SEO for Colleges and Universities

When developing a marketing plan for a college or university, it is important to assess the site’s presence in organic search engine rankings. Let’s try a quick exercise. Head to Google and try to find your institution without looking it up by name. If you are unable to find your site through the search engine, you are in need of a comprehensive SEO strategy.


With online colleges and universities popping up by the dozens and dominating search engine rankings, established higher education institutions are constantly struggling to keep up. Because of this growing competition, it is all the more important for established colleges and universities to develop and stick to a concrete SEO strategy.

How to Approach A College or University’s SEO Strategy

1. An Overall SEO Audit and Health Check

One of the most important steps for any website SEO strategy, particularly college and university sites, is an SEO audit and overall health check. Large websites often go through various stages of growth and can have different individuals working on the content, code and structure. These variations in development can result in issues such as cluttered code, missing Meta tags, orphaned pages, broken links, slow site speed and more. As a result, sites can experience issues in search engines when the site is crawled and indexed.

Through an in depth SEO audit and health check, site issues can be tracked down and repaired. This will ensure the college or university’s site is in tiptop shape for an effective search engine optimization strategy.

2. Optimizing Content for Increased Traffic and Rankings

Content is king. As far as SEO is concerned, this couldn’t be more true. Search engines understand and index a site based on links, the content contained within the code, and the content on the page. On-site optimization is a crucial part of any college or university’s SEO strategy in order to gain organic traffic and rankings, as well as convert users.

Developing a well-structured content strategy is instrumental to the optimization process; each page’s content should be carefully crafted around high volume search terms and structured in a way that supports the overlying degree program and college as a whole. Pages on a site with thin or poorly optimized content will not rank well. In fact, these pages can be penalized by search engines through various algorithm updates. This is all the more reason to view a website’s content as a key strategy in the marketing and optimization process.

3. Tailoring SEO Strategy & User Experience to a Potential Student’s Perspective

Improvements to site health and traffic are the building blocks of SEO; a site can’t rank well in search engines or increase organic traffic without it. However, some colleges and universities often find that even with substantial traffic increases, new student inquires and applications do not always follow suit. In this case, it is important to take a look at a site’s user experience. Try to view the college or university’s site though a potential student’s eyes. Tailor the site’s layout, navigation and call-to-actions to specific curriculums, majors, courses, tuition and other important information for which a potential student may be looking.

Read more on SEO strategies for College’s and Universities by visiting one of our SEO Case Studies.