In the current digital landscape, organic search has become the foundation of online visibility and brand awareness. Although many schools may benefit from word-of-mouth referrals, the reality is that prospective students and parents rely on search engines to find their dream schools. To attract qualified students and stand out in a crowded market, schools should devise ways to enhance their organic search rankings and optimize their digital presence.
But to create winning SEO strategies, it is essential to understand the importance of organic search and its role in online success. If you are looking for key organic traffic insights, you’ve come to the right place! Continue reading for some key tools and techniques to stay on top of your organic results.
What Is Organic Website Traffic?
Though organic traffic may sound daunting for those unfamiliar with SEO and analytics, we have all engaged. If you are wondering, “What is organic website traffic?” The answer is straightforward: organic traffic refers to the process of obtaining website traffic from search engine results pages (SERPs), like Google or Bing, without paying for it. Other sources of website traffic, which are not organic, may include email, paid search, direct and social media.
If you need help tracking and measuring your website analytics, the HEM team can help! Get in touch with us for more information.
When prospects enter a query or keyword into a search engine like Google, the search engine’s algorithm scans its index of web pages to provide the most relevant and authoritative results. Websites that rank highly in organic search results have likely implemented effective SEO strategies to improve their visibility and attract organic traffic–these are not the same as the results that are accompanied by an ‘ad’ or ‘sponsored’ label.
But if schools can pay to appear on Google’s front page, why is organic traffic important? Though ads and sponsored links can help your school improve online visibility, 53% of all trackable website traffic is estimated to come from organic search. Schools should apply SEO best practices to cultivate a competitive edge. Furthermore, ranking high is not only important for getting free website traffic, but also because users tend to have higher trust in the websites that appear first on their search results.
The Importance of Monitoring Organic Results
Search engine monitoring is critical to a school’s digital marketing strategy. It allows schools to assess the effectiveness of their websites and content. This is crucial to improving your prospects’ overall experience, ultimately leading to better enrollment results. Using data analytics to gain organic traffic insights can help schools make data-driven decisions, track their performance, and adjust SEO tactics to current needs.
Furthermore, understanding the search intent of prospects is to improve keyword optimization and SEO efforts. This can also guide schools’ content creation efforts, resulting in content that responds directly to prospective students’ and parents’ questions on the web. By analyzing the keywords and search queries that bring prospects to your site, schools can tailor their content and SEO strategies to meet the needs of their target audience.
Example: This Medix College blog post addresses a common question prospective students might have.
Source: Medix College
Finally, monitoring organic traffic can help schools stay competitive. How? By comparing your school’s organic performance with the performance of your competitors, you are more likely to identify areas of improvement. Looking at what your competitors are doing right can give you an idea of what your school should do to attract more students.
Search Engine Performance Metrics to Track
Now that you know the basics of organic traffic, it is time to review some key search engine performance metrics. If your school is not tracking its organic performance, these are some of the primary metrics you should begin to track:
Organic Traffic
As mentioned above, this metric refers to the number of visitors who arrive at your school’s website through organic search engine results. As a KPI, this metric allows your school to evaluate the effectiveness of your website’s search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. HEM’s SEO Specialist, Mohammed Tamtalini, and HEM’s Director of Paid Ads & Analytics, Alexander Nachaj, recommend comparing Month Over Month (MoM) and Year Over Year (YoY) organic traffic every month to assess performance. They suggest that you compare MoM and YoY performance for any metrics.
Mohammed explains that analyzing page views is a good way to identify top pages and prioritize updates for those that have seen a significant drop. Along the same line, Alexander suggests that checking which pages brought organic entries to your website “can give you a good idea of what content piece is bringing people onto your site in the first place.” This can help you understand, for instance, what blogs bring in traffic, and if you see that there is demand for that kind of content, you can write more pieces on similar topics.
Pro tip: Mohammed suggests organizing all the data in an Excel file for convenient comparison.
Organic click-through rate (CTR)
Also known as organic CTR, this metric measures the rate users click on a website’s link when it appears in search engine results pages (SERPs) for specific search queries. It is calculated by dividing the number of clicks by the total number of impressions.
Pro tip: Besides measuring your website’s CTR, you can also look for keyword CTR. For instance, Moz’s keyword explorer helps you identify keywords that may have high competition in search engine results pages (SERPs) due to features such as ads, news, knowledge graphs, and more. Higher Organic CTR indicates a reduced presence of distracting SERP features, which means more visibility for traditional organic links.
Knowing which keywords may require more effort to achieve a significant organic click-through is essential. This knowledge will enable you to focus on keywords that can drive more organic traffic to your website.
Exit and Bounce Rates
Exit rate refers to the percentage of visitors who leave your school’s website after viewing a particular page. Unlike bounce rate, which measures the percentage of users who leave your school’s website after viewing only one page, exit rate focuses on users who exit the website after interacting with multiple pages, including the specific page being analyzed.
Both exit and bounce rates are helpful in analyzing user behaviour and assessing the effectiveness of your website’s content, user experience, and conversion funnel. In addition, high exit or bounce rates may indicate that visitors need help finding the information they are looking for or are running into issues when navigating your website.
Pages per Session
As the name indicates, this metric measures the average number of pages viewed by a user during a single session on your school’s website. Like the exit rate, this metric gives you an insight into how prospects engage with your site. The more pages per session indicate your prospects are more engaged and interested. This SEO metric is fundamental as it helps your school gauge the effectiveness of your website structure, navigation, and content.
Alexander recommends checking which pages go up and/or down with their total views as “it is possible some once popular content has fallen in the rankings or that people no longer browse around on your site and find them. Look for pages that performed well in the past but less so now and see if they need to be optimized or if some issue prevents them from being easily accessed.”
Conversions
The last important metric our specialists recommend checking is conversions, which refer to desired actions by website visitors that align with your goals. For instance, filling out forms, signing up for newsletters, downloading files, and applying for a program. This metric indicates that your school’s website visitors are turning into prospects and are starting their enrollment journey. Check if your numbers are up or down. If they are down, Alexander advises that you check the “pages where most occurred (or the previous page of the conversion funnel). See that all your KPIs can still be performed as easily as before (eg., your forms are easy to find, they function, and other CTAs are prominent).”
Lastly, although not mentioned here, your school can also evaluate for keyword ranking, page load time, search visibility, and average session duration. In the context of higher education, it is equally vital to check the countries where visitors are coming from. As Alexander explains, this provides your school with an insight about “which countries send the most and if they are in your target audiences. If they are not, try making content more relevant to those in the locations you want student interest.”
Helpful Tools Your School Should Know About
When it comes to getting organic traffic insights, knowing which tools to use can impact the overall effectiveness of your SEO efforts. Since there is a plethora of tools available in the market to monitor organic results, we have decided to compile a list of the most influential and used tools in the higher education industry:
- Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is the most popular web analytics tool globally. This tool focuses on user behavior, engagement, and conversions across different platforms, providing a thorough understanding of user engagement. It allows your school to see who visits your website, on which pages, and for how long. In addition, schools can use GA4 to generate many different reports, using custom dimensions and metrics based on their specific needs.
- Google search console is a webmaster tool that allows schools to analyze, and optimize their website’s presence in Google search results. Schools can use this tool to see which queries bring prospective students to their websites and analyze some of the key metrics discussed above. In addition, schools can get information on how Google’s web crawler is indexing and crawling their website and inspect specific URLs to understand how Google is viewing and indexing those pages, among other things.
- SEMrush is a powerful all-in-one digital marketing tool that can help schools improve their online visibility, analyze competitors, and optimize their digital marketing strategies. This tool offers users the ability to do keyword research, competitor analysis, site auditing and backlink analysis, among other things.
- MOZ is a great SEO tool for link building and analysis, keyword research, and webpage performance evaluation. Schools looking to get an idea of what keywords they should be included in their SEO efforts will find this tool convenient.
Don’t know where to begin? Take advantage of Hubspot’s website grader. In a matter of seconds, this tool will give your school’s website a grade based on key metrics like performance, mobile readiness, and SEO, among others. Once you understand your weakest areas, you can begin using all the other tools to get more organic traffic insights, strengthen your digital presence, optimize your strategies, and unlock the full potential of your school’s website.
Organic Traffic Insights and Tips to Drive Organic Traffic
Organic search refers to the process of obtaining website traffic from search engine results pages without paying for it. Other sources of traffic include email, paid search, and social media. According to a study, 90.63% of pages don’t get organic search traffic from Google. This emphasizes the need for schools to actively monitor search engine rankings and work on improving their organic search results. One way to achieve this is to create a winning SEO strategy that maps out the school’s content cloisters and identifies the keywords specific to the school.
Example: Part of an SEO strategy developed by the HEM team for a European business school.
To improve organic traffic, schools should focus on creating high-quality content, optimizing keywords, improving website structure and user experience, acquiring backlinks, and following SEO best practices. Another important tip is to enhance local SEO. This is particularly important for schools, as prospects will likely look for schools in the cities or countries they find more convenient or appealing. For instance, in the example below, you can see how Turnbull School and St-Laurent Academy have optimized their websites to match the keyword “private schools in Ottawa,” enhancing their chances of being found online.
Pro tip: Try to look for trends, and identify areas for improvement regularly. If you want to maximize results, combining organic and paid traffic is a good strategy.
One thing schools must do is optimize their website for mobile view. Since nearly 60% of all online searches are carried out on a mobile device, and schools tend to target younger demographics, ensuring that your website is mobile-friendly is necessary. Prospects who encounter a website that is hard to navigate are more likely to end their journey there.
Lastly, it is recommended that schools combine organic search traffic key performance indicators (KPIs) with relevant web metrics. This approach ensures you get a complete view of how your school’s website is performing and the effectiveness of your overall digital marketing strategies.
