If universities create content that is diverse and engaging, they can increase their brand presence, generating more student inquiries.
Universities must create content and marketing strategies which differ from other already established educational institutes if they want to make themselves unique and competitive.
Your university’s first point of contact with prospective students is likely to be online. Prospecting students are more likely to find and engage with your university on social media, through a blog post, or digital display ads.
In today’s challenging higher education landscape, making a good first impression is critical to success. It is extremely important to create quality content that attracts the right students. Having a well-designed website can help a university attract students, providing information about the university that will help prospects decide if it is the right fit for them.
Content marketing in higher education is a creative process. There’s so much you can do and experiment with. Technological advances are making it easier to create and market content, requiring less time to do so.
Opportunities to Create Content
What you consider interesting is probably not what your prospective students find interesting. A truly successful content strategy starts with research to gather data. What kind of information are prospective students searching for? You can use free tools to figure out what keywords students use when they search on Google and uncover the questions they are seeking answers to. You can even study their search patterns on your website, finding out which pages they visit most often and which they spend the most time perusing. You need to know how to identify content which is performing well, which is performing poorly, and even suss out what content is missing entirely.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console (previously called Google Webmaster Tools) is a free service that provides valuable information about your website’s performance in Google’s search results. This tool allows you to see which keywords are prominent on your pages, together with the times those pages have been visited. It also indicates which pages are most interesting to your site visitors, as indicated by the length of time they spend on each page. The data can be used to improve pages with low visibility and to check that pages with high visibility are providing good quality content.
Review the keywords shown for each of your site’s pages. There are some that are frequently searched but which don’t result in many few click-throughs to your site. If you are seeing a low search engagement, it could be a sign that users are seeing you in the search results, but not clicking on your link to visit your web site. This happens if they don’t find the link and the short text snippet (the metadata) they see for your school interesting as they skim through results they found in the search engine .
In addition, results for your school could be buried several pages deep in Google or some other search engine, where they would be hidden from potential students. It is beneficial to optimize your school’s pages to improve their visibility in the search engine results. Using Google Search Console is a great way to see how your site is performing and where you should spend your time and effort making improvements as you create your content marketing strategy.
Google Analytics
Organic search traffic is the traffic that comes to your site from a search engine, such as Google, without you having to pay for it. The pages on your site getting the most organic search traffic are the those that show up most frequently in the first page of search engine results. You need to identify which pages are getting the least traffic and consider changing the keywords drawing visitors to the search engine. Google Analytics allows lets you track your site visitors through your site, identifying pages users find most interesting and showing you how those users travel among your site’s pages. It also lets you see whether users are finding the pages you want them to, and helps you identify identify dead end pages – those that users visit when they first come to your site, then immediately bounce away from the site. If you use the data from Google Analytics, you can create a content marketing strategy that will help increase traffic to pages that are already doing well, or improve pages that have no traffic.
You can make your website more engaging by providing content users find informative or interesting, and by linking to related content. In short, Google Analytics will help users interact more with your website.
Google Analytics can tell you what users have searched for on your site, as shown above. You should take some time to determine how well your site will fare in search results, type in potential search terms and see if your targeted pages come up on the first page of the search results. You may need to re-prioritize your efforts, focusing your efforts on improving those search results.
Keyword research
Before writing content for your web page, you should research keywords applicable to that page, then create that content based on that research. Each keyword is actually a phrase, reflecting the phrase a user might type into a search engine. Each of the following might be keywords frequently used when searching for information about obtaining an MBA:
- MBA degree importance
- MBA degree salary
- Part time MBA
- MBA degree online
You have identified several keywords, each of which can be made into a web page. If your research is well done, prospective MBA students will find each of these pages interesting and spend time on the page they discovered, then travel throughout your site more extensively as they research your school more thoroughly. By establishing trust with potential students, you will make your school more appealing than others. Optimizing several pages for related keywords makes it more likely that your website will show up for special search engine features such as rich snippets, and increases the likelihood your website will be be included in voice search results.
To find questions people are asking about a certain keyword, consider using sites like Answer the Public. You can use other tools, like Google Keyword Planner and Keywords Everywhere, to find long-tail keywords like “MBA degrees in southeast Michigan” or “MBA career paths in public schools.” These long-tail keywords can give you great ideas for future content.
Know your school’s needs
Your content strategy should be driven by your internal knowledge of your institution’s unique needs. Perhaps your MBA program has a wait list, but your Master’s in Accounting program is struggling to get prospects’ attention. If you want to improve your visibility for “Masters in Accounting” in the search engines, you should create content about that topic and monitor that traffic using Google Analytics to see which pages your prospects find most interesting.
Deciding which content you want to cover
After finding ideas for topics to write about, the next step is to come up with relevant keywords. Remember that certain topics or keywords might only work well for a certain type of content. Content-type refers to the different types of content that can be published on a website, such as a blog post, an article, or a guide.
The key phrase “Which universities offer part-time Ph.D. programs?” can be used to write a blog post. What are the 10 best universities that offer part-time Ph.D. programs?
To sum up, you should select various content types depending on the keywords you want to target on your university website. Different types of content require different platforms and strategies for promotion.
Content-type: Pages
Pages are especially well-suited for writing about news, research, and interviews – any information that is likely to change slowly over time. The article content type allows you to share information about specific research conducted and published by your university. You can also write articles that feature interviews with students, faculty, or alumni.
An example of content you could create would be an overview of a Ph.D. program your school offers. The main page for your Ph.D. programs should have links to separate pages for the Ph.D. course structures, the Ph.D. fee structure, faculty for the Ph.D programs., and facilities available for research by Ph.D. candidates.
Web pages for universities should contain complete information about the programs offered by the university and the procedure which prospective students need to follow to apply for admission.
Content-type: Blog post
For schools, blog posts are great for covering content addressing dynamic school programs or functions. Posts are also a good place to discuss student’s experiences, grant applications, new faculty hires and retirements, etc.
Writing content with Search Engines in mind
If you want your website to be successful, it is important to have a lot of content. This will help improve the user experience and make your site more visible to search engines. Statistics indicate pages focusing on a single topic and having a length of 1,700 words to 2,000 words hold visitor’s interest longer.
Further, it is important to offer information in a “silo” format. Stated differently, if you have a single page addressing your MBA program, your site visitor will move on relatively quickly. On the other hand, if you offer ten pages devoted to your MBA, your visitor will likely investigate the first page and move on to glean additional information about the program on subsequent pages – all the while moving closer to becoming a prospective student.
In addition, search engines such as Google note the additional MBA information you have, and conclude you are an expert on the topic, improving your visibility in their search results.
The MBA overview page should should have information on career opportunities, internships, and alumni. The overview page should have a sprinkling of internal links to other pages on your webs site with more detailed information, encouraging your visitor to drill down and investigate your program more completely.
Headers
Headers break up your page into smaller sections which facilitate skimming, which site visitors prefer when deciding what information is of interest and what is not. In many cases, they will read the first sentence or two to determine whether they’ll leave the page, then they’ll skim down the page to see if the headers pique their interest. Only if you’ve passed these initial tests will your site visitor begin to absorb the information you’ve put on the page. Further, once you have passed this initial test, it is more likely that the visitor will be open to reading subsequent, related pages. They will be more open to signing up for an email list at that point, and are on the road to becoming a prospective student.
Headers tell search engines what the subject matter of the page is and help improve a page’s rank in search engine results pages (SERPs). They also provide a better experience for users by making it easier to navigate a page. Google uses header tags to help it understand the structure and content of a web page. The header tags go from Header 1 to Header 6, each with a different level of importance. The further down the page an element is, the less weight it has in Google’s eyes. The most prominent header is H1, followed by H2, etc. There can only be one H1 tag per page and it should indicate the page’s main topic. Multiple H2s can be used as subheaders or subtopics for each page. H3s can be used for subtopics which are part of the H2 section.
Header tags should be organized like an outline. You can’t just put headers on a page, you have to make sure you’re using the correct HTML code to ensure the search engines understand their importance. Content Management Systems (CMSs) like WordPress and Drupal make it easy to do this. The header text should contain the keyword specific to that page.
Keywords
To draw your targeted audience to your school’s site, keyword research is essential. Once an appropriate keyword has been identified, content for the page can be created. There are many free tools available that can help you identify which keywords would be most qualified for each piece of content. Tools such as Google Keyword Planner, Keywords Everywhere, and Answer the Public are several options that can provide you with the information you need for keyword selection.
When creating content, it is beneficial to create and target both primary and secondary keywords. This will help your content reach a broader audience. Your primary keywords should appear multiple times in the content, while your secondary keywords may only appear once. The secondary keywords should provide more specific information about the primary keywords. Other potential keywords you may want to target could also help shape your strategy for developing new content.
The primary keywords for each page should be chosen with the intent of ranking for that particular keyword. The primary keyword should appear several times within the page’s content to ensure your site appears in search engine results. Make sure to use that primary keyword in your H1 header tag, in the first paragraph of the page, and sprinkled occasionally in the body content. Be sure to include it in the metadata which the search engines will use as part of their search results. Secondary keywords can then be added throughout the page.
Metadata
Metadata is the information that appears on the search engine results page, and includes the page title and a brief description of the page’s contents. Metadata is essential for search engine visibility. If you don’t optimize your title tag and meta description, it’s unlikely that you’ll appear in search engines such as Google.
The title tag and meta description on each web page should be unique and contain the keywords relevant to the page’s content. Making sure your page includes commonly searched keyword will ensure that it appears in Google searches for those terms. The search engine returns results matching the query the searcher entered, and an optimized title tag and meta description draws the searcher’s eye to your page. Once they click on the search engine link, they become a visitor to your page – the first step to becoming your prospective student.
If a user is looking for something that you offer, but no relevant results show up because every page of your site has the same generic metadata, they may not be able to find what they’re looking for. This creates a frustrating experience. When advertising to prospective students, it is important that they are able to find what they are looking for both with and without your brand name.
If you use WordPress or some other Content Management System (CMS), you may be able to install a plugin such as Yoast. Such a plugin allows you to easily add a unique title tag and meta description to your page.
Links
You should incorporate internal links in each of your pages. These links provide a clickable route to other parts of your website. Similarly, you should incorporate external links to other websites. Both are important to ensure your web pages rank highly in the search engines.
Conclusion
When universities want to get their name in front of prospective students, their content marketing strategy is critical. To make your higher education marketing campaigns more efficient, you should learn about the latest trends. This page has dealt primarily with written pages consisting of prose and pictures, but audio and video are also powerful tools to expand your school’s reach. You will increase your engagement rates and generate more student inquiries by following these top content marketing and digital marketing strategies for higher education.
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