We have left those days behind us where students ask their seniors or guardians about top colleges and universities for higher education. They simply enter or dictate their query on the search bar of the search engine and browse for top educational institutions. Most of the students end up selecting colleges or universities that appear in the top ranks of the search engine results.
The top educational institutes must focus on improving their SEO for their web pages. An SEO expert will suggest the same and work towards improving your institute’s web page rankings in search engine results.
Importance Of SEO For Institutional Websites
Google has emerged as the ultimate source for every query of a student regarding the best educational institutions today. Hence, it is essential for any university or college to secure top ranks in search results so that the maximum number of students visit their web pages. This is where SEO comes in handy for these institutes. It helps the institutes maintain a regularly updated web page and attracts a maximum number of potential students.
We will take a brief insight into the various factors which can improve SEO for educational institutions.
Conducting An SEO Website Audit
To identify the weakest areas of their web pages, the institutions need to opt for SEO Audit Services. This aids them in identifying their weaknesses that need a change. Conducting an SEO audit for educational institutions makes the web page easily accessible for search engine bots. This also increases the organic traffic entering the website. An SEO expert in Gold Coast will help you conduct this audit and increase the online ranking of your institutional website.
To rank higher in browse results, they need to perform the following tactics:
- On-page Audit
- Off-page Audit
- Technical Audit
- Content Audit
- Architecture
- Code review
Unique Long-Form Content
Blog posts and long-form content are a great way of informing students regarding the various facilities of your institute. Student testimonials or professor reviews are a great way of idealizing your content. Besides being descriptive, your content should also be unique so that it can be easily differentiated from other potential college websites. Your website content should be engaging and adaptive so that it attracts the maximum number of students. Being highly shareable, it creates natural links across various social media platforms.
Google always prefers quality over quantity. It promotes sites with a good website user interface and unique content. This has proved to attract the maximum audience to the web page. Unique content not only attracts more students to your website but also retains them in the future. Hence it is essential to have good and regularly updated content for your institutional website.
Building Relevant URLs And Links
If your web page URL is built with irrelevant letters and numbers, the search engines do not understand them well. As a result, your web page fails to rank high in search results. It is highly effective if your URL contains relevant keywords related to the users’ search.
Requesting inbound links from other university and college portals is also an effective measure. In the same manner, you can also create outbound links that link your portal to other higher authority educational institutions. This helps you improve your search verticals.
Mobile-Friendly Webpage
In the future, Google will be using the mobile version of a web page as its default version, and the rankings of the websites will be decided accordingly. Mobile phones have been proven as the best and most popular source of browsing info on the internet. Hence, by making your portal mobile-friendly, an increasing number of people will be accessing your website. Any renowned expert will work on improving the mobile friendliness of your website, which ensures lower bounce rates.
Conclusion
As we have discussed, SEO is a critical factor for your educational institution’s website. More importantly, you should work on how to improve your SEO tactics. Any interactive, mobile-friendly, and optimized website will ensure that the maximum number of students are attracted to your institute portal.