SEO for Educational institutions: Strategies for a Page 1 Ranking

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is often a strategy set aside by professionals working in Higher Education and schools especially those with small marketing departments, because of the immense amount of work and upkeep it requires. 

SEO isn’t something you just do once and hope for the best. Because algorithms are constantly changing and the bots crawling your site are getting smarter, it is essential that you constantly re-visit best practices and strategies, and how they relate to the success of your website.

One of the simplest ways to begin optimizing your website for search engines understanding the branded and unbranded searches.

Branded Searches

These types of search engine queries include your college or university’s name plus a particular piece of content, such as “IIM Scholarship” or “Best College football team in Kerala” These kinds of searches serve up interior pages of your website prior to your homepage because Google wants to help searchers find information quickly.

Implications of branded search

If someone is conducting a branded search, it means they already know about your institution. So at this point, you’re not competing for rankings, but you could be your own worst enemy.

Because branded searches serve up interior pages of your website, families are entering your site through a “mudroom” rather than a “front door.” So, if your interior pages are messy, confusing, or disorganized, you may have trouble keeping new website visitors on your site.

To get an idea of which interior pages you need to focus on, use Google Analytics to create a report of top entry points on your website. While you might be too busy to tackle all your interior pages, starting with your top 10 entry points will greatly improve your bounce rates. In addition, branded searches also result in what we call the 0th (zero-ith) impression, or, the search impression — the impression before the intended first impression of your website. Within search results, searchers can see your social media pages, display ads, directories, ratings, rankings, bad press and so much more — just on Page 1. So, if they see something they don’t like they may never even visit your website.

Unbranded Searches

Unbranded searches are where schools meet the most head-to-head competition. These are general searches for colleges that serve a particular interest, location, or goal, such as:

  • Best colleges for Mechanical Engineering in Kerala
  • Best boarding schools in India
  • Best private colleges in UK
  • All-girls schools in Boston

It is in these unbranded searches where colleges and universities have to work their hardest to earn the clicks and homepage design becomes critically important. 

Are you tired of spending tremendous amount of money with no real return on investment for your SEO and SMM strategies? Running online paid advertising campaigns is not an easy job at all, you need a specialized team dedicated team to keep an eye on every potential opportunity, set KPI’s, measure results, and stay on budget at all times. We know SEO as if it’s one of our families. We will help you make the best of it by improving your website performance, ranking, and conversations rates, with valuable insights about your business and potential customers.

We are offering 24 SEO tools for Educational Institutions

  1. No. of Key Phrases Optimized/Keyword Analysis/URL mapping
  2.  Sitemap 
  3.  Crawler Implementation
  4.  Google Panda and Penguin update checking for the website 
  5.  Website Document type Analysis.
  6.  Cross Browser Compatibility
  7.  Website Load Time Monitoring
  8.  Checking the Page Size
  9.  Check the Broken Links and its Correction 
  10. Duplicate Content Checking 
  11. Optimize Title & Meta Tags 
  12.  Checking of Site Structure
  13.  Banner / Image Optimization and ALT tags
  14.  H1 / H2 Tag Optimization 
  15.  Content Optimization 
  16.  Create new Optimized Pages if required 
  17.  URL Rewriting and URL Optimization 
  18.  Logo Placement and Optimization
  19.  Favicon Implementation 
  20.  Anchor Text, Hyperlink Analysis and Optimization 
  21.  Optimization of Internal Navigation /linking structure
  22.  User Friendly Check On Website And Fix All The Issue User Can Face 
  23.  Mobile Friendly Test and Fix All the Issues Found 
  24.  Check all Contact Form, Subscribe And Other Form And Fixing

 

For more info fill in the contact section of our web site our sales team will provide you Best SEO and Social media marketing solutions with advanced technical tools