Important Alert:
Summary: Generating leads is critical for education institutions a few months before admissions begin. With organic search being the leading driver of traffic to your website, using SEO to increase website traffic is the most effective way to generate high-quality leads. This article will also highlight key SEO mistakes to avoid for education websites to help you optimize your strategy for better results.
Key Takeaways:-
There are more than 40,000 colleges in India that prospective students choose from every year. With each of these educational institutions and many more international universities competing for attention, you must take a strategic approach to SEO and understand the fundamentals of how to improve traffic for education websites. This could seem overwhelming when you start, but with the right SEO services expertise, you could see results in no time.
Today, there are more businesses than ever using the same platforms to attract the same sets of people. This is also true for educational institutions trying to generate leads. SEO for education websites makes it easier to accomplish this goal to increase online visibility, attract prospective students to your website, generate leads, and increase enrollment. Collaborating with a digital marketing agency for education industry can further streamline these efforts, offering expertise tailored to the specific needs of educational institutions.
According to various reports, students and parents start looking for schools and colleges between six months and two years before they are due for admission. This is why it is important to ensure you understand the user’s search intent and create content that provides relevant value. For the highest chance of SEO success, you must implement several proven SEO practices that will increase website traffic and generate high-quality leads.
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This is one of the biggest mistakes even large companies make while trying to create digital content. Since the search engine algorithm determines SERP rankings, educational institutions try to create content that appeases the search engine. However, this results in keyword stuffing, clickbait-y content and overall reduced content quality.
Search engine algorithms today use website traffic to determine your page rank. This includes the number of pages visited, bounce rate, dwell time and footfall per month – all factors that indicate how much users like spending time on your website. If more people bounce from your website after staying for a short while, it tells the search engine that they’re not deriving enough value from you. On the other hand, if a visitor stays on your site longer, clicks on sufficient CTAs or visits multiple pages through internal links, the search engine deems your website relevant and useful.
Your institute’s geographical location is a significant factor that affects which students apply. Local SEO makes your college or university more virtually visible in specific geographical areas, increasing your chances of being discovered and contacted by prospective students.
By approaching local SEO strategically, your institution becomes more visible to students and parents within a specific radius, which results in higher inquiries and registrations. Make sure you don’t forget to update your Google Business Profile. This is Google’s way of listing your institution on the map and showing your contact information, website details and user reviews.
Creating and launching a website is just the beginning. Updating content regularly in keeping with market trends and what your users are searching for is the tough part.
You will need to create a content schedule and calendar that is updated regularly with content and published strategically to reach the right audience. Running a website or blog requires consistency. Publishing regularly drives organic traffic to your website and establishes you as a credible source of information.
By creating a content calendar, your page gets some semblance of order. It also tells your visitors that your page is active and will have something new for them whenever they come back.
If you want more organic website traffic, your content needs to be optimized for Google’s featured snippet. This is a box that you’ll find at the top of search results with a direct answer to the related search terms or keywords.
According to Google statistics, the first organic search result received 34% of all clicks from that search. User insights have shown that more people click on a featured snippet than on a search result link.
Use SERPs to identify your competitors, analyse their keyword strategies and understand their content plans. This will tell you what they are doing and how their content has performed so far. This will help you set a benchmark for your own content and keyword strategies.
Once you’ve achieved this milestone, make sure you strive to create more value than your competitors. Consider that your competitors are all talking about how to choose the best college based on placement rates. You need to create that blog and add additional information about the unheard-of career opportunities with this degree.
Keywords are the foundation of any SEO strategy. For educational institutions, keywords are the specific search terms or queries prospective students will enter into Google to find answers. Instead of just using keywords based on popularity, make sure you target your user’s search intent.
While targeting keywords, focus more on keywords related to the different courses you offer. For example, consider that you are offering a business degree with a few modules on AI in the business landscape. Instead of focusing solely on the business and marketing-related keywords, target AI keywords as well since that topic has a high search volume. You could also consider adding keywords like ‘online courses’ and ‘pay in installments’ to attract more students and even working professionals.
According to Statista’s search insights, about 58.67% of online traffic comes exclusively from mobile devices. That’s more than half of all search queries. For this reason, your website must be mobile-friendly, highly responsive and easy to access. This includes not only web pages and banners but also registration forms and payment portals. If users face issues with pages loading or forms getting submitted, it might discourage them from applying on your website and increase your bounce rate. This could negatively impact your SERP ranking as Google’s algorithm uses mobile indexing as a key factor while ranking your webpage.
A backlink is a hyperlink that points users from a third website to yours and plays a critical role in your website’s search engine ranking. It is a form of social proof for your website from the other website and tells the search engine that your website is credible. The more quality backlinks you have from reputed websites, the greater your chances of appearing at the top of a SERP ranking.
An FAQ section directly addresses questions your audience is asking. This gives you several opportunities to add more keywords to your content without it seeming forced or overdone. You can also use your website’s FAQ section to answer anything that the rest of the content on your page hasn’t addressed. This makes for perfectly placed featured snippet text and drives more organic traffic to your website.
Google’s search quality rater guidelines have been built on E.A.T (Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness). Recently, Google added a new E to its guideline – Experience. This is Google’s way of saying that the content creator’s reputation, credentials and experience are highly valued when it comes to evaluating their content.
Mediocre UX will significantly impact your SEO and not in a good way. Qualitative factors such as page load speeds, internal links, content quality, and website visuals are critical in establishing how users and search engines perceive your website. Your website needs a well-designed educational website wireframe to help address these factors. Because a poor UX will result in a higher abandon or bounce rate, which will, in turn, drop your SERP ranking.
When optimizing your education website, avoiding common SEO mistakes can save you time, effort, and missed opportunities. Here are the key pitfalls to steer clear of:
With more prospective students and their parents browsing on mobile devices, having a mobile-friendly website is essential. A poor mobile experience can lead to higher bounce rates and lower rankings in search results.
Many education institutions make the mistake of neglecting local SEO. Students often search for schools, colleges, or courses within specific geographic regions. Focusing on local keywords and creating location-based content can help you attract students from your target areas.
Keyword stuffing or targeting overly generic terms won’t help you rank well. Focus on specific, course-related keywords and use long-tail keywords that reflect the needs and interests of prospective students.
Quality content is one of the most important ranking factors for SEO. Many education websites fail to update their blogs or provide useful content for students. Regularly publishing informative, engaging, and well-structured content can improve your visibility and authority.
With the rise of virtual assistants, voice search is becoming increasingly popular. Optimizing your content for voice queries can help you capture more search traffic, as students may search for courses and institutions using voice commands.
Using some or all of these SEO best practices will significantly increase website traffic and improve the quality of leads you generate. To get guidance personalized for your unique business needs, speak to SEO experts and find out how to improve traffic for education websites.
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