SEO 101 for higher education

Co-written with Jennifer Croft. Jennifer is an SEO consultant with 30 years of marketing experience who has worked on more than 500 websites, including 50 higher education websites.

If you started your career in higher education marketing more than a decade ago, you had a pretty standard set of tools to use to reach prospective students and decision influencers—direct mail, telephone, campus events and print/broadcast media. And while the advent of college and university webpages added to our toolset, Google has become the most effective (and sometimes most elusive) lever we can use to deliver our message and engage with our markets.

In our E-Expectations research as well as client-specific studies, we see that prospective students are using Google (and other search engines) to explore their options to build an initial list of schools and navigate the specific college and university sites to find the specific program details they need. Effective search engine optimization strategies are the key to ensuring that the right web searcher reaches the right page on your site.

The complexity of search engine optimization

Search engine optimization, also known as SEO, is the art and science of positioning your pages so that they can be easily found, crawled, and categorized by Google and other search engines. Google uses more than 200 parameters to decide which pages to send to the top, and it adjusts its algorithm 450-500 times per year. Those two facts alone are daunting enough to make most higher education marketing and web development teams shy away from any concerted SEO efforts. Add in the fact that many SEO consultants and companies continue to employ deceptive “black-hat” SEO-inflation tactics that can temporarily or permanently damage a page or web site, and it’s easy to understand why SEO keeps getting pushed to the back burner. Yet, the days of ignoring search and expecting to stay competitive are long gone. To outperform your competitors, you’ll need to make SEO an ongoing priority at your institution.

Google’s top parameters

The good news is that the more SEO changes, the more it remains the same. The basic principles that have been in place since search engines entered the mainstream in the late 1990s remain intact today. Google is trying—always—to provide searchers with the best results for their queries. What does Google consider a good result?

These are some of the top parameters that Google uses to rank pages:

• content on the page (the more focused, the better)
• age of the domain (the older, the better)
• size of the website (the bigger, the better)
• links coming into the page (from within the website and from other websites)
• user engagement (e.g. time on site and number of pages viewed)
• website performance (e.g. page load speed and rendering on mobile devices)

Consider your visitors

To succeed at SEO, you’ll also need to think about your prospective visitors in addition to considering Google’s criteria. Which words would they be most likely to type into a search engine to find what they need? For example, if you’re working on a page for a Bachelor of Science in Cyber Security degree, which of these keyword phrases should you include in your content to attract the most clicks from prospective students:

• cyber security, cybersecurity, information security, network security, or computer security?
• undergraduate, major, bachelor, bachelor’s, bachelor of science, or BS?
• degree, program, classes, or courses?
• education, school, college, or university?

Ideally, you would use all of the keywords above, with frequent repetitions of the ones that are the most popular.

Get Google’s attention

Once you’ve chosen your most relevant keywords, it’s not enough to simply include them in the content on your page. For the best results in SEO, you’ll also need to understand how Google evaluates a page. What does Google look at to determine what a page is about and how to categorize it among the trillions of pages in its index?

To grab Google’s attention, here are some of the best places to insert keywords and phrases on your college and university pages:

• urls
• title tags
• metatag descriptions
• headings (H1, H2, and H3 headings)
• links (internal and external)
• alt tags (for images and photos)

Noel-Levitz has a sample university site that demonstrates how campuses can adjust their SEO, with before-and-after examples of optimization.

Track your SEO progress

Finally, as you begin to make search engine optimization a higher priority, it’s critical that you track metrics pre- and post-optimization in order to determine if your SEO efforts are paying off.

These SEO metrics can include:

• search engine ranking positions for your primary keyword phrases
• visits to the website from organic (non-paid) search traffic
• page views
• conversions (e.g. request for information, form downloads, phone calls, and applications)

Start today for tomorrow’s success

SEO results won’t happen immediately. It typically takes 60-90 days or more to begin to see significant impact. And optimizing for search isn’t a one-time project. Instead, SEO requires patience, perseverance, and the ability to adapt to the ever-changing landscape of organic search.

By committing the resources for the long haul, though, you’ll ensure that your college or university website has the best chance of getting to the top of Google and staying there!

In upcoming blog posts, we’ll take a deeper dive into SEO, covering topics such as: including keyword research strategy, competition reconnaissance, the impact of architecture and integrating analytics. In the meantime, we are happy to answer any questions you have. Just email us with your questions. Or see our SEO consulting for higher education to learn more about our SEO evaluation.