The Role of SEO in Higher Ed
If you’ve been in education marketing for a while, you know that the organic search results for high-intent terms result in the highest-quality, lowest-cost enrollments of any marketing source. Why? Three main reasons:
Prospective applicants typically commence their initial search in search engines.
Prospective applicants trust Google’s results as a proxy for honest information. For example, if a college ranks first for the search “best college”, prospects are likely to assume that this is in fact the best college for them.
An institution that ranks highly in search can diversify the traffic sources that come to the site.
For all of these reasons, SEO is a sustainable long-term strategy for educational institutions.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a staple in almost every digital marketing plan that’s written in 2019. Most marketing teams should be familiar with the concept and it has become widespread enough that other departments are beginning to understand its importance. However, the importance of SEO goes beyond its basic definition, especially for Higher Education. Leveraging SEO to your advantage can be the difference between hitting enrollment goals or losing students to a competitor.
The Search Goes Both Ways
As institutions look high and low for new prospects, the students themselves are also searching for the right education destination. As a college, your goal is to make sure you’re easy to find when your ideal student are looking for their next step. Search is vital at the beginning of the enrollment cycle, but it’s also useful in getting conversions. The student who Googles your college looking for information is more likely to engage in conversations with you than the average student who has shown no previous interest in you.
Even for schools with an existing SEO strategy, there are still plenty of areas of improvement. For one, the prevailing misunderstanding today is that it’s all about keywords. Most people are under the impression that when a student searches for something, Google is scanning for pages that use the same keywords present in the search. These days, Google’s technology has advanced far past that. Google’s team employ tools that “transform words to fuzzier representations of the underlying concepts, and then match the concepts in the query with the concepts in the document.” In other words, Google wants to understand both what users are searching for and what the webpage offers. So, in order to succeed at SEO, make it very easy for Google to understand your institution. Create web content that outlines what degrees you offer, your graduation rate, information about alumni, the city/town your institution is located in and much more. The more completely Google understands your institution, the better you will appear in search results.
An SEO Strategy In Practice
Explaining SEO to leadership within your institution can often be met with apprehension and you may be faced with the question: “So, what does this actually mean for our enrollment?” In order to give you a better understanding, here is an example of the tactics we use to keep our clients on page one for targeted, high-intent search terms.
Select your keywords
The basis of an SEO strategy has to start somewhere and often it is the keywords. Your goal here is to come up with a list of keywords that properly describe not only what you offer, but what you believe students are looking for.
When selecting keywords, here are a few tips and things to consider:
Google Keyword Planner is a free tool that allows you to search for words and phrases related to your institution and relevant to your target audience
Prioritize words with high search volume but low competition, as these offer the greatest amount of opportunity
Don’t overlook your specific programs, especially niche degrees or concentrations that might not attract volume but have relatively little competition
Select words that indicate a searcher’s intent. For example, if someone searches “best colleges in the us”, this indicates that they are likely early in the search journey. Conversely, if someone searches “mechanical engineering degree minneapolis”, we know that they already know what specific degree they want and their preferred location.
Google Trends will also show you how the term is trending, where it is trending, and what other topics the terms are related to.
Ranking improvements
Ranking improvements
As with any good strategy, there have to be some measurable objectives. Keep an eye on how your ranking improves over time in relation to your competition. There are several applications and tools that allow you to track how you’re rankings improve. These metrics will not only help guide your strategy, but will be a good way to measure success to stakeholders within the institution.
Monthly search volume
Google Keyword Planner will show you how many related searches there are per month in the US. For example, “Christian colleges in PA” gets 880 searches a month domestically.
Screen capture of Google Keyword Planner showing monthly searches.
Below is a graph that charts click-through rate and ad position and includes statistics on keywords and websites. An institution that ranks 20th for this specific search would be getting 8 visitors per month for a total of 96 per year.
Click Through Rates (CTR) by Search Engine Results Page (SERP) position
If this institution were to put an emphasis on SEO and make their way up to the 3rd spot in the rankings, the numbers would change drastically. They would now be generating 88 visitors per month and 1,056 for the year. That is 11 times the amount of traffic that the 20th ranking generates.
If the strategy was aggressive enough to earn the second spot in the rankings, they would earn 132 visitors every month which accumulates to 1,584 for a year. Finally, if this institution set their sights on SEO and earned the first position in the search results (which receives 27% of the clicks) they would generate 238 monthly visits and 2,851 per year.
Just increasing your SEO enough to earn the third place position will drive nearly 1,000 high-intent visitors per year to your school. That number can increase dramatically if you earn the first or second spot. So, how does this translate to leads?
The average higher ed landing page converts at 2.6% for paid traffic. Using this as a conservative baseline, the third spot for ONE high-intent term would result in a minimum of nearly 30 additional leads or applications, for free, in perpetuity, each year.
A Few Words of Advice
Know your unique selling proposition. A great SEO strategy won’t hide any holes in the larger aspects of your marketing plan. Establishing what makes your school unique will make Google more likely to find you and students more likely to engage upon discovering your school.
Further, understand what people are searching for. That doesn’t mean the same thing as “understand how people are wording their searches.” What you want to know are the overall topics—are people searching at all for a college with a USP like yours? Are they searching for the different majors you offer? Creating a world-class website takes work, and SEO can only play a role if the website represents a college that has attributes and a set of offerings that people are actually searching for.
Finally, when you’re creating the content on your college’s website, think less about the target keyword (the search phrase) and more about the intent behind it. If I were a student searching for a “college with microbiology major,” the fact that you offer a microbiology major is only the beginning. My intent is to find a college that offers a microbiology major in a way that fits me well. So, what I care about is learning that your program has a track record of educating people who graduate and become excellent immunologists. Or, that it’s not a problem that I’m not taking calculus in my senior year of high school. Or, that your labs are state-of-the-art. I want to learn that I’ll have opportunities to collaborate with professors on real research. These additional details about your institution, facilities, and degrees can be the difference maker for a deciding student.
Where to begin?
With this abundance of information, it may be difficult to decide where to start. There are two kinds of pages of your website where you can’t go wrong spending time: pages about what makes your college special, and pages about each of your degree programs.
If what makes your college special is its location, create a set of awesome pages on that topic — what makes the location great, how the community and students interact, what things there are to do nearby, how to get to and from the campus, and so on. For the degree programs, include the details mentioned above to help a student visualize what it would look like to enroll in that program.
What’s the best way to do this? Step away from your computer and talk to people. Talk to professors face-to-face. Talk to students. Talk to prospective students who are visiting campus. Call up some alumni. Find out lots of great, specific details about what makes your college special and about the degree programs it offers. Then capture that with words and graphics, facts and stories. In short: Don’t write fluff. Be honest, be specific.