to create a complete guide on the available scholarships, loans, grants, work-study programs, etc.
- You need to provide various financial planning tools like calculators and many other inceptive tools. These help you estimate costs.
Share Student Testimonials
It’s a good idea to feature stories and testimonials that can be either from existing or past students. It helps you offer complete insights into your programs and campus.
Showcase Unique Selling Points
The next important thing you can do is to highlight unique aspects of your institutions. These aspects can be state-of-the-art facilities or also unique campus culture. You need to focus on what distinguishes your institutions from others.
Personalize
You need to use structured data and analytics to personalize your content based on user preferences, behaviors, and more. It’s important to tailor your messaging based on individual interests. Following are important tips you can consider to personalize your message;
- If you notice several visitors from a specific location, you need to create content that highlights the experience of students from the same location.
- If any specific program gets a higher engagement on your website compared to other programs, you need to create content accordingly.
- Do Local SEO
A robust Local SEO strategy is essential for universities and educational institutions to entice prospective students in local regions. You can go through the following steps to do local SEO effectively;
Localized Content
The best way of localizing your content is to use local keywords and terminology in meta tags, content, headings, etc. You need to include your location or your city name along with keywords related to your programs.
You need to form content that should be relevant to the audience you target locally. Your content should be about local events, seminars, attractions, etc. It makes your institution connected with the local community. And it indeed helps you rank well in local searches.
Reviews
As we already mentioned, you need to encourage your current or even alumni to write reviews for your universities. Once you get their reviews, you can publish on the following platforms;
- Yelp
Positive reviews play a vital role in boosting both the search engine visibility and credibility of institutions in search results. To encourage more people to write reviews, you need to share a unique review link from your Google Business Profile (GBP).
Google Business Profile
Always create a GBP for your university. Google also creates an unverified GBP for your university. You need to claim it on the SERP. You need to complete your listing by ensuring a higher accuracy.
Make sure you include every important detail of your university, be it contact details, address, university name, amenities, websites, and more. Make sure you use the relevant business category.
- Technical SEO
Technical SEO is necessary to let search engines crawl and index pages of your university website. It’s highly important to follow important technical SEO right practices;
Indexability
- Indexing
You need to ensure your website is fully accessible to many search engine crawlers to get indexed and rank properly. The index serves as a database of web pages for search results. So, if your website page is not indexed, it will not return and appear in search results.
- Robots.txt
It facilitates control pages that can be and can’t be crawled. It’s basically a text file on your website that instructs search engines to understand pages that should be and should not be crawled.
- Canonical Tags
It’s useful when a page on your university website has different versions. But, you wish only one version to index. It’s a tag you leverage to define the major version of a page that has several duplicate pages as well. It allows search engines to index the right version of a page.
- Meta Tag Directives
These directives are popular as “nofollow” and “index” for preventing search engines from indexing duplicate or irrelevant content.
- Crawlability
Crawlability makes it convenient for search engine bots to discover and crawl website pages conveniently.
- Internal Linking
Internal linking is quite essential to create a logical structure for your website. Since the university website has several pages, your most important directories and pages should be fully accessible even within a few clicks from the homepage.
- XML Sitemaps
Create an XML sitemap to allow search engines to access a complete list of several pages on the website. To create a sitemap, you can get help from many tools such as Yoast SEO, XML Sitemap Creator, Inspyder Sitemap Creator, and more.
If you are not able to detect the technical SEO of your university website manually, you can leverage site audit tools provided by many reputed brands – Semrush is one of those. It’s an easy-to-use tool – you just need to enter your website domain and hit the ‘Audit’ button to get the detailed report.
- Create Backlinks
It’s important for a university to focus on improving both credibility and authority. And this can only be possible only by creating high-quality backlinks.
Let’s understand different ways of creating backlinks;
- Guest blogging is one of the most popular ways of creating quality backlinks. You need to submit your guest posts and blogs related to university or educational websites.
- The next thing you can do is to provide scholarships to prospective students. You need to promote them on many scholarship websites.
- You can also get in touch with your alumni to link back to your university site either through a professional or a personal site.
- You can also prompt your faculty to share important research papers and contribute to many articles to reputed websites and publications in their own horizon.
- You can create a partnership with many other education institutes, businesses, and organizations. It’s important to collaborate on events, projects, or also research initiatives.
- It offers expert commentary and also contributes to many articles from many local media outlets.
- It’s important to create important resources like tutorials, guides, or also research papers.
So, after exploring several ways of generating backlinks, you might be seeking to find the right way to check the backlinks of your website. For this, you can again use the Semrush backlink analytic tool.
Once you open the tool, you need to enter the domain name and hit ‘Analyze‘
The final result of the backlink analytics appears like the above one. To get details about backlinks, you need to scroll to ‘Backlink’.
- Mobile Optimization
Mobile optimization is necessary for a university website for various reasons. Some of them are as follows;
- A large number of people of late use mobile devices to access the internet. If your website is mobile-friendly and responsive, it makes your content easily readable and accessible even on small screens.
- Google mandates mobile-first indexing when it comes to indexing web pages. It observes the performance of your website on mobile devices. If your website is mobile-friendly, it indeed ranks high in search results and thus increases online visibility and attracts traffic from mobile users.
- A better user experience is another important factor you can expect from a mobile-friendly website. It loads fast, displays content, and navigates easily on multiple devices.
To check the mobile-friendliness of your website, you can leverage Google’s PageSpeed Insights. Being an easy-to-use tool, it requires only the URL of your website and provides accurate search engine results.
- Measure SEO Performance
Google Analytics is the best tool to determine the effectiveness of your SEO strategy. You can leverage this tool to get the following vital information;
- You need to analyze the overall amount of traffic that comes to your website organically from Google and other search engines.
- You can analyze conversion rates of various desirable actions on your website, including submissions and program applications. It lets you have a clear idea in terms of how perfectly your website converts organic traffic into applicants.
- The next thing you can do is analyze your targeted keywords and their search rankings.
Wrap Up
Search engine optimization for any education institute is the most reliable way to improve visibility and attract many students. So, above are the tried and tested SEO strategy you can implement to skyrocket the digital presence of your university website and grab opportunities to generate more leads. Meanwhile, it’s pivotal to keep an eye on your overall SEO strategy and performance and adapt to various emerging trends for your long-term success.
