Education industry has completely revolutionized, especially after the pandemic. This has made the overall landscape more competitive wherein organic search is perhaps the most important factor that drives traffic to the website. In fact, identifying and choosing the right type of college or course itself starts with a simple google search. And the best place to start with is to optimize your SEO. If your business knows how to rank your institute in top search through brand audit, your word is half done.
But most of the education websites or institutes fail to recognise the importance of brand audit wherein their business can get lost in the digital space. Optimizing SEO is not just related to enhancing search results, but will also help you to create and deliver a consistent experience. In addition, with the correct strategy, you can deliver high-quality content and information which is all you need to attract and retain users for a long period of time.
So, how as an education institute, can you enhance your brand audit?
- Use latest and current keywords
Developing SEO checklists for higher education especially for education institutes can be extensive and overwhelming as many factors need to be considered. But you don’t need to rush it all. Start with analyzing your user intent which will perhaps help you to develop keywords which are relevant and authoritative. You also need to consider statistics such as monthly key volume or organic search. Simultaneously, you also need to analyze your institute as well as courses you offer and a few other factors such as locations as well as your unique selling point.
For instance, if you offer remote courses, use of keywords like ‘online course’ would do good for your business.
However, one common mistake that most of the businesses do and neglect is use of many and extensive keywords. The rule here to follow is use one primary keyword across the page and couple it with secondary keywords. And once done, you are all set to help your business show up in the 1st page of search.
- Enhance your local higher education SEO
Another factor that needs to be considered is the location of your institute which could have a massive impact on your overall SEO search. This is because many students consider location as a primary factor while deciding any course and this should be reflected well in your SEO strategy. Without local SEO, your business will get lost in the crowd of thousands which can hamper growth of your business. In fact, 30% of respondents in a survey conducted by McKinsey stated that they always look for courses near their locality.
You need to start with identifying students that are attracted and are in near-by proximity. Even if they are looking for global courses, either way having a location-wise keywords will open doors of ample growth opportunities for your business.
The bottom line here is, no matter whether you are targeting local or international students, having a brand audit can help you attract and generate more traffic for your website.
- Optimizing website
brand audit alone will not do wonders for your institute and business itself. Another thing that you need to focus on is your website. After all, your institute website is the first thing that your prospect student notices when they land on search. And in this competitive world, creating a first impression is all you need to survive such a competitive business landscape. This includes everything right from user experience to the overall appearance of your website which can engage users.
One thing you can do is to include or optimize your call-to-action buttons which will influence your user to go to next steps of action. This will help you to convert leads into final customers. Similarly, you need to make your website mobile friendly as half of the web traffic is generated through mobile platforms. This will ensure your prospect can access your website from anywhere and at any time regardless of the device they are using. Lastly, you need to optimize your content which will enable your users to understand different courses and info about your school.
- Keyword placement
Once you have decided your keywords and optimize your content, the next step is to consider keyword placement which is a good place to start with and to generate traffic for your business. Make sure the content you are designing revolves around keywords. Besides, make use of those keywords which you have already known that can generate higher volume or traffic for your website. Once you know what keywords to use, you can decide on appropriately placing those keywords.
Some of the best places to incorporate these keywords for optimizing brand audit are titles, subheading, and images which will boost and drive your traffic. But while doing this, just make sure you don’t over use these keywords and compromise overall compatibility of your users making it difficult for them to read.
Final thoughts
The digital landscape as well as the way users search and reach institutes have changed. This has changed the way traffic is driven towards websites and one thing which is constantly evolving is brand audit. Now it is not just about using correct keywords, it extends way beyond that. But the overall process can get highly overwhelming and with constant changes to Google algorithm, it might get difficult to keep pace with changing things around your business.
But you don’t have to worry. All you need to do is identify the correct and most appropriate SEO strategy, define your keywords and their respective placement, optimize your website, review and execute your strategy for SEO.
Remember, SEO cannot be done overnight. It requires patience. These tips will surely help you get started. Of course, there are ample tactics that you can use that match the needs of your business, but you need to identify and make use of tactics and strategies that work best for your business in the long run.
