SEO for educational websites is becoming tougher because of dense competition in the field. It is not easy to constantly go with the latest search trends and updates. Most SEO practitioners think that these trends and search algorithms are for dragging down your website traffic but they are purposed for increasing your site’s potential. Keeping up with these trends encourages you to create helpful content, a user-friendly website, and relevant content for searchers’ queries. You can get the most out of these algorithms by understanding the intention of the updates. By optimizing your school’s website following the algorithm updates, you can boost search rankings, boost website speed, make it user-friendly, and in the end attract more admissions which is the ultimate purpose of your SEO. A reputable SEO for education website agency can help you with their best SEO strategies. Here is the complete guide.
Step-1: Create High-Quality Content
In digital marketing, high-quality content means, SEO-friendly content. You can do this by finding the right keywords and placing them in strategic areas in the content. By doing this you are allowing search engines to go through each aspect of your content and information it contains. Conduct thorough keyword research about the education field. You will find a never-ending list of education or school-related keywords that other websites are writing about. You have to choose what specific keywords you need to target to attract parents and students. But even before keyword research, confirm who is your target audience. Then make a list of the phrases you think your prospects are typing in the search bar. After making a list of your needed keywords categorize them as primary keywords, secondary keywords, and tertiary keywords. Use them at different places in your content. Focus on using primary keywords in headings and most of the time, avoid keyword stuffing as it may impact negatively.
Step 2: Building Robust Link Networks
Link building serves as an integral component of any effective SEO strategy, playing a pivotal role in bolstering your website’s domain authority. Adding links to your web pages not only enhances the comprehensiveness of your content but also signifies its shareability. When reputable educational websites link to your content, it’s referred to as backlinking, carrying significant weight in enhancing your site’s credibility. External links direct users to external sources, signaling to search engines the depth of your research and the reliability of your content. However, exercise caution to ensure you’re linking to reputable, authoritative websites, as linking to unreliable sources may invite penalties from search engines. Interlinking within your website creates a content cluster, facilitating seamless navigation for visitors and increasing their time-spend with your site.
Step 3: Optimizing Technical SEO for Your School
Search engines prioritize websites that deliver a seamless user experience, emphasizing the importance of optimizing your school’s technical SEO. Make your website’s navigation smooth and get rid of glitches, it not only improves your search ranking but also establishes user satisfaction. To ensure your website is technically sound, focus on measuring, rectifying, and creating various elements. Evaluate metrics such as website bounce rate, dwell time, and page speed, while addressing issues such as broken redirects and duplicate content. Additionally, prioritize the creation of a sitemap and robots.txt file to allow search engines to index your site By proactively addressing technical SEO concerns, your school demonstrates its commitment to providing a user-friendly online experience.
Step 4: Enhance Local SEO for Educational Institutions
As the trend toward location-specific searches gains momentum, the significance of local SEO for educational institutions grows in tandem. It increases the chances of your school appear in search results when prospects seek institutions within a particular region. Nonetheless, effective local SEO strategies remain within reach. Like other SEO tactics, optimizing keyword usage constitutes an initial approach. Putting location-specific keywords in your content and keep up with the search engine guide for keyword usage. Examples of location-specific keywords for educational websites include “Top schools in (city name),” “London MBA,” “Masters in Norway,” “CBSE School in Jaipur,” “business school in the UK,” “best economics courses offered in India,” and more. Another avenue for enhancing local SEO is ensuring consistency in NAP (name, address, and phone number) listings. While most schools provide this information on their sites, it may not always adhere to Google’s preferred format.
Search engines prioritize web pages containing complete contact information for schools. While this information can be distributed across various pages, at least one page should present all relevant details. For instance, if your address appears on the ‘About Us’ page while your phone number is solely listed on the ‘Contact Us’ page, your SEO efforts may fall short.
Step 5: Work on Mobile SEO
Today mobile SEO has become a cornerstone of digital strategy. To effectively engage the growing number of prospects researching schools on mobile devices, meticulous attention to the mobile-friendly or responsive website is imperative. While many assume that responsive design inherently renders a site mobile-friendly, this isn’t always the case. Even with responsive design, optimization for the specific device at hand remains essential. To enhance mobile SEO, manual adjustments to your mobile site can improve user experience. Search Engine Journal, an SEO-dedicated website, offers several recommendations to ensure your mobile site aligns with search engine standards:
- Resize images for mobile users
- Implement a user-friendly, concise navigation menu with 4-8 pages, utilizing a hamburger menu if necessary.
- Exercise caution with pop-ups
- Minimize content displayed above the fold
- Incorporate tailored mobile calls-to-action.
Google’s mobile-friendly test provides valuable insights for schools seeking to optimize their mobile sites, offering a comprehensive analysis and highlighting potential technical issues.
Step 6: Optimize Your Site for Voice Search
With the increasing prevalence of voice search, modern SEO strategies also include the topic of optimization for voice-enabled inquiries. Addressing user queries directly in your website content is key, given the question-based nature of voice searches. For example, while a desktop user might search “best business school Jaipur,” a voice searcher may ask, “Where can I study business in Jaipur?”
Voice search optimization helps identify question-based queries during the keyword research phase. Subsequently, integrating concise answers to these questions within your content enhances visibility. Including brief responses, approximately 29 words in length, to specific queries within longer posts increases the likelihood of your pages being featured as snippets. Featured snippets, displayed prominently atop Google’s search results, are the primary responses read aloud to voice search users, underscoring their importance in securing visibility for relevant queries.
Step 7: Monitor the Performance of Your SEO Efforts
Search engine optimization can’t be done perfectly in just one move but requires continuous dedicated efforts that continually evolve. Given its potential long-term impact and the dynamic nature of search algorithms, maintaining an effective SEO strategy is imperative. As search algorithms evolve in response to internet trends and user behavior, ongoing optimization becomes essential. For educational websites, tracking your site’s search rankings is crucial, allowing you to identify areas for improvement and ensure optimal performance. Several key metrics can provide insights into the effectiveness of your efforts, including organic traffic growth, keyword rankings, conversion rates from organic traffic, average time spent on the page, bounce rate, top landing pages attracting organic traffic, number of indexed pages, and link growth, encompassing both new acquisitions and losses.
Various tools are available to assess your school’s SEO health and its performance. These tools can evaluate the indexability of your pages. Regularly conducting tests to evaluate your site’s loading speed, mobile-friendliness, and other factors is also advisable.
Conclusion
Given the pivotal role of search visibility in student recruitment, SEO for education should remain a central component of inbound marketing techniques for institutions. The intricacies of Google’s algorithms may remain elusive, but you can always seek help from a top-rated school SEO services agency like SAG IPL which can help you with numerous resources, tools, and insights. Elevate your website’s prominence surpassing your competitors and reach out to easily who are looking for schools online.