Take advantage of digital marketing and SEO to get in front of more prospective students.

1. HIGHER ED SEO TIPS: POWER
UP ONLINE VISIBILITY
By. Jordan Lowry
Digital Marketing Analyst

2. SEO AND HIGHER EDUCATION
 Higher education institutions are beginning to realize the
true value of SEO.
 Unfortunately, the SEO landscape is volatile and ever
changing. However, there are some best practices which
have been fairly consistent over the last couple of years.
 We believe that these best practices will continue to be
relevant throughout 2016 and work to improve online
visibility.

3. KEYWORD RESEARCH AND TARGETING URL’S
 To get started first conduct
keyword research which
will drive content creation.
 Start with a free keyword
research tool from
SEObook.
 This tool pulls data from
Google and Bing’s
databases.

4. KEYWORD RESEARCH AND TARGETING URL’S
 Next, you want to build an
appropriate page around a
theme of closely related
keywords.
 These keywords should
relate to educational
programs your University
offers.

5. KEYWORD RESEARCH AND TARGETING URL’S
 A PDF is not an appropriate
landing page.
 Rather than a dedicated landing
page, one University had
downloadable PDF’s of their
courses.
 The alternative is to build a
landing page around your
keywords and include
conversion points.

6. AVOID DUPLICATE CONTENT

7. AVOID DUPLICATE CONTENT
 Google admits that 25-30% of the internet is
duplicated content. However, we can still take
measures to avoid this.

8. AVOID DUPLICATE CONTENT
 To get an idea if your site has
duplicate content simply use
Siteliner to run a quick
diagnostic.
 I can see this college has around
10% duplicated content but, the
free version this tool will only
look at 250 pages.

9. AVOID DUPLICATE CONTENT
 A way to fix this is to write unique copy on key pages and block
unnecessary pages from being crawled by search engines with a
robots.txt file.
 The robots.txt is a nifty text file you can create to instruct search engine
robots on where and where not to crawl your site.

10. GET A GRIP ON LOCAL VISIBILITY
 Colleges are not immune from the types of competition businesses face
online. As you can see competition is fierce.

11. GET A GRIP ON LOCAL VISIBILITY
 There are a lot of different options for any prospective student deciding
on where to further their education.
 Local visibility or local SEO has risen in prominence over the last
several years.
 But how can Higher Educational Institutions benefit?

12. GET A GRIP ON LOCAL VISIBILITY
 Google has begun to provide
more individualized search
features.
 These personalized features are
based on a person’s geographic
location and search history.

13. GET A GRIP ON LOCAL VISIBILITY
 You can take advantage of this by:
 Local Citation Corrections - Your first job is to make sure your college’s
address is easily found on key pages. Then you need to ensure it is listed
correctly throughout the web.

14. GET A GRIP ON LOCAL VISIBILITY
 Local Content - Once your Higher Ed’s citations are handled it’s time to
produce local content.
 It’s important this content resonates with your audience.
 Maybe you build a page dedicated to ‘College Life’ and talk about activities
around your college’s campus.

15. DON’T BLOCK IMPORTANT RESOURCES
 Blocking content that is important to searchers within search engines is
detrimental.
 A common way to block important information is with a robots.txt file.

16. DON’T BLOCK IMPORTANT RESOURCES
 A robots.txt file is a simple file which holds pretty significant power.
 This file controls how search engines initially crawl a website when they
first visit.
 However as you can imagine it can be pretty easy to block important
resources you would otherwise want indexed.

17. DON’T BLOCK IMPORTANT RESOURCES
 To check this simply type your
domain name
“example.com/robots.txt”.
 Remember replace
“example.com” with your
Universities domain name.

18. DON’T BLOCK IMPORTANT RESOURCES
 A good rule of thumb is to not block key pages from search engines with
a robots.txt file.
 For example, you would not want to block important categories such as,
Admissions, Academics or Athletics sections.
 Keep in mind, if you use Google Site Search as your internal site search,
blocking a section with the robots.txt file will also prevent it from
showing up properly in your internal search as well.

19. SEO FOR HIGHER EDUCATION
 Higher Educational institutions may not take digital marketing or
search engine optimization into consideration.
 However, no website is immune from the grasps of Google.

20. SEO FOR HIGHER EDUCATION
 Take advantage of digital marketing and SEO to get in front of more
prospective students.
Related Posts
● 8 Tips about Image optimization for Search Engines
● How-To: Robots.txt Disaster Prevention
● Robots.txt “Disallow” and “No Index” Meta Tag: What’s the Difference?