With thousands of colleges across the States, there is a lot of competition. Hence, SEO is essential. A business must have tools to make its website visible. Colleges are often found by students through campus tours, college fairs, and online searches.
So, whether you do or do not rank in lists for the best colleges in the US, where you type in online search results, will change how students perceive you. Colleges that get themselves into the top page results of Google will be seen as better than those that do not. So, how can you make your college more visible to students?
It all comes down to marketing and SEO. Whether you hire a college marketing agency or try to manage your SEO campaign, we’re here to share several strategies you can implement to increase student enrollment.
How colleges can use SEO
SEO – Search Engine Optimization – improving the quality and quantity of website traffic you receive through organic search. When someone searches online, they will be presented with several sponsored ads or links, followed by organic results pages. To improve traffic, you need to find a way to get your website onto – at least – the first few pages of the organic search results.
To get your college into the top-ranking results that students will see, there are several strategies you can put in place.
1.  Keyword strategy
A keyword strategy is integral to improving your SEO and increasing student enrollment. You can use many keyword research tools to understand more about your target audience: their behaviours, search intent, and the questions they are looking to get answered.
By doing this research, you can ensure your website holds keywords related to these enquiries and content that answers their questions.
But as well as using content to capture these keywords, you can also use them throughout page titles and meta descriptions. The search engine reads this content to determine whether you fit the user’s original search. If you have all the right keywords within your meta, you have more chance of being displayed to the user.
2.  Content marketing
By creating relevant and informative content for your website – either through page content or blog posts – you can capture more keywords and, in turn, rank higher in searches.
If you cannot keep up with posting blogs, ensuring each degree page is rich in SEO and valuable content for prospective students will do the trick.
3.  Backlinking
While having content on your site is one thing, having other sites and writers vouch for your college will do wonders for your credibility and SEO. Google and smaller search engines see links from other websites to yours as ‘upvotes’ when it comes to relevance and authority. Backlinking strategies are tedious to implement and require a lot of content to be written for many publications. But that is where a college marketing agency can help lower the workload.
By using these three strategies for SEO, as well as others you can find online, you can increase your chances of visibility. Visibility often leads to higher engagement and – for the college – increased student enrollment.
Conclusion
In conclusion, the highly competitive landscape of colleges in the United States necessitates a strategic approach to SEO for enhanced visibility and increased student enrollment. Leveraging effective keyword strategies, content marketing, and backlinking efforts are pivotal in ensuring a solid online presence. A well-crafted keyword strategy, supported by valuable content and proper meta descriptions, improves search rankings. Content marketing, whether through informative website content or regular blog posts, aids in capturing relevant keywords and engaging prospective students. Furthermore, a thoughtful backlinking strategy enhances the college’s credibility and authority in the eyes of search engines. By adopting these SEO practices, colleges can navigate the competitive higher education environment, improve their online visibility, and attract a higher enrollment of students.
