Imagine yourself at a crossroads. You’re staring down the exciting, yet daunting, path of higher education. Questions swirl in your mind: “What career path should I take?”, “What type of degree is right for me?”, and most importantly, “Which college will help me achieve my goals?”. This is the beginning of the student journey, a crucial decision-making process that every aspiring student embarks on.

Interestingly, this journey often starts with a simple search on Google. Whether it’s “best colleges for engineering” or “tips for choosing a major,” students are actively seeking information online to guide their decisions. This is where Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Higher Education comes into play.

SEO is the art and science of making your website visible in search engine results. But for higher education institutions, it’s much more than just ranking high. It’s about influencing the student journey at every stage, from initial awareness to final enrollment. So, let’s unpack this journey and see how SEO can be your guide along the way.

Stage 1: Planting the Seed – The Awareness Stage

The first step in the student journey is awareness. Students are just beginning to explore their options, and their minds are brimming with questions. They might be unsure about their desired field, the type of degree they need, or even the very concept of college life.

As a higher education institution, SEO can help you be there at the right time with the right information. This is achieved through keyword research and content creation. By identifying the keywords students are searching for (e.g., “best colleges for social work”, “what does a computer science degree entail?”), you can create informative blog posts, articles, and guides that address their concerns and answer their questions.

Imagine this: A student unsure about their major stumbles upon your article titled “5 Tips for Choosing the Right College Major.” This article, optimized with relevant keywords like “choosing a college major”, “career paths”, and “finding your passion”, guides them through the decision-making process, potentially sparking their interest in your programs.

This is exactly what The University of Kansas has done. Their article “10 Tips for Choosing a Major in College” gets close to 2,000 clicks/mo and ranks in the top positions for keywords like:

• how to choose a major – 1,000 searches/mo
• how to pick a major – 800 searches/mo
• how to know what to major in – 150 searches/mo
• and hundreds of other keywords

From this research, they might become interested in getting a computer science degree. However, they want to learn more about the program and what they can do with a computer science degree. So they would search for [what do you learn in computer science]. SNHU has an article on this topic (What Can You Do With a Computer Science Degree?), and that page alone brings them over 1,800 clicks every month.

Stage 2: Narrowing the Options – The Consideration Stage

Once students have a better understanding of their interests and goals, they move into the consideration stage. This is where they start researching specific colleges and programs, learning more about things like curriculum, faculty expertise, and even campus life.

In this phase, SEO becomes even more critical. You can create content with relevant keywords related to specific programs and majors (e.g., “computer science vs computer engineering”, “is computer science a good major”). Additionally, ensure your website is user-friendly and provides clear information about programs, faculty profiles, and student life. This makes it easier for students to find the information they need and assess if your institution aligns with their aspirations.

Rice University’s Department of Computer Science has an article titled “Computer Science vs Computer Engineering: What’s the Difference?”. This article brings them over 5,400 clicks every month (64,800 visits annually) and ranks for over 630 keywords.

By appearing in search results, this article reaches students with initial program interest but may not be ready for immediate action. This visibility benefits Rice’s brand; every year, tens of thousands of prospective students land on this page, with a significant number engaging with their calls to action and learning more about Rice’s Computer Science program.

Think of it this way: A student interested in computer science lands on your website’s “Computer Science” blog article. The page is optimized with relevant keywords and offers a clear overview of the program, including course descriptions, faculty profiles, and internship opportunities. This transparency and ease of access can significantly influence their decision to explore further or even apply.

After they’re done with their questions, they are going to search for specific programs. You should be visible here, too, as these searches have a clear intent to convert. They are also one of the most competitive keywords to rank for. 

The most important thing to remember here is to understand the search intent and use that information to target the right keywords for your program page. You’d think that targeting the (computer science degree) keyword with your program page is the right decision, but the screenshot below proves you wrong. There’s only one program page ranking for this keyword, all other results are informational content (blog articles).

If you want to rank for this keyword, the best chance you’ll have at ranking will be through blog content that targets this keyword. And for the program page, you’d probably want to target a different version of this keyword that shows more program pages listed. 

Here’s one example of search results showing only program pages when you search for (online computer science degree), a keyword that is searched over 9,000 times every month. Because the search query is more specific, this signals Google that the user is interested in programs and not blog articles.

Stage 3: Making the Final Choice – The Decision Stage

The decision stage is where students finalize their choices, considering factors like financial aid options, campus visits, and acceptance rates. As an institution, you want to ensure you’re providing the information and resources that make your option stand out.

SEO can help you showcase the unique selling points of your institution during this crucial stage. You can highlight testimonials from current students and alumni, emphasizing their positive experiences and career successes. Additionally, you can create landing pages dedicated to financial aid information and the application process, making it easy for students to navigate the next steps.

For example, imagine a student on the fence, torn between two colleges. They visit your website and discover a dedicated landing page titled “Scholarships and Financial Aid.” This page clearly explains eligibility requirements, application procedures, and even features success stories of students who received scholarship support. This level of transparency and accessibility can significantly impact their final decision.

Conclusion: The Journey Continues

By understanding the student journey and implementing a strategic SEO approach, higher education institutions can effectively guide prospective students from initial awareness to successful enrollment. Remember, SEO is a continuous process, and it requires ongoing effort to stay ahead of the curve. But by prioritizing relevant content, user experience, and transparency, you can harness the power of SEO to attract the right students and build a thriving academic community.

When it comes to higher education SEO success stories, Southern New Hampshire University stands out. With more than 15 million annual visitors from organic search alone, their approach offers valuable lessons for university marketing teams.

Southern New Hampshire University is a private, nonprofit, accredited institution with more than 3,000 on-campus students and over 170,000 online students, making it one of the fastest-growing universities in the nation. SNHU is not, nor it has been a client of Manaferra in the past. All the data in this article is provided from third-party platforms.

In this analysis, we’ll break down SNHU’s most effective SEO strategies and show you how to adapt them for your institution. Whether you’re looking to boost program visibility or increase qualified traffic, these insights will help strengthen your organic search presence.

SNHU.edu – Organic Traffic Overview

SNHU.edu gets an estimated 1.3 million visitors from organic traffic monthly. This traffic is only to their “marketing” website (www.snhu.edu) and doesn’t include their mySNHU student website (https://my.snhu.edu), which also receives close to 600k visits from Google every month.

From the Ahrefs traffic chart above, we can see that the traffic started to increase in mid-2020. This makes sense because, during COVID-19, with campuses closed and learning moved online, SNHU was well-positioned to capitalize on this new search demand.

From an SEO point of view, something else that happened during this time was Google giving more weight to all .edu domains in their efforts to combat misinformation. SNHU was already investing in SEO, had all the right pages created to target the right keywords, and when this algorithmic update happened, their pages started to rank better gradually.

The biggest spike in their traffic came from the July 2021 Core Update. Their traffic increased by almost 60%, from 600,000/mo to 950,000/mo.

Another interesting data point is to look at their traffic by location. 73.4% of the traffic is coming from the United States, but they’re also getting significant traffic from India and the Philippines. This is normal; some of the content that will be published on the site will perform in markets outside the US as well, even if that is not part of the strategy. In SNHU’s case, this could be intentional since they are targeting international students as well.

Traffic Value

Organic traffic value is the equivalent monthly cost of traffic from all keywords that the SNHU.edu website ranks for organically if that traffic was paid via PPC instead.

Ahrefs calculates it by multiplying the monthly organic traffic of each keyword at its respective ranking position by its CPC value. Then, they add up the organic traffic cost of individual keywords that the target website/URL ranks for.

In essence, the number gives you a sense of how valuable a domain’s keyword profile is. Another way to think of it is how much money SNHU has saved in terms of ranking for keywords organically instead of buying paid traffic.

In their case, SNHU gets over $5.7m in traffic value for free (per month) because they’re ranking for hundreds of thousands of keywords and getting over 1.3m visitors per month.

Here’s one example: their healthcare administration degree page gets over 6.3k clicks every month. They are ranking in top positions for keywords like:

• healthcare administration degree [3,900 searches per month, position 5]
• bachelors in healthcare administration [1,100 searches per month, position 1]
• healthcare administration degree online [1,100 searches per month, position 3]

If they had to advertise on Google Ads to get this traffic, it would cost them $137,000; instead, because they have a strong SEO presence, they’re getting this traffic for free.

Branded vs. Non-Branded Organic Traffic

When we filter out the branded keywords, the traffic drops to 1m per month. This tells us that SNHU’s branded traffic is 23.07% of total traffic.

This is really good because, for most higher ed. institutions, the majority of their organic traffic is usually branded traffic.

Branded traffic is usually from people who already know us; this could be existing students, alumni, etc. Branded traffic can also be impacted by offline marketing initiatives, which could drive more people to search for your institution.

In the case of SNHU, they’re getting 76.93% of their traffic every month from people who discover them not by searching their brand but by searching for programs and information they need, and SNHU offers. In SEO, this is the traffic you want to go after; these are new audiences that most likely haven’t engaged with your brand before and are interested in what you have to offer.

Top Pages (by Organic Traffic)

Looking at their top pages by traffic, we notice something interesting: most of the top pages are not program pages but blog articles. This is intentional, and here’s why:

There are two important things here that we need to understand: how students search and the concept of search intent.

How Students Search (the Student Journey in Google)

Our first instinct when thinking about the keywords we’d like to rank for would be to go after program-related keywords. And this is correct. However, we need to understand that there are thousands of other institutions going after the same keywords as well, so the competition is fierce.

We also neglect the fact that when a student starts considering getting a degree, they don’t immediately search for [master’s in cybersecurity] or [bachelor of social work]. They have questions, tons of them, and very often quite basic questions like [what is a BSN degree].

Once they start to educate themselves, they begin to refine their questions, and would probably search something like [is a BSN degree worth it] or [BSN vs RN].

They have thousands of these questions, and they search for them hundreds of thousands of times every month on Google. SNHU has created a content library that provides answers to these questions, and because their content is quite good, they are able to rank and get in front of them earlier in their student journey.

Chances are that these students will engage with SNHU, request more information about their programs, and remember this positive experience (being educated on their questions) when the time comes to apply.

Search Intent

Search intent is the main goal a user has when typing a query in the search box. This is important for us because, in the Higher Ed. SEO space, it impacts what keywords we target with our program pages, and for what keywords we need to create informational (blog) pages.

If you search for [BSN degree – 23,000 searches/mo], you might think that Google will show you program pages offered by different institutions.

The reality is that Google will show you mostly blog articles and a few program pages at the bottom of the search results.

Google has determined that the search intent for this keyword is informational – someone searching for it is more likely to look for information about what is a BSN, the difference between RN and BSN, than to go to a program page.

You can repeat the search for keywords like [MBA degree] and [MSW degree], and the results will be similar.

When the query (keyword) is more specific, then Google starts to refine the search results, to better answer the search intent. Here’s what Google shows when you search for [bachelor of science in nursing – 2,900 searches/mo].

This is the reason why content marketing (blog) is an important part of your SEO strategy. It allows you to rank for keywords that your target audience is searching for thousands of times every month. You wouldn’t be able to rank for these highly relevant keywords with a program page, and you also need to keep in mind that there are even more content opportunities out there to rank for by answering students’ questions.

Program Pages vs. Blog Content (Organic Traffic Breakdown)

SNHU gets over 182,000 visits to its 164 program pages every month.

The total traffic to their blog is 802,000 per month.

In terms of value, the traffic to their program pages is far more valuable than the traffic to the blog. However, we must note that their blog helps a lot with their program pages to rank and get the traffic they’re getting today. This help comes in the form of building topical authority (another important concept in the SEO world – in short, it means making Google see you as a thought leader in the space because you’ve published content on the topic that is relevant to your program page), internal linking from the blog articles, and backlinks (authority) built organically.

SNHU.edu – Program Page SEO Performance

While SNHU is known for its online programs, they do offer on-campus programs as well. Here we’re going to look at the SEO performance of their online vs. on-campus program pages.

On Campus vs. Online Program Pages

SNHU has 69 on-campus program pages indexed that are ranking and getting traffic. The total traffic for their 69 program pages is just over 2,000/mo.

This is negligible compared to the traffic that SNHU gets from its online program pages.

There are two reasons why the difference is so huge. The first one is search intent, which we discussed earlier. Even for program keywords where [online] is not mentioned, most of the results will contain online program pages. This is happening because Google has determined that these results would be more relevant to the majority searching for that program.

The second reason is that online programs have more search demand vs. on-campus programs. There are more keywords that contain [online] in the query than keywords without [online]. If you have a program page that is targeting [online] like SNHU does, and your page is performing well, then you get more traffic than you would if you were targeting on-campus.

Another reason would be that on-campus programs are location-specific, which limits the number of people who could go there, and the best keywords to target would also include the location, and these keywords would have way fewer people searching for them than a general keyword.

SNHU.edu – Technical SEO Overview

This is where we get technical. A good technical SEO foundation means that Google will be able to find all the pages on your site and see all the important content on those pages. Other important technical SEO considerations also include things like website speed, UX/accessibility, website architecture, and more.

We crawled the SNHU website to better understand their technical SEO setup, and here’s what we learned:

The Website Only Has About 1,500 Indexed URLs

This is a good thing. Ideally, you only want pages that are worth ranking to be indexed in Google’s search results. Usually, when we’re doing SEO audits, we see higher ed. websites with thousands of pages, most of which don’t serve the marketing purpose of the site.

We understand that a lot of these pages must exist and be indexed, but what we usually find when working with our higher ed. partners is that a significant % of these pages can either be moved to a subdomain or removed altogether.

SNHU’s setup works great for their SEO strategy. Their main site www.snhu.edu serves mainly as their marketing site, and its main goal is to generate demand for their program pages.

The reason why we look at what’s indexed is that it impacts how Google sees our site. They look at all the indexed pages, the quality of these pages, and what these pages are about to better understand what the site is about. If we’re sending mixed signals to Google, then we could risk our most important pages not achieving their potential in the search results.

Crawl Depth – Important Pages Close to the Homepage

Crawl depth looks at how many clicks it would take Google to find a page if the starting point is the homepage. The closer a page is to the homepage, the more important it is perceived to be by Google.

In SNHU’s case, most of the pages are 2-3 clicks away from the homepage, which is ideal.

They are achieving this thanks to their HTML sitemap, which is linked in the footer.

SNHU.edu – Link Building

We look at two things when doing a quick analysis of the backlink profile: the number of referring domains (how many websites are linking back to SNHU.edu) and the number of backlinks (the total times these websites are linking back to SNHU.edu).

In SNHU’s case, they have 11.5k referring domains, linking back a total of 124k times.

These numbers look great but they can be a bit misleading. Most of the SEO platforms/tools that we use will report on the total number of backlinks. However, we know that Google doesn’t treat all backlinks as equal and there are different factors that go into making a good backlink. Ahrefs (the SEO platform we use) has a neat feature that allows you to filter just the “Best links” – and what it does is that it removes a lot of irrelevant, low-quality links from spammy websites.

When we do this filtering, we see that SNHU has a total of 1,290 good backlinks from the likes of The Guardian, El Pais, Business Insider, Today, and more.

These are the backlinks that make the difference, and if we’re competing with SNHU, we’d look at beating this number and not the total number of backlinks/referring domains.

Diving deeper into this analysis, we see that apart from the homepage (which is usually the most authoritative page and has the most backlinks), the pages that have the most backlinks are blog articles. This is another side benefit of having a blog and writing content; it allows you to attract organic links passively, builds your website and program page authority, and helps with rankings.

One area where SNHU has lots of room for improvement is their backlink profile to the program pages. When we look at the report of just program pages, we see that most of their program pages have only a few referring domains.

Improving this aspect of their SEO strategy will allow them to break into the first positions for thousands of keywords where they are currently ranking in the top 3 or top 5 positions.

SNHU.edu – Organic Traffic Competition

When we talk about competition in SEO, we don’t mean your usual traditional competitors. We mean other websites that are competing for the same keywords your target audience uses to search for the programs you have to offer.

In SNHU’s case, we see the likes of ASU, WGU, Franklin University, and National University who are also ranking for the same keywords as SNHU, and then we have Coursera, the biggest competitor in terms of traffic and traffic value.

Something to note about the data shown above is ASU’s traffic value. What this means is that even though it’s getting less traffic than Coursera, most of the traffic is likely from its program pages, hence the higher traffic value.

Conclusion

Looking at SNHU’s competitors shows that there’s room for improvement for them. They are doing quite well with the traffic that their blog is providing, and their program pages are performing well, but they’re struggling to win the top spots for their target keywords. If that were to happen, their traffic and traffic value would increase significantly.

Search is the largest source of online traffic, pushing forward well over half of the web traffic in most industries. Therefore, as a higher education professional, you should give your website the best chance of standing out from the competition by aiming for a higher ranking on the search engine results page (SERP).

Anyone marketing a higher education institution can benefit significantly from search engine optimization (SEO) to improve the quality and quantity of their site’s traffic. Implementing a strong SEO strategy for higher education is the best way to attract more quality leads to your website, including potential students and donors for your institution. 

In this blog, we will discuss some specific SEO strategies that will help you increase college enrollment rates through improvements to your website.

3 SEO Strategies To Increase College Enrollment Through Your Website

From our experience as an SEO agency for higher education, we’ve listed below three SEO strategies that will help you increase college enrollment through your website. We’ll begin by discussing the importance of the student journey and how relevant that is in terms of gaining insight into enrollment and retention. Then, dive into the importance and role of content strategy and other SEO factors for improving your website. Carefully follow each strategy provided below in order to best represent and promote your website.

Strategy 1: Understanding the student journey: How to identify key touchpoints in the enrollment process

The first strategy you could implement is understanding the student journey in order to gain insight into ways you can improve students’ experiences as they interact with your higher education institution across various channels. Ensure that your institution’s marketing and recruitment efforts are following the student enrollment cycle by creating a map of your student’s journey to enrollment and identifying some critical touchpoints.

To identify the above-mentioned touchpoints, you must consider all steps your leads go through as they engage with your university or college, online and in person. Think about how students hear about your institution, how they learn more about the study programs and courses offered, generally engage online, and get in touch with admissions. The student journey map created is similar to the typical sales funnel marketing models that study the awareness stage, consideration, and, finally, the decision-making process.

Track each touchpoint through web analytics as you analyze your site’s traffic to gain insight into how students interact with specific areas of your site and what information they are seeking. You can also utilize surveys and focus groups at major touchpoints in order to evaluate the students’ experiences at different stages of interacting with your institution through their journey.

Once you have gathered data about your students’ conversion journey, you can strategize about possible improvements. Address gaps on your student enrollment journey and fix the problems discovered. This way, you will prioritize student satisfaction and build your institute’s reputation as a student-first college or university.

Embrace SEO to ensure your target audience can easily find your higher education institution when searching for it or other relevant terms, and provide higher quality content that attracts the right audience and increases opportunities for enrollment.

Strategy 2: Enhancing your higher education institution’s content strategy

In order for your higher education institution to stand apart from the thousands of other colleges and universities, you must also employ an effective content strategy in terms of development as well as marketing. This way, you can ensure that the content you create is creative, current, accurate, and appropriate for your target audience.

It is essential that you create quality content in order to attract prospective students to your site and provide them with all the information needed to convince them that your college or university is the ideal fit for their academic needs. In order to present relevant content, you must first know your audience. Therefore, it is important that you identify your audience and their needs so you can then target each one with relevant content. In addition, it would be best to make your content accessible in different channels to ensure that communication with your target audience is seamless in all cases.

On top of determining your target audience and the type of content they seek, you must also make sure that you stay up to date with trends so that you can update and adapt your content accordingly. Create a content calendar and schedule regular updates to your website to ensure information accuracy and currency.

To optimize your content for search engines, carefully choose each topic you will discuss and, through keyword research, ensure that you are creating content around terms your audience is searching for. Such a step will help with your site’s ranking on the SERP as well. After publishing your content, review the metrics regularly so you gain insight into the type of content that gains your site the most visibility.

Strategy 3: Optimizing your website performance with SEO for higher education

SEO can also help improve your higher education institution’s website’s performance, that in turn, helps create a better experience for all site visitors. To begin, your site’s page load speed is one of the first things that visitors notice upon clicking on your site. The time it takes to load the content presented has a significant impact on visitor satisfaction and, consequently, conversion too. In addition, page load speed is also one of the direct ranking factors for Google and Bing, so it can make or break your site’s visibility in search engine results.

Other factors to consider include mobile-friendliness and ease of navigation across all layouts. It is important to ensure that visitors have access to the same content regardless of whether they access your site through mobile devices, desktop computers, or a laptop. After all, web traffic is almost equally distributed between visitors accessing information through mobile and desktop devices. Therefore, ignoring one version for the other can damage your quality and quantity of traffic.

Significant improvement to your website performance can also be achieved through on-page and off-page optimization. By updating your titles and descriptions with relevant keywords and engaging language, as well as better structuring your content through headers and subheaders, you help search engines connect your content to various searchers’ queries that are relevant to your site. Furthermore, on-site optimization also helps with site navigation, thus, improving your visitor experience as well. 

On the other hand, off-page optimization is achieved through tactics such as guest posting, link building, social media marketing, and more. Employing such tactics will not only increase your site’s ranking but also help establish your site as a trustworthy and credible source.

Lastly, you should also conduct an SEO audit regularly to analyze your site’s technical health and traffic. Through this process, you can identify the presence of any issues, including on-page and off-page SEO problems, content gaps, website structure issues, technical problems, and more. After identifying the problem, you can work towards finding a solution and thus, keeping your site healthy and generating traffic.

FAQ 

1.  What is SEO and how does it impact higher education institutions?

SEO, or search engine optimization, is the practice of improving the visibility of a website in search engine results pages (SERPs). For higher education institutions, an effective SEO strategy can help attract and retain students and faculty, as well as improve the overall user experience of the website.

2. How do I get started with an SEO strategy for my higher education website?

A good first step in developing an SEO strategy is to conduct an audit of your current website. This can help identify technical issues, such as slow page load time or broken links, as well as opportunities to improve the quality and relevance of your content.

3. What are some key factors to consider when optimizing a higher education website for SEO?

Some key factors to consider when optimizing a higher education website for SEO include the use of relevant and targeted keywords, ensuring a mobile-friendly design, and building high-quality inbound links.

4. How can I measure the success of my SEO efforts for my higher education website?

There are several metrics that can be used to measure the success of an SEO strategy for a higher education website, including organic traffic, rankings for targeted keywords, and the number of inbound links. It’s also important to track website performance metrics, such as page views and time on page, to understand how users are engaging with your site.

5. Are there any specific challenges or considerations for higher education institutions when it comes to SEO?

Some challenges and considerations specific to higher education institutions when it comes to SEO include managing multiple subdomains or departments, ensuring that content is kept up-to-date and accurate, and navigating privacy regulations around student data. It’s also important to consider the unique goals and target audience of a higher education institution when developing an SEO strategy.

Conclusion

An effective SEO strategy is crucial for higher education institutions to attract and retain students. Implement the strategies mentioned throughout this blog and you will soon see a difference in your site’s traffic, engagement, click-through rate, and ranking. All these elements are essential to generating leads and increasing conversion rates.

Are you interested in learning more about SEO and all its benefits in supporting your institution’s student retention goals? Contact us for more information and set up a free SEO gap analysis to gain better insight into your site.

Universities in the United States are widely regarded as some of the best. According to a survey, 59% of people outside the U.S. believe American universities to be above average compared to universities in other developed countries. Naturally, such a belief is associated with high numbers of international students interested in studying at universities in the U.S.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, in the 2019/20 academic year, there were 1,075,496 international students following their studies in the U.S.—making up around 5.5 percent of the total number of students in the U.S. However, the following year, there was a significant decline due to travel restrictions that prevented students from traveling to the U.S. During the 2020/21 academic year, there were 914,095 international students in the U.S.—a 15% decrease from the previous year, with only a small percentage of them being new international students. 

Now that travel restrictions have eased, it is important to update your higher institution’s enrollment strategies and begin recruiting international students.

To increase the number of international students recruited for your higher education institution, you must center your international enrollment strategies on resource efficiency by utilizing various technology and digital marketing techniques. So, read on and find out the top three strategies from the agency that specializes in SEO services for Higher Education, that will help refine your recruitment plan with effective international student recruitment strategies for 2023.

International Recruitment Strategy #1: Optimising Your Website

Optimizing your website for international students is crucial since websites are often the first exposure potential students have to higher education institutions. Before deciding whether they want to apply to your study programs, they need to learn more about your institution and the opportunities you offer. Therefore, you should pay close attention to what you present on your website and how you present it.

Similar to techniques typically used for growing college enrollment through SEO, you should improve your site’s landing pages and contact forms in order to increase click-through rates and convert website visitors into qualified leads. To begin, make sure you include all the information potential students must know about your institution on the landing pages. 

Next, make the text readable and minimize using complex language or colloquialisms that your international audience might have difficulty understanding. Keep the content engaging—include visual elements such as infographics and videos that explain topics relevant to potential students and their decision-making process, like tuition fees, accommodation, and program structure, including information specific to international students. 

Do not forget to include keywords relevant to your target audience in order to increase lead generation by improving your site’s visibility and pushing its content through the ranking in organic search results.

As you work on optimizing your website, focus on the following elements:

• Easy navigation
• Engaging homepage
• Relevant content
• Meta titles and descriptions
• Keywords

International Recruitment Strategy #2: Incorporating Virtual Campus Tours and Zoom 

Even prior to the pandemic, international students have faced challenges traveling to the U.S. or other countries for in-person campus visits. However, these visits are crucial for students to make informed decisions about the institutions they are considering, as they offer a glimpse into the facilities, atmosphere, and culture associated with the institution. In light of this challenge, a useful strategy to bridge this gap is to offer virtual campus tours and Zoom meetings.

Virtual campus tours allow prospective students to engage with your institution and experience what it is like to walk around your campus from the comfort of their homes. Many universities have already developed 360-degree tours using virtual reality technology or Google Maps Street View, and there are numerous benefits to incorporating these tours. By offering virtual campus tours, you can:

1. Provide equal access for all: Regardless of the reason why potential students cannot visit your campus in person, whether it be because of financial limitations, time constraints, or something else, with virtual campus tours, you help provide the same experience to anyone interested in joining your study programs. Virtual campus tours are cost-affordable for both students and institutions to upkeep.
2. Improve interaction: Students can have little to no interaction with the tour guide because of the large tour groups. Therefore, they will not be learning much about the institution. However, with virtual tours, the information and visuals are on the screen for students to access and go through as many times as they want.
3. Better accessibility: Unlike physical tours, virtual campus tours are not affected by factors such as weather conditions or time constraints. Therefore, students can choose to visit your higher education institution’s campus on a Monday morning, Saturday at midnight, or any other time of the week and day.
4. More inclusive: Virtual tours can easily incorporate live captions, ASL translation, audio descriptions, and other elements that help students with disabilities navigate better throughout the campus tour. 

In addition to the tours, your institution can make use of several web-conferencing tools, such as Zoom, that help provide potential international students with a more personalized interaction between them and your admissions committee. 

Regardless of the distance, your counselors can communicate with potential students and help them by clarifying any information needed, sharing relevant documents, and guiding them throughout the whole process.

International Recruitment Strategy #3:  International Student Success Stories 

Providing proof of successful international student experiences is a surefire way to make potential international students feel more connected, included, and comfortable choosing your institution. Therefore, you should focus your recruitment efforts on improving the experience of your current international students in order to generate better referrals and leads.

It would be best for you to work toward ensuring that international students have an environment where they can thrive in your higher education institution, as well as dedicating a portion of your website to displaying their success stories. This way, you can expand your reach and influence over your target audience. After all, when it comes to studying abroad, students want to enroll in a school where they are most likely to grow and progress academically and socially. Therefore, they will research the experience of other students in similar circumstances before committing to the school.

You can also expand your strategic international partnerships in order to enhance your brand’s reputation and improve the student experience. Consider research collaboration opportunities and exchange programs that might benefit your international students.

Use all opportunities presented to you and provide a good experience for international students that choose your school. In turn, they will help advocate your brand and share their success stories that inspire other students to join your college as well.

The Bottom Line

Spread your wings and generate leads from all over the world. Attract potential international students by optimizing your website for international students, incorporating virtual campus tours and web-conferencing tools, as well as leveraging the success stories of existing international students and alumni. With these three strategies, you can ensure a better and easier experience for students getting to know your school.

Are you interested in learning more about how to improve your higher education institution’s website? Contact us for a free SEO gap analysis and learn more about your website’s potential. Join us and become our next success story!

SEO for higher education focuses on helping schools outrank their competitors by reaching a wider audience, producing more leads, and increasing conversion rates.

So, how does a higher placement on the search engine results pages (SERP) turn into an increase in enrollment? Well, it’s all about attracting your target audience and driving prospective students to your website. By ranking high, your school has better chances of students actually clicking on your site, learning more about the programs offered, and enrolling there. After all, the first website on a search engine results page gets an average click-through rate (CTR) of 27.6%. 

So, the higher you are on the SERP, the better visibility you have and the more traffic you will attract. Ultimately, this will lead to better chances of landing prospective students and increasing your enrollment numbers.

Various factors contribute to a successful SEO marketing strategy for higher education websites, starting from on-page elements and content to the reputation. However, as you work on optimizing such elements, you can encounter various challenges, including technical issues.

Working with an experienced SEO agency, such as ours, will make it easier for you to navigate through various difficulties. So, let’s look at what makes us a top-notch SEO agency and how we can help your SEO strategy.

Establishing a Strong SEO Foundation

The first step to establishing a strong SEO foundation is to be aware of your site’s current state, the competition, and areas needing improvement. Therefore, we’ll start by performing an in-depth analysis of your search performance. Once we have gathered enough data to make an informed decision, we’ll develop an actionable SEO strategy that clearly defines the roadmap needed to put your higher education website on top of the SERPs.

On average, this step takes around 30-45 days to complete, depending on the size of your website.

Improving high-impact pages

Based on our comprehensive research of your website, target audience, and current performance, we will implement our recommendations to optimize your online presence. Our approach includes a thorough examination of your site to identify and rectify technical issues, ensuring that your content is displayed optimally for a seamless user experience.

Moreover, we will audit and set up analytics, utilizing tools such as Google Analytics 4 to track the effectiveness of your marketing strategies and monitor your conversion rate. If you already have analytics in place, we will review and fine-tune them to gain more in-depth insights into your website’s performance.

At this stage, it is also crucial to improve your content. We’ll help you find new content opportunities as well as identify and work on improving the already-existing content that could be performing better. With these steps, you will start to see improvements in your site’s organic traffic in just a matter of weeks.

Producing content that drives value

Our objective is to enhance your higher education institution’s website and ensure it reaches the right audience—those interested in exploring your institution’s offerings and programs. By producing content that drives value, your site can bring relevant traffic from potential students who want to pursue a degree in the programs of study you offer and then funnel that traffic down to conversion.

To achieve this goal, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of what students are searching for at different stages of their college decision-making journey. With the insights gained from this data, we work with you to create content that aligns with their needs and matches their intent.

Driving traffic and brand recognition

In addition to improving conversion rates, increasing organic traffic is crucial to establishing your brand. Our link-building team will craft a link-building strategy by analyzing your existing links as well as those of your competitors and finding ways to not only catch up but surpass them. 

We will ensure that your higher education institution gets coverage on various authoritative and relevant sites where potential students can encounter your website and learn more about the programs provided. Throughout the link acquisition process, our team will help your site acquire valuable links that drive qualified traffic to your website and improve brand recognition.

Measuring performance

After implementing some of the steps planned in our lead generation strategies for your website, we will use multiple data sources to identify the strengths and weaknesses of our search strategy. This way, we measure performance based on specific pre-defined key performance indicators (KPI), such as the click-through rate, domain authority, keyword ranking, page views, and more. Based on the results, we make the necessary adjustments to keep improving and adapting to the standard of the ever-changing market.

But just because your site sees significant improvement after the first few months of working with us doesn’t mean that our work is done. We will always be looking for ways to update and upgrade our strategies and goals in order to help your website reach and stay at the top.

Conclusion 

SEO has become a crucial part of college enrollment growth. To be the best, you must work with the best SEO agency for higher education. Our team has extensive experience working with higher education institutions to help them rank higher in search results and reach outstanding growth after only a few months. Want to be the next success story? Contact us for a free SEO gap analysis, where we estimate your site’s potential and share more growth opportunities.

WordPress powers 41.5% of the web. We at Manaferra like to think of WordPress as one of the best things that ever happened to the web. Its simplicity and flexibility are the main reasons why WordPress is so popular nowadays.

WordPress it’s one of the most SEO-friendly Content Management Systems out there. But there is still some work to be done in some areas. Let’s take this case as an example:

You have this amazing, well-designed WordPress site with high-quality content and great user engagement, but while your website gets more visits day after day, a very common problem starts to appear, and that is “your page speed.”  Judging it from a visitor’s perspective, that is irritating, and as a result, it sends your potential customers away from your site. Even SEO is affected by page speed.

Below, we present to you some tips on how to speed up your WordPress site.

First of all let’s see how fast is your site loading by using Pingdom.

The first thing that visitors notice when they come to your site is speed, and if your site is slow, they will go away. You may have the best website in the world, but if nobody sees it, what’s the point then. Google also is considering site speed as a ranking factor. Studies have shown that slower sites perform badly compared to the faster ones when it comes to buying stuff online or, putting it differently, e-commerce sites.

From the above screenshot, we can see that the load time is relativity good, but still, there is room for improvement. Let’s start with the basics.

Plugins

WordPress plugins are wonderful, especially for us with limited coding skills (or not at all). One-click, and you’ll add almost any feature you want on your site. They also have a dark side. They make your site perform slower. If you go to Installed Plugins in WP Dashboard, I’m sure that you’ll find one or two active plugins that you don’t use. De-activate them and look for other plugins that you don’t need that much. Also, install P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) and use it to see which are slowing down your site. After that, you can see what’s happening in the backside and try to find a solution to fix it.

Hosting

Hosting is an essential part of your WordPress site. It’s a little bit tricky to find good hosts with affordable prices. However, it is important that the website’s speed can not be ignored. If you just have started your WP website,  you might want to look at Bluehost, Dreamhost, or Hostgator. These hosting providers are a good solution if you have just started your website. Still, when its visits start to get significance increase,  you might want to start thinking about switching to a VPS or Dedicated Servers like OVH, GoDaddy, HostNexus, GoDaddy, or others.

Another solution for WordPress hosting websites may also be WPEngine, a provider built and developed mostly for WP sites.

Caching

With caching, you’ll see dramatic improvements the moment you click the Save button. There are two popular caching plugins, WP Super Cache and W3 Total Cache. I prefer the second one. These plugins are amazing because they simplify the way WordPress works. After all, it makes it possible that the content you’re looking for to be served from the cache without being generated over and over again.

The picture below shows how installing and configuring W3 Total Cache helped our blog go down from 1.71s to only 964ms load time. Isn’t it great?

Image Compression

When you’re dealing with websites with many pictures, then image compression is a must. For WordPress, there is this amazing plugin called WP Smush.it which helps a lot. What this plugin does is that it automatically compresses every picture while you’re uploading them. You can also go back and compress (or “smush”) pictures that are already on the site, like logo or banners, to save in maximum.

Content Delivery Network

CDN stands for Content Delivery Network, and it’s a way of delivering your web objects like scripts, URLs, text and graphics from different locations across the globe. For example, when a visitor from Europe visits your blog, it will automatically look for the closest server that hosts these files to show you. This way, you’ll improve your site speed.

Conclusion

A faster website these days is a must. It’s not something you can ignore. Ignoring it will cause visitors to leave your website, bad user experience, dropping rankings in Google etc. Most of the tips in the article are simple and easy to execute; however, if you don’t understand or know how to do something, I would be happy to help you. If you have any other tip on improving WordPress speed, please share it with us through comments.

Are you now more familiar with speeding up your website speed? Share your challenges with the community using the below comments.