Search Engine Optimization for Schools

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for schools, colleges, and universities involves a series of techniques that work together to generate organic traffic from search engines and increase your online visibility. This is accomplished through a combination of techniques that ensure your school’s website ranks well for certain keywords or key phrases in Organic Search Listings or “free” listings on Search Engine Results Pages (SERP).

These SEO techniques can:

• Ensure your program pages rank well for relevant keywords in search engine results
• Target the most relevant audience for your institution and help give your school, university, or career college an online “brand”
• Reduce your cost per lead (CPL)
• Become a significant education lead generation channel and traffic source

Here is a brief run down of Higher Education Marketing’s SEO process.

SEO Technical Audit
Is your school website falling behind in search engines? Are they ranking lower than they should be in search engine results pages? Higher Education Marketing’s SEO Technical Audit is the first step in the SEO process, providing insight into why your higher education website is not ranking as highly as it should be.

Individually tailored for each school, university, or college website, HEM’s SEO technical audit can identify problem spots and provide clear, concise, and easy to implement adjustments that can improve ranking and increase your school’s online visibility.

Higher Education Marketing’s SEO Technical Audit can:

• Enable schools to find site-specific problems and understand their website’s SEO and design needs
• Establish if your site is accessible to Google, Bing, Yahoo, and other major search engines. Are these search engines indexing your pages?
• Conduct a complete analysis of server-side issues, page naming, navigational and page structure, meta data, and coding from a search engine perspective
• Build an SEO roadmap that prioritizes a list of action items and establishes how your website will achieve its search engine goals

Keyword Research
Keywords are at the heart of your school, university, or community college’s website and online marketing initiatives. These are the words or word combinations that prospective students (and Internet leads) will use to find your website. They are essential to any SEO plan.

However, not all keywords perform the same way. For example, certain keywords may efficiently generate traffic but they may not be the best at turning visitors into Internet leads. Using Google Analytics, HEM can research and experiment with all relevant keywords, helping you isolate the function and strength of each individual keyword.

The image below is an example of a Google Analytics report that can help pinpoint the different values of each keyword:

With these sorts of data and research capabilities, Higher Education Marketing can improve website design and build effective Internet marketing campaigns around these strategic words and phrases.

On- and Off-Page Search Engine Optimization
SEO for schools can be broken down into 2 separate initiatives: on-page search engine optimization and off-page search engine optimization. In order to achieve a page 1 rank (and a top 10 on Google’s search engine results page) on popular search engines, both need to be working hand in hand.

On-page search engine optimization is the part of the process that deals specifically with website design and search engine algorithms. This involves:

• URLs
• Title tags
• H1 tags
• Description tags
• Alt attributes (images)
• Page content
• Keyword density

While on-page SEO for schools is becoming increasingly important, you also need to invest energy and resources towards off-page optimization. An essential component of off-page SEO is the tried and true press release, which can generate media interest in your higher education institution, increase your brand name and reputation within the industry (and among potential Internet leads), and help improve your search engine ranking.

With your help, Higher Education Marketing can generate professional press releases for your school, university, or community college, ensuring that your institution’s latest news, events, and developments get the attention they deserve. More importantly, HEM’s press releases can help keep your school’s name stays at the forefront of the higher education industry.

Off-page SEO initiatives, however, are not limited to press releases. They also used to get other relevant websites and Web pages linked back to you.

Link Building
If your institution has a partner school or sister association, these ties could represent important link building opportunities. A partner school, for example, could have a mention of your institution on their website, with a link back to your site. This is considered an inlink, and it is the objective of a link building campaign, of which there are many varieties.

Inlinks are important because they can generate referral traffic to your website. Visitors who otherwise would not have found you may end up on your website through an inlink on one of your partner sites.

Inlinks also give search engines an indication of how popular your website is. In fact, Google assigns a PageRank value to your Web pages based on their proprietary algorithm, which assesses the value of each link you have pointing to your website.

Here is a list of the types of links a well-managed link building campaign can obtain:

• Social networking sites
• Blogs
• High Page Rank directories
• Press releases
• Forum participation
• Articles and newsletters

Higher Education Marketing will help you plan and execute a link building strategy that can increase your referral traffic.

Setup Webmaster Tools
The next step in the SEO process is something that is not as well known as Web Analytics but is becoming just as important: search engine Webmaster tools. Google, Yahoo, and Bing, among others, now offer these tools, which assure that your website is properly integrated with their search engines and help maintain the health and visibility of your site. These services include:

• Search engine reports on top searches linked to your site
• XML sitemap feeds
• Index pages and clarity
• Site errors
• Backlink texts and counts
• Top query strings
• Content analysis
• And more!

The major search engines are continuously improving these Webmaster tool services, so it is essential to set up your site now and make sure you benefit from future changes and improvements. Don’t fall behind! Let HEM can guide you through this important step.

Benefits of SEO
Studies show that nearly 80% of website traffic comes from search engines. However, it isn’t enough to just put up a site and hope for the best. To really benefit from search engines, your school, university, or community college’s website needs to be in the top 10 results. After all, it’s been said that close to 90% of users never look past the 3rd page of search results. By optimizing your website for relevant keywords, you can properly target the audience you want and ensure that your school’s website and program pages rank well for certain keywords in organic search listings on popular search engines, like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

You’ve filled your program pages with content that represents the great things your programs have to offer, so why let them fend for themselves? With so many schools, universities, and career colleges offering similar programs, you need to ensure that prospective students (and potential Internet leads) find your program web pages.