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Is Your College Doing What It Takes to Help Potential Students Find Your Programs Online?
Struggling to figure out what you need to do for your college’s SEO strategy when enrollment is down? Worried your current approach isn’t helping your school be recommended in AI-generated answers? We understand the frustration you face; this is where enrollment marketing strategies that keep AI in mind come to save the day.
And as a digital agency that has helped higher education institutions market their college and boost their enrollment rates, our higher education SEO agency believes that these six strategies can help your school get more applications and, ultimately, enrolled students.
What is Higher Education SEO Anyway?
SEO (search engine optimization) for higher education includes implementing a diverse array of online marketing best practices to increase rankings on search engines, thus increasing organic traffic and leads on your school’s website. Popular tactics of SEO for colleges include on-site page optimization, quality link building, and strategic technical enhancements to help conversions.
Common Issues Colleges Face When It Comes to SEO
As you no doubt are aware, the competition for university enrollment is intense, to say the least! You might be facing the following:
- You are not only competing for rankings, but your website also has to convince both students and parents
- For online programs, there is likely no locational bias, meaning you have more competitors nationally or even globally
- You used to depend on pay-per-click advertising for your school, but changes to age restrictions on various platforms have made it impossible to do so
- Your website may be built in a custom management platform, imposing limitations on what you can do and how much you can change
- Department deans likely want control over their own sub-sites, which can lead to issues with academic governance.
- There may be discrepancies in your data due to your school’s site structure and whether you use subdomains (https://www.music.yourcollege.edu) or paths (https://www.yourcollege.edu/music)
We understand these frustrations and have tackled them head-on. Which is why your school needs to do everything it can to put itself in front of the right audience of prospective students, and it can start with any of the following:
Five Higher Education SEO Strategies That Help Colleges and Universities Improve Enrollment Rates
Here are some things you should consider when crafting your school’s SEO strategy.
1. Optimize Locally and/or Nationally on Individual Program Pages
If you want individual program pages to rank higher in search results, it’s vital to write content that caters to how prospective students search.
Approaching the content of your school’s program pages with a search engine optimization mindset will help search engines rank your content for a wide range of relevant keywords, driving higher-qualified traffic to these deeper pages on your site.
Assessing Local vs National Terms for Colleges
In many cases, education organizations (when focusing on enrollment) have a dual focus depending on the program of focus. If your focus is national, you won’t have to worry about a regional focus. However, if you are trying to target students in a region or city, incorporate the following additional attributes to the page:
- Mention some things about the city of focus in the copy, such as things that stand out about your campus and the city
- Add photos of the campus on the page and include them in the alt descriptions of the images
- Add specific costs related to this campus, such as parking or dorming, if applicable
Pro-tip: Put yourself in the shoes of a student and search for your programs just like they would. This way, you can see what your competitors are doing to rank higher. By analyzing these other program pages, you might just find the perfect blueprint for enhancing your own site.
2. Claim the Missed Backlink Opportunities of Your School’s Mentions
Over the years, your school has probably been mentioned in various places online. Whether it’s news articles, directories, or even alumni shout-outs, you might be overlooking some valuable backlinks that could significantly boost your site’s SEO. When it comes to enrollment marketing, having a robust backlink profile is essential. Take some time to hunt down these unlinked mentions across the web and reach out to those sites to see if they can link back to your site—or even better, to a specific department or program page. This can be done either with a tool such as Ahrefs unlinked mention finder or manually by using Google’s advanced search:
This is an advanced example that shows your ability to look for mentions across different TLDs, such as .org, .gov, etc.
3. Use Your Educational Expertise Wisely
If the above tactic to get more links seems daunting, there are other ways to go about link building.
Consider signing up for PR tools like Qwoted and Featured to boost your visibility online. When it comes to pitching articles on other platforms, you have the freedom to choose which sites to collaborate with, ensuring you receive proper credit for your contributions.
Not only will responding to report requests help you get more links, but it also adds more fuel for your staff to build expertise in their specific area of study. What is even better is that when LLMs scan the web for relevant information that a student is searching for, they look at not just school websites but also other relevant sources.
Good press for you, good press for them, and good authority for your domain—a triple win!
4. Write Content Targeting Long-Tail Keywords for Individual Programs
We’ve recently written about the various benefits of targeting long-tail (also known as low-volume) keywords and how they can help any type of business cover all its bases in terms of marketing online. And that is no different when it comes to enrollment marketing.
Program/Course Content
You’ll want to itemize the courses or programs you want to rank in order of importance. When doing research, add a variety of phrases, such as:
- Programs offered (with or without a specific city name)
- Classes/courses/certifications offered (with or without a city name)
- The type of school (trade, community)
- The type of programs offered (bachelor’s, master’s, etc.)
- Location of school (city and state)
- Adding in programs/classes offered with variants of online (e.g., online MBAs)
You’ll definitely want to take search volume into account. The search volume definitely helps in terms of driving traffic if you are ranking for it. We typically value relevancy over search volume when picking out keywords.
The ultimate test in deciding between variants of keywords or even including keywords is to actually Google the term to see if your competitors are either running Google Ads or ranking for the term in organic search.
Blog Content
One of the easiest ways you can go after these types of terms is through blog content. A few examples could be:
- Online vs. In-Person MBA: Which is Better?
- 5 Year Roadmaps to Becoming an Architect
- Medical Assistant vs. Clinical Assistant: What’s the Difference?
- The Main Types of Jobs a Biology Degree Can Get
- How to Balance a Master’s Degree Program with a Full-Time Career
5. Utilize Education-Based Structured Data
Higher ed websites are often insanely large. From individual course pages, faculty pages, and so many more, you need to help search engines understand what each page is about with more than just the text on the page. This is made possible thanks to schema markup.
Schema is a type of structured data that helps identify the page’s purpose, depending on the type of schema you add. There are various types to choose from, such as EducationOrganization, Course, Person, Review, and many others!
The best part is it’s easier than you think. There are various plugins or add-ons to add schema, or you can generate it manually and have a developer add it to different sections of your site. We know that this may be a hurdle, as your IT department may not want plugins that could open up to security issues. This is why you’ll want to generate custom schema scripts so your institutional IT or web development team can easily deploy them across your CMS without compromising security compliance.
It’s something we use for our higher ed clients ourselves, and we’ve seen some great results:
Higher Education SEO Helped Our Client Get 148% More Leads
If you’re still on the fence about investing in SEO, internally or externally, we want to highlight how it helped Kent State University when we worked on graduate programs within its College of Business.
They were struggling to compete with both in-person and online programs. When our higher ed marketing experts stepped in to help, we decided to:
- Have a strong emphasis on keyword targeting, framed for an adult audience
- Create blog posts about how these degrees help careers to help drive traffic
- Create CTAs and alter messaging across key landing pages to help conversions
- Updating outdated page templates within their CMS to encourage form submissions
After a full year of SEO work, when comparing their data to the previous year, we saw:
- Overall leads increased by 135%
- Organic leads increased by 38%
So if you want results like that, explore the various services they invested in:
