Why SEO matters more for colleges than you might think

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.

Search engine optimization (SEO) should be woven into every marketing plan for every college and university…not only because SEO can drive new, qualified traffic, but also because it can help protect one of the most important assets on an institution’s balance sheet: its website. Not paying attention to Google and its ever-changing algorithm—as well as to what’s going on in the broader landscape of the Internet—can have costly consequences.

Below are some of the risk scenarios that we’ve helped clients navigate in recent years and some steps you can take now to avoid or mitigate them.

URL redirect snafus during a college website redesign

A private college underwent a full web design. In the process, the campus didn’t place 301 redirects from the primary pages on the old site to the corresponding pages on the new site (301 redirects point search engines from an old page to the URL of the new page that replaces it). As a result of the omission (as well as other coding errors) organic search engine traffic to the site plummeted.

What you can do: Whenever you change URLs–whether it’s for a single page, a section of your website, a subdomain, or your entire site—it’s critical that you implement 301 redirects. These redirects act much like a forwarding address at the post office, signaling to Google and the other search engines that the old content now resides at a new URL. The 301 redirect can help transfer the strength of the original page to the new page, while also creating an unbroken path for links from other websites. Whenever possible, don’t just send these 301 redirects to the home page or an overview page; instead send them to the new page that most closely corresponds to the old page.

Suspicious links profiles coming to your college website

A private university had hundreds of thousands of links for knock-offs of expensive watches coming into its website and was at risk for a Google penalty.

What you can do: For years, Google has used incoming links to a website as part of its criteria for deciding which pages and sites to send to the top. And for years, SEO spammers, hackers, and criminals have been trying to game the system and/or place malware that drives links into or out of a site.

Google’s repeated releases of “Penguin” updates to its algorithm in the past few years have been aimed at detecting bad links and penalizing sites that have participated (wittingly or unwittingly) in links schemes.

To avoid links issues, which can temporarily or permanently harm a domain, check the incoming links to your site at least once a month. You can use Google’s Webmaster Tools to look at your links profile (from the Site Dashboard, go to “Search Traffic” and then click on “Links To Your Site”). This will list the domains that are linking in and the anchor text in the links, as well as your most linked content (if you see a strange page listed here, you’ll know someone has hacked into your site).

If you spot suspicious links, Google spokesman Matt Cutts, advises that you initiate the “disavow links” process. For more information on Google’s disavow process, click here.

Photo attacks designed to denigrate a campus in search results

An organization that was unhappy with a university’s “politics” posted incendiary photos across the Internet, tagged with the university’s name. As a result, branded searches for the university using Google’s image search option were yielding these negative photos at the top of the results.

What you can do: To help control which images come to the top for searches that include the name of your university or college, include relevant alt tags on all of the images on your site. Be sure to include different derivatives of your institution’s name as part of the alt tag text. For more on image alt tags and SEO, see Example 2 on this Noel-Levitz page about college website SEO.

Negative or incorrect information about a college in the knowledge panel on Google

A technical college had negative Google reviews showing up in its Knowledge Panel on Google. This feature, also known as the Knowledge Graph, is Google’s summary of a topic, which it puts on page one, in a large box on the right side of the search results. Usually, for branded searches of colleges and universities, Google will present a panel that includes: logo, description of the institution, contact information, and more.

What you can do: If negative Google reviews are showing up in your Knowledge Panel (or elsewhere on the internet), the best approach is to encourage happy students to post reviews. These reviews should come in gradually and organically, and should never be contrived. If other information on the Knowledge Panel is incorrect, you can submit the correct information to Google by clicking on the “Feedback” link in the bottom right corner of the panel. (See below for an example of a Knowledge Panel and the Feedback link.)

“Blackhat” SEO tactics to inflate college search rankings

A marketing director at a large state university was approached by an SEO company that guaranteed placement in the “auto-fill” portion of Google’s Instasearch for pre-established keyword terms. (See below for an example of Instasearch.) The FAQ of the SEO company’s marketing packet had a clear red flag by including the question, “Can this process hurt my website?” And in explaining its methodology, the SEO company repeatedly used the term “discreet process,” which is another signal of potential bad behavior. The marketing director turned away the company, thereby protecting the university’s site from a current or future Google smackdown.

What you can do: Never hire an SEO consultant or SEO company that won’t share its methods with you and with Google, if Google were to ever ask. Blackhat SEO work can hurt a website when the unethical strategies are caught by Google’s algorithm or employees.

“Lookalike” college website domain names

Using the university’s name, with a .biz extension, a disgruntled ex-student put up a website that mirrored the university’s site but was full of complaints and negative comments about the school. Because the university’s name was in the domain, the rogue site was showing up in Google’s top results for many of the primary keyword phrases searchers were likely to use. Once this was discovered, the university had to threaten the ex-student with legal action to have the site taken down and the .biz domain name back under the institution’s control.

What you can do: Make sure that you register the various versions of your website’s domain, including .com, .org, .net, .biz, and .info. Also, at least once a quarter, manually type 15-20 branded and non-branded search phrases into Google and scan the top 30 results to see what’s coming up that’s related to your school. If you see anything untoward, take action immediately.

Be proactive with your college website’s SEO

These examples illustrate just a glimpse of what can happen to college websites in today’s SEO environment. SEO companies with “guaranteed” schemes, students and organizations attacking a university’s reputation, link spammers and criminal hackers, mistakes made by website developers – none of this is new to the world of SEO, but today’s consequences can be more immediate, dire, and long-lasting than ever before.

If SEO hasn’t been a priority for you or your institution before, perhaps because everything is “fine,” it’s time to become more proactive. Check to make sure that everything really is fine, and then put a plan in place to ensure that it stays that way!

You can learn more about how you can optimize your website’s SEO at a free webinar on November 20, Attracting More Prospective Students Through Search Engine Optimization. You can also email me any questions you have about best SEO practices for your campus website.