SEO For Higher Education: Best Practices For Academic Institutions via @sejournal, @AdamHeitzman

The competition for student enrollment has never been stronger.

Many colleges struggle to stand out online and attract new students. Without a strong SEO strategy, your school remains hidden, and potential students won’t find you.

This includes details about admission processes, available programs, extracurricular activities, and other tiny details that attract the typical student.

A solid SEO strategy helps you appear in search results, increases brand recognition, boosts credibility among parents and students, and ultimately increases enrollment.

Here’s how you can implement it:

Critical Components Of An Effective SEO Strategy

Understanding Your Target Audience

Identify audience segments, such as prospective students, current students, faculty, staff, alumni, and visitors. Rank them by importance based on the institution’s goals. For example, prospective students could be the highest priority.

Understanding these audiences, their needs, and search habits will help you create content and SEO strategies to reach them effectively.

However, with over 17 million high schoolers and 16 million undergraduates in the U.S. (data from 2021), who are your target audiences?

Here’s how to know them:

• Use surveys among current students to understand their motivations and concerns. For example, use a simple poll on the school website asking, “What are the top three factors you consider when choosing a university?” or “Why did you choose us?”

Their answers can give insights into why your institution was a top choice, and you can include these details while writing landing pages, program pages, or student experience pages.

This makes it easy to lead every page with a promise that matters to your target audience.

• Analyze website analytics to determine your traffic sources and most popular pages. Traffic sources reveal the demographics engaging with your website and how they are led to it. Analyzing the most popular pages also shows the content that resonates with your target audience.

Merging this analysis helps you create content that targets your audience and meets their search intent.

There are four types of search intent (commercial, transactional, informational, and navigational). For colleges and universities, the most common intents tend to be informational, commercial, and transactional.

Analyzing search intent helps you target keywords that reflect what searchers are looking for. Here’s what that looks like:

• Informational keywords, such as “best universities in the US,” “top engineering schools,” or “best liberal arts colleges” are common queries for general information. These keywords indicate that searchers are looking for options.
• Commercial keywords, e.g., “online MBA programs,” “online master’s in data science,” and “nursing programs with scholarships,” are common queries for specific programs. These indicate that searchers want to know about schools offering these programs (and also learn about what sets each institution apart). This is where you create dedicated landing pages for each program explaining why your school should be at the top of students’ minds in their decision-making phase.
• Transactional keywords, e.g., “application deadlines,” “tuition fees,” or “campus dates,” show intent to do something. These users are closer to making a decision, and they want information on their exact query. These keywords are usually preceded by a branded search (e.g., “UCLA application deadline”).

Creating content that engages your target audience is essential. When your content matches their search intent, it sends positive signals to Google.

This can improve your rankings and increase traffic. Keyword research plays a key role in this process, ensuring your content meets the needs and search habits of your audience.

Read more: How People Search: Understanding User Intent

Keyword Research And Analysis

Keyword research means finding the words students use when they search online. These terms can help your website show up in searches.

Tips to get started:

• Brainstorm seed keywords: Make a list of words related to your school and programs. For example: “computer science,” “business administration,” “online MBA in marketing,” “online courses,” “coastal university,” and “urban campus.”
• Use advanced keyword tools: Tools like Semrush and Ahrefs offer detailed insights into search volume, competition, keyword difficulty, and trends. Use these tools to discover keyword opportunities that your competitors might be missing.
• Identify long-tail keywords: These longer phrases, like “scholarships for international students studying cyber security,” have lower search volumes but higher conversion rates. They attract users who are further along in their decision-making process.
• Analyze competitor keywords: Use tools to spy on competitors’ keywords and find gaps in their content. Target these gaps to improve your visibility and attract more traffic.
• Consider seasonal trends: Use tools to analyze search trends throughout the year. Optimize your landing pages for terms like “summer courses” or “fall application deadlines” during relevant periods.

Read more: Keyword Research: An In-Depth Beginner’s Guide

On-Page Optimization

On-page optimization is where you include relevant keywords in your content to improve visibility on search engine results pages (SERPs). Use your primary keyword in:

Screenshot from search for [online MBA program], June 2024

• Meta Description: It’s a summary of your content located under your title page in search results. You can use it to entice users to click your link by incorporating relevant keywords that provide context to the webpage. See ASU’s copy here:

Screenshot from search for [online MBA program], June 2024

• Headers: Headers structure your content and make it easier to read. Use keywords in your main header (H1) and subheaders (H2, H3, etc.) to signal to search engines what your page is about.
• Body of your content: Incorporate keywords naturally throughout the page. You can also use variations of your keyword – long-term or semantic topics – to avoid repetition and keyword stuffing.

Read more: 12 Essential On-Page SEO Factors You Need To Know

Technical SEO Considerations

The goal of every search engine is to provide relevant content to searchers, and good technical SEO makes your website easier to find and use. Focus on these areas:

• Page Speed: Your website should load in one to three seconds. A slow site can frustrate users and impact your rankings.
  • Choose reliable hosting: Ensure your hosting can handle your website’s traffic.
  • Compress images and files: Use tools like TinyPNG or ShortPixel to reduce file sizes without losing quality.
  • Enable browser caching: This helps returning visitors load your site faster.
• Mobile Optimization: Use a responsive design that adjusts to different screen sizes. Test your site on various devices to ensure it works well everywhere.
• Schema Markup: Add structured data to your website’s HTML. Schema markup, or structured data, allows search engines to understand your institution and its offerings better. It’s a form of code you can add to your website’s HTML that uses a specific vocabulary to label and describe different elements of your content.

Schema Markup is important because it enables search engines to display rich snippets in search results.

These enhanced listings can include star ratings, images, event dates, and other relevant details to make your institution’s results more visually appealing and informative. Here’s an example from Rutgers Business School:

Screenshot from search for [rutgers university], June 2024

You can see details about addresses, tuition fees, campus type, and other helpful links without directly engaging the website.

Research shows that structured data increases click-through rates by presenting users with context-rich information in search results. This captures user attention and builds trust even before they visit the site, which in turn increases organic traffic.

Read more: The Complete Technical SEO Audit Workbook

Implementing Local SEO For Campuses

If your school has multiple campuses, local SEO is important.

• Create location pages: Make a separate page for each campus with details like address, contact information, and unique programs.
• Optimize for local keywords: Use keywords that include your city or neighborhood, like “best colleges in downtown Chicago.”
• Claim your Google Business Profile: Make sure each campus has a Google Business Profile listing with up-to-date information.

Read more: How To Create A Winning Local SEO Content Strategy

Leveraging Video Content

Video content can engage students better than text alone.

• Create informative videos: Make videos about campus tours, student testimonials, and program highlights.
• Optimize video titles and descriptions: Use keywords in your video titles and descriptions to help them show up in search results.
• Embed videos on your website: This can keep visitors on your site longer and improve engagement.

Read more: 10 YouTube Marketing Strategies & Tips (With Examples)

Optimizing Site Structure And Navigation

A well-structured website helps both users and search engines.

• Simple navigation: Keep your menu simple and easy to use.
• Clear hierarchy: Organize your pages logically, with main categories and subcategories.
• Internal linking: Link-related pages to each other to help users find more information and search engines understand your site better.

Read more: Why Google Recommends Hierarchical Site Structure For SEO

Conclusion

Improving your school’s SEO is a long-term investment.

However, you can start today by creating content that targets students to amplify your brand and increase credibility. This will help increase visibility, attract more students, and build your school’s online reputation.

Whether you’re a new or established institution, good SEO practices can help you reach your goals.

More resources:

What 4,538 Domains Tell Us About ccTLDs Ranking In The US via @sejournal, @Kevin_Indig

Since the Times Of India quadrupled its organic growth in the US in 12 months, more ccTLDs (international domains) have been spotted ranking in the US.

Image Credit: Kevin Indig

More international domains would make sense as Google is testing country labels indicating where the site operates.

Google has also expanded Translated Results:

Translated Results is a Google Search feature that will automatically translate the title link and meta description into the local language of a user, making a website published in one language available to a searcher in another language. If the searcher clicks on the link of a translated result the web page itself will also be automatically translated.

Maybe Google wants more international domains in US Search? If a site in English from another country is a better result in an English-speaking country, why not rank it?

International domains might be most relevant when the location matters less.

For example, publishers could rank in other countries with the same language, but SaaS or ecommerce companies that don’t sell in that specific country would not be a good result. As a result, the playing field for “foreign” domains would grow.

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Do More ccTLDs Rank In The US?

I picked 1,000 random keywords from a large pool of queries across travel, ecommerce, publishing, SaaS, services, finance, health, and other verticals.

The data surfaced 4,538 domains in organic results. I focused heavily on the first five positions on Google since any URL ranking higher than that likely won’t see much traffic, especially with the flux of SERP features these days.

Image Credit: Kevin Indig

The data shows that .com domains rank 71.8% of the time in the top five positions, followed by .org (8.4%), .google (4.1%), .edu and .gov. Only 52 out of 4,538 domains were from the UK, 11 from Canada, and three from India.

As a result, we can say that international domains performing in the US, like the Times of India, are outliers more than the norm.

What Else Can We Learn From The Data About URL Structure?

The dataset of 1,000 random keywords provides more insights into the nature of TLDs, subdomains, and URL slugs in terms of organic ranks.

TLD Matters A Bit

I wanted to find out if the TLD (.com, .net, .org, etc.) has an impact on ranking. Traditionally, we know that ccTLDs (country-code TLDs like .fr) have a better chance of ranking in their respective country than gTLDs (generic TLDs like .com), which are country-agnostic.

I ran correlations between TLDs and rank across 7,678 results while normalizing for factors around backlinks, content quality, content volume, and rank distribution – but I couldn’t find any relationships. I found that:

• .net TLDs have a lower chance of showing up in the top two positions.
• .us didn’t show up in top positions at all (even though I know a .us domain that performs really well).
• .gov has the best chance to rank at the top – go figure.
• .uk has a lower chance of ranking at the top compared to .com.
• .co has a lower chance of ranking at the top than .com.
• .edu doesn’t perform as well in position 1 compared to .gov.
• .org has a higher chance of ranking at the top than .com (might be influenced by Wikipedia).
• .com TLDs rank 71.8% in the top 5 but are registered only 36.31% as often compared to other TLDs (~2x).

TLD by average rank in organic search (Image Credit: Kevin Indig)

The rank benefit of a .com domain is disputable: Due to mere exposure, users are more familiar with .com domains, which means sites might be more likely to link to them, too.

Even if .com domains got a small rank boost from Google, it most likely doesn’t outweigh the importance of content, backlinks, brand, and user experience.

URL Slugs Matter A Bit

Next, I wanted to answer whether having the keyword in the URL slug, the part after the TLD, matters.

The data shows no advantage to having the keyword in the URL slug for ranking in the top eight positions. However, URLs ranking in positions 9 and 10 carried the keyword way less often, indicating that its tables take to “apply” for the top results.

Image Credit: Kevin Indig

In conclusion, scanning for the keyword in the URL or meta title was and is a low-hanging fruit SEO exercise.

From experience, optimizing the slug just to match the keyword is not worth the cost of a redirect. It should be taken into consideration more when creating a new URL.

Subdomains Matter A Lot

Lastly, I was curious whether (non-www) subdomains have an impact on rank.

In Google’s ranking factor leak, we learned that keyword exact-match domains (EMDs) were demoted many years ago. Google also evaluates subdomains separately from root domains, which makes sense because they have a different DNS address.

Image Credit: Kevin Indig

I found in the data that URLs, including www, show up on average thrice as often in the top five results as non-www subdomains.

That ratio shrinks as we go further down the SERPs, meaning there does seem to be a benefit of avoiding subdomains, even though we always have to consider the non-SEO benefits of subdomains.

 Google Tests Country Label In Search Result Snippets

Google’s Now Translating SERPs Into More Languages

Top level domains

Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal

AI Has Changed How Search Works via @sejournal, @marie_haynes

This extract is from SEO in the Gemini Era by Marie Haynes ©2024 and reproduced with permission from Marie Haynes Consulting Inc.

Much of the SEO advice you will see online today is borne from shared community wisdom that was learned about Search in the days before Google was actively using AI.

So much of what many of us do as SEOs and treat as standard practice is based on a search engine that was a list of heuristics – handwritten rules programmed by humans. So much has changed.

For example, let’s say you are tasked with creating a new article for the website you are working on.

You’ll likely start with keyword research because we know that in order to appear relevant to a search engine, you need to write content that covers a topic thoroughly and uses keywords that are semantically related to your topic.

So much of the content that we have on the web today is borne from a process that looks like this:

• Do keyword research to see what your competitors have written.
• Create content that’s similar but perhaps a little bit better, or more comprehensive than theirs.
• Do keyword research to see what other people have covered, but you have not included.
• Create content that covers that stuff too.
• Do People Also Ask research to find related questions to cover so that we can write content that looks even more relevant and comprehensive to search engines.
• Create more content to answer those questions even though Google already has content to answer them.

Nothing in that process is causing us to create content that truly is original, insightful, and substantially more helpful than what exists online.

Yet, that is what Google wants to reward!

An SEO agency will often spend many hours each month improving the technical SEO of a site, improving the internal link structure, or perhaps getting external links and mentions. These are all things that can possibly help a webpage to look better to a search engine.

They are not bad things to do and some of them have the potential to help a site improve. But again, those things are unlikely to make the content on a page substantially more helpful to searchers, which is, once again, what Google wants to reward.

I want to be clear here. I’m not saying that technical SEO is dead.

There are benefits to be had by having a technically sound, fast site that search engines can easily navigate and understand, especially if you have a large site.

Schema can still do wonders when it comes to helping Google understand your business and its E-E-A-T, especially a new one. There are some verticals where technical improvements will give you enough advantage to improve rankings to some degree.

There is one thing that makes content more helpful.

Are you ready for this deep, insightful secret?

Here it is…

The secret to having content that is likely to be considered by Google as more helpful than others’ is to have content that users are finding helpful.

A Mindset Shift Is Needed For SEOs

For more than a decade now, my main source of income has come from advising businesses how to improve their search presence.

I have pored over every word Google has published that talks about what it is that they want to reward and have produced pages and pages of checklists, training documents and advice.

I had one goal: Help people understand what it is that Google rewards, and help them become that result.

Do you see the paradox that is hidden in that statement? The more I think about it, it’s laughable!

I didn’t realize the whole time that while I was preaching on creating People-first content, as Google now calls it, much of what I was doing was geared far more towards satisfying Google than searchers.

Other SEOs are catching on to this mindset as well now. What users do on our websites matters immensely. The actions of users shape Google’s rankings dramatically.

Screenshot from X/Twitter, July 2024

I have historically treated Google’s guidance on creating helpful content as a checklist of things we could look to for improvement.

Have an author bio? Check. Good descriptive heading? Check. Demonstrating experience? Information gain? Another check.

My first book on creating helpful content takes you through multiple checklists like this. You can see improvement by working through these checklists.

Actually, I know this as I commonly will have people reach out to me to tell me that they have implemented changes based on the checklists and have been seeing improvements.

But, it turns out what Google gave us was not a list of criteria to be analyzed as a checklist!

I realize now that what Google was telling us was: Our systems are built to reward the types of things that people tend to find helpful and reliable. And if you want to know what that is, here are some ideas.

It’s not a checklist, but rather, a list of the types of things that searchers tend to like. The algorithm is built to reward what it is that searchers like.

An author bio isn’t a ranking factor, but, in many verticals, demonstrating the experience of your authors is something that users like.

Core web vitals, metrics used to measure load time and other similar things, used to be a score we’d aim to get…but really, the reason we work to improve on core web vital scores is because users tend to like pages that load fast and don’t jump around.

It’s not like Google has a checklist or a scorecard when it comes to the quality of every page. Google doesn’t know exactly what your content is or whether it is high quality.

As we discussed earlier, search is a complex AI driven system that is trying to predict what searchers are going to find helpful.

Here are the full list of “ideas” Google gives us to help us understand what searchers might find helpful:

In the past I’ve taught on looking at these ideals one by one for inspiration on how you can improve your site. I still think there is great value in doing this.

But, now I realize I was missing the main point. I have been thinking about helpful content like an SEO.

If you are truly creating People-First content, you will already be aligned with Google’s helpful content recommendations.

I had it the wrong way around.

If you know what your audience’s needs are, and know the questions that they have, and you create content that answers those questions you are on your way to creating the type of People-First Content Google wants to reward.

People First Content Is:

• Usually created by people with real world experience on a topic. A store that sells a product to real customers is more likely to produce helpful content advising people on that product. A person who advises professionally on a topic, is more likely to have fresh content that understands the current needs of that audience.
• There is an exception to this: Sometimes authority can trump experience. We see this when a website like Forbes is ranking for [BBQ reviews]. In this case, Forbes is likely seen as a place that users trust for its overall authority in journalism. It’s got sufficient E-E-A-T to be considered a trustworthy answer for this query. And as long as searchers are indicating they are satisfied, it will continue to rank. (I think this will change though as we learn to create truly helpful content. We should start to see more truly helpful content from topic experts recommended.)
• Content that provides real value to searchers.
• Written clearly and concisely in a manner that is easy to understand.
• Original and insightful.

But how does Google determine this?

In the next section we’ll talk about something that has been mostly unknown to SEOs until just recently – just how much Google uses user engagement signals.

It turns out that Google knows what it is that’s helpful to people because signals from every single interaction that happens in search are fed back into machine learning systems with one goal in mind – for the systems to learn how to best work together to create present the searcher with information that they are most likely to find helpful.

Notes

[1] Creating Helpful Content. Marie Haynes. 2023. https://mariehaynes.com/product/creating-helpful-content-workbook/

To read the full book, SEJ readers have an exclusive 20% discount for Marie’s book, workbook and course bundle. The discount will be applied automatically by following these links:

More resources:

Featured Image: MT.PHOTOSTOCK/Shutterstock