Historically, educational institutions (except all-online ones) have lagged behind in their website optimisation. Elite schools and universities didn’t need to ‘advertise’ and people found a way to learn more about them and apply. That is no longer the case, and we can see that these institutions are really starting to give a big push to their online marketing, whether it be through pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns like Google Ads or working on directly improving their SEO.
In the cheatsheet below, you’ll see that we put a focus on mobile optimisation, keywords, content and fixing technical SEO errors such as titles, URLs, meta tags, h1 tags and broken links.
In addition to this, it is important you focus on getting brand mentions and links back to your site. This intertwines with the PR your school or university does, as the high quality links you want to get are on sites such as these:
- The Top Private Schools in the US.
- The Top Schools
If you’re focused on higher education, ranking for your degree programs is just as important. You can do this through getting backlinks or through creating content on your website, through a dedicated page or blog, where you talk about programs, faculty, campus life, etc. The most important part of optimisng for you will be understanding the intent of the visitors to your site. Are they mostly looking for admission requirements, what the campus looks like, what are employment rates post graduation, etc? or are they mostly parents trying to figure out campus life? Once you figure this out, you can adapt your site to suit what your visitors want to see.
