Over the past few years, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been more than just a buzzword. It’s become a strategy that many schools depend on to reach prospects and boost their brand visibility. In fact, SEO will continue to dominate in the years ahead—expanding to include new features and trends that can give your school a competitive advantage. If you’re looking to catch up and make 2023 a more successful year for your school, then it’s time to embrace SEO for enrollment growth.
Search engines are designed to help users discover high-quality content that’s relevant to their queries. By understanding how this process works and optimizing your school’s website to meet the necessary standards, you can generate great results. Here’s how your school can get started!
How Does SEO for Enrollment Growth Work?
At its core, good Search Engine Optimization for schools requires creating a good user experience (UX) along with a good robot experience (RX). That’s because optimizing for search engines means optimizing for both humans and robots—the internet user who inputs a search query and the Google bots that crawl and index websites.
A lot happens behind the scenes to create a search engine results page (SERP), but it all boils down to three basic elements: crawling, indexing, and ranking. Crawling is when Google bots find and scan web pages, reporting their findings to Google’s servers. Indexing occurs right after when Google evaluates the webpage and stores it in a big index if it deems it useful. Ranking is the final stage, focusing on authority and allowing pages to be shared whenever a user inputs a relevant search query. Based on many factors, Google determines the ranking order of websites on its SERP.
Schools with a firm grasp of this process and all the factors influencing SEO ranking can more easily boost their website’s visibility. This means knowing what to improve and how to improve it to appear at the top of the SERP.
1. Create a Winning SEO Strategy for Schools to Gain Better Ranking Opportunities
If you’re looking to grow college enrollment with SEO for higher education, you’ll need to start with an SEO strategy. By leveraging your student personas and identifying your user’s search intent, you can begin crafting SEO-driven content that delivers results.
To get started with SEO for enrollment growth, you’ll need to conduct effective keyword research and use your findings to shape your content development efforts. Link-building and technical SEO are other considerations that can take your school’s SEO strategy to the next level.
Interested in working with industry experts to improve your SEO efforts? Reach out to our team for specialized SEO insights and support!
Begin with Keyword Research to Boost Your SEO for Enrollment Growth
Keyword research is meant to help your school identify which words and phrases to target to reach your target audience. These keywords can even give you insight into the type of content prospects want to see, giving you an idea of what your audience is searching for online. Here, it’s all about understanding search intent, which is typically categorized as:
- Informational – searching for educational content on a specific topic
- Navigational – searching with the aim of finding a brand or website
- Commercial – searching with a focus on a product or service
- Transactional – searching with the intent to complete a transaction
In addition to serving different intentions, these keywords can be either short-tail or long-tail. Short-tail keywords are much shorter in length and often have the highest search volume. This can make them extremely different to rank highly for. By comparison, long-tail keywords are longer and more specific. Despite garnering a lower search volume, they can provide search engines with more detail—making their intent much easier to discern. Below is a graph that highlights this dynamic:
Conducting keyword research is a multi-step process, but breaking it down into manageable stages can help your team ease through it:
It’s important for schools to begin by identifying which keywords their competition is using to appear on similar searches. Schools exploring non-branded, untapped and high-gain keywords may also discover new opportunities to boost their visibility—allowing them to align their content and program offerings to what prospects are searching for. Once your team compiles the necessary keywords, you can begin incorporating them into your school’s content development strategy.
To streamline this process, your team can rely on online tools provided by Moz, Semrush, or Ahrefs, to name a few. You can use your Google Search Console account to gain valuable keyword insights.
When it comes to SEO for enrollment, you’ll want to measure how well you rank for your designated keywords regularly. Consider producing an initial keyword ranking report and compare your performance with that of your competitors. You can then conduct monthly reports to track your progress and adjust your strategy as you see fit.
Map Out Your School’s Content Clusters
An effective way to achieve better SEO for enrollment growth and produce SEO-driven content is to jump into creating topic clusters. Instead of simply drafting blog posts to target specific keywords, you’d be creating high-quality and in-depth articles that provide your prospects with extremely high value. Taking the extra time and effort to create these topic clusters can help your school improve its topical authority in Google, boost its organic search ranking, and drive qualified traffic to its website.
There are three key elements to consider when integrating topic clusters into your school’s content calendar and strategy:
- Pillar Page – a page that explores a broad topic, targeting a focus keyword with a high search volume
- Subtopic Pages – pages with relevant content targeting less competitive long-tail keywords
- Internal Links – hyperlinks that connect all of your content, directing readers from the pillar page to other content within the cluster
To get started, you’ll need to group content into a core pillar that offers more profound insights into a single subject—one that’s relevant to your school and its program offerings. From there, you’ll create more specialized content (subtopic pages) that targets long-tail keywords, all while staying relevant to the overarching subject of that cluster. Through internal links peppered throughout each of the subtopic pages, directing users to other aspects of the cluster as well as the pillar page, you can begin building your site authority and cultivating your position as an expert in the field.
Get a Head Start on Technical SEO and On-Page SEO for Your School
Technical SEO refers to optimizing a website by focusing on its technical aspects—that is, improving page speed, crawling and indexing, and much more. These efforts all revolve around improving elements on the webpage itself, making it a part of on-page SEO. By optimizing these aspects, schools can create a more positive user experience while also improving the overall robot experience, which makes their site easier for search engines to understand.
One of the most important elements of technical SEO for enrollment growth is optimizing page speed. That’s because Google prioritizes websites that load quickly, giving them an advantage in search engine rankings. Besides, page speed can also influence your website’s bounce rate, the percentage of visitors who leave a website after viewing one page without making any interactions. According to research, pages that load within two seconds reach an average bounce rate of 9%, skyrocketing to 38% when a page loads within five seconds.
By using the PageSpeed Insights tool, you can test your school’s website and determine how well it’s performing. Below is a screenshot of how the results may appear, giving you a solid overview of the website’s performance rating (along with accessibility, best practices, and SEO) as well as helpful suggestions for improvements:
Source: PageSpeed Insights
In addition to optimizing your page speed, you’ll want to make sure that your school website doesn’t contain any duplicate content, dead links, or 404 error pages. In doing so, you’ll help maintain a strong internal linking structure that makes it even easier for Google bots to crawl and index your pages.
Schools looking to go a step further can even integrate structured data into their SEO strategy, which is a way for you to provide search engines with more nuanced information about your web content. In fact, embracing structured data can open up opportunities for you to use rich results—making your links appear more eye-catching on the search engine results page. These rich results can appear as featured snippets, “People also ask” links, how-to guides, carousels, and more.
Example: Prospects interested in career paths after welding college can quickly discover Niagra College Canada through the search engine’s featured snippet. Since the school’s website is well optimized, prospects can quickly gain the answer they need without leaving the search engine results page:
This extra value gives prospects an idea of what they can expect from the school website, making them more likely to click the link. To see if your school supports rich results, you can use Google’s Rich Results Test tool.
Pro Tip: Part of technical SEO includes embracing good UX Design. That involves ensuring your website is accessible, easy to navigate, and mobile-friendly.
2. Regularly Measure Your SEO for Enrollment Growth Efforts
Schools seeking to grow university enrollment with SEO will inevitably need to measure and track their efforts. By regularly monitoring their SEO performance, schools can determine how successful their campaigns are and discover new and more effective ways to reach their target audience. Taking a closer look at your data can also help you identify areas for improvement, allowing you to strengthen your strategy and generate better results.
Generally speaking, there are five dimensions to focus on when measuring SEO:
- Keyword rankings – a webpage’s position within the SERP for a target keyword
- Organic traffic – any unpaid traffic coming to your website from a search engine
- Engagement rate and bounce rate – Engagement rate is the percentage of engaged sessions (longer than 10 seconds, has a conversion event, or at least two pageviews). Bounce rate is the inverse of Engagement rate.
- Click-through rate (CTR) – the ratio of users who view vs. click on your SERP listings
- Domain rating – a measure on a 100-point scale
All of these dimensions can influence your SEO performance. Here’s a closer look at them below:
Track Your Keyword Ranking and Organic Traffic on the Google Search Console and GA4
You can monitor the effectiveness of your keyword-targeting efforts by diving into the Google Search Console. Here, keywords are referred to as “queries.” By navigating to the “queries” tab, you’ll be able to view which phrases and keywords your website ranks for, along with your position for each one:
You can also use this platform to discover how well you rank for these queries in different countries:
Keeping an eye out on these numbers can help you determine how well you reach your target audience. If you notice that some keywords are not providing the desired results, then you can use these insights to refine your keyword research process and identify more effective alternatives.
It’s also good practice to regularly review your traffic sources regarding SEO for schools. This can be done using your Google Analytics 4 (GA4) account, which provides you with access to numerous highly-valuable reports. By navigating to “Traffic Acquisition” under the “Acquisition” tab in the Life cycle reports menu, you can easily view the different types of traffic that your website generates. Focusing on organic search can help you determine how successful your SEO efforts are:
Monitor Your School Website’s Engagement Rate and Bounce Rate on GA4
Your school’s engagement rate is a way for you to assess how involved visitors are when they land on your website. Generally speaking, you’ll want a high engagement rate and a low bounce rate since this dynamic delivers the best results for your school. A good way to assess your performance for both these metrics is to visit your GA4 account and navigate your way to engagement reports, as seen below:
If you’d like to improve your school’s performance, then it may be worthwhile to revisit your content and review your technical SEO efforts. To boost these numbers, consider adding a video or an image at the top of your webpage. You can even add contextual links to your pages for a similar effect. Another strategy you can explore is improving the readability of your content. Remember to use headers (H1, H2, and H3 tags) when appropriate, as well as short paragraphs. To maximize your SEO for enrollment growth, you can double-check that your page is a 1:1 match for search intent.
Evaluate Your School Website’s Click-Through Rate and Domain Rating
Your click-through rate (CTR) is an important metric that indicates how well your keywords and SEO efforts are performing, showing you the ratio of users who actually click on your site instead of just viewing it on the SERP. You can discover your average CTR rate by accessing your Google Search Console account, as shown below:
Various factors can influence this metric. For example, these numbers may reflect your keyword performance—dipping down or rising depending on how well you rank for your target keywords. By inspecting keywords and “queries” in the Google Search Console, you can conduct a gap analysis to discover which keywords to improve.
Alternatively, your score may be impacted by your technical SEO efforts. This can be a good opportunity to ensure that your webpage features engaging meta titles and descriptions along with structured data. The addition of structured data enables you to elevate the appearance of your webpage on the SERP, allowing you to use rich results to make your link even more compelling.
Another important SEO metric to measure is domain authority and rating. In fact, measuring your performance here allows you to better understand your site’s credibility from the perspective of search engines. You can even test your competition’s website to evaluate how you compare—and, in some cases, improve.
The term “Domain Rating” (DR) may be slightly confusing at first, especially in conjunction with “Domain Authority” (DA). DR refers to a ranking metric used by Ahrefs to show and rate the strength of a website’s backlink profile on a scale of 1 to 100, while DA describes a Moz calculation that predicts how well websites will rank in the SERP. Here’s how DR might look on Ahrefs (first image) and how DA appears on Moz (second image):
Source: Ahrefs Website Authority Checker
Source: Moz Domain Authority Checker
Websites with a high domain authority ranking offer great backlinks that can boost your SEO strategy, whereas those with low authority rankings can impede your progress. Knowing which websites have a higher rating allows you to determine who you should aim to develop backlinks from—which can also include guest blogging opportunities. Acquiring high-quality backlinks from high-authority websites can help you boost your own authority score while also increasing your web traffic. It’s all about creating link-worthy content and collaborating with others to maximize your chances for better SEO for admissions.
3. Consider SEO Audits and Social SEO to Set Your School Up for Future Success
According to the latest social media trends, social SEO is poised to rise in popularity—particularly among Gen Z. Research from Google shows that around 40% of young internet users, ages 18 to 24, use TikTok or Instagram instead of Google Maps or Search. As schools look to future-proof their SEO strategy, they may benefit from developing their social SEO.
Similarly, schools that want to continue optimizing their SEO for enrollment growth should consider conducting regular SEO audits. These audits will help you identify what’s working and what isn’t, giving you the insight you need to make adjustments that can take your current efforts to the next level.
