AT ALBION, WE DO THINGS DIFFERENTLY…

It goes without saying that your university, college or school’s website needs to rank at the top of Google for your organisation’s name – so that your existing customers can access the information they came to find. However, it is by achieving top rankings in Google’s results for keywords that relate to the courses you offer that you’ll generate more and better quality candidates.

This is the key to increasing search traffic that results in increased student numbers and profits. More often than not, generating more online traffic from potential new students is the most important area that education sector brands have yet to fully exploit. Over the years we have found that university and school websites are very well made, but suffer from a number of known problems that hold them back from higher rankings in the search results pages. To help them achieve more website traffic we implement a number of Search Engine Optimisation techniques which Google approves of. These include:

Technical SEO

Adding and editing pages that relate to education courses is usually done by those in busy marketing departments at universities who may have limited specialist knowledge of search engine optimisation. Add to this the fact that these sites are usually created by in-house web developers who have to stick to strict templates and brand guidelines. The results usually look and sound great, but often contain hidden issues that make Google’s life difficult.

By informing your team of how to ensure the search engines can more efficiently discover, crawl, index and rank your site’s web pages, a much larger volume of traffic can be achieved with little effort. We do this by showing your team how to remove duplicate content and implement better internal linking practices that distribute maximum “ranking power” to important pages. We also explain how to take steps to ensure Google overcomes issues relating to webpage load speeds and broken links. For instance, temporary redirects not only result in hidden penalties and lower rankings but also improve usability for your site visitors.

Keyword Research

Of course, achieving top positions in Google for phrases your next cohort of students don’t actually search for won’t bring your educational organisation an increase in targeted traffic. So we make sure the intelligence generated via extensive keyword research allows your team, and ours, to identify and target keyword phrases that are most searched for by your market. These search queries may not be obvious at first glance because people use different keywords and phrasings when they search for courses and training programmes on the web. So as well as the name of your course, it is always important to uncover the all-important “modifier” and “qualifier” keywords your pages should be optimised with.

For example, this web pages is optimised for variations on the phrase “education marketing agency” but by including words like “digital”, “services”, “online” and many others, we are able to qualify for high rankings for a range of other search queries. Indeed, adding the words “universities”, “colleges”, “schools”, “training”, and “courses” etc, we are able to secure a high rank for many other search queries we wouldn’t have usually ranked for. For educational organisations it is always wise to include words such as “qualifications”, “course”, “uni” and other keywords that relate to the specific courses – even if they are only mentioned in passing in the course description pages.

Webpage Optimisation

Because most webmasters and marketing teams are unsure how to effectively add their target keyword phrases to course pages, we provide advice on how to include all the relevant words into page heading, subheading, content, image file names, image alt tags, and the anchor text of internal and incoming links. Over the years we have found that simple templates and rules of thumb ensure your pages don’t suffer from reduced rankings due to what Google calls “keyword stuffing”. This is a problem many educational and training sites suffer from – without their web editors and marketing teams realising it.

Link Building and Content Marketing

A part of all the SEO campaigns we design for our education sector clients is the effective use of pro SEO tools that allow our clients to “spy” on the elements that cause their competitors to rank above them in the search results. This allows us to uncover valuable incoming backlink opportunities your competitors are benefiting from. It is often the case that the best results are achieved by setting up small programs that allow your team to identify and reach out to other highly trusted sites in order to request they link to your site.

As many know, Google gives the highest positions to sites that are more often referred to and linked to from other authority sites in the same field. It is unknown to most though, how to go about acquiring those backlinks that give your site pages a huge boost in the rankings. By showing your team how it is done most effectively, your web pages will enjoy increased “ranking power” that can be distributed to the pages you most want to rank above your competitors for highly competitive search queries.

Of course Albion has an extensive knowledge of the sites that are happy to link to universities, schools, colleges and other educational websites, so we hit the ground running when it comes to showing your team how to benefit from this powerful SEO technique – or you can choose to have us show your team how it is done most effectively – and in a way that causes minimal changes to your existing online marketing and web editing procedures.

If your education brand’s revenue is based on the volume and quality of potential students and traditionally relies on your own marketing or website team’s knowledge of gaining higher positions in Google, there are likely to be valuable improvements that can be made. And if you currently outsource search engine optimisation campaigns to external marketing agencies that don’t seem to get the results you expect – now may be the time to make use of a team that has increased traffic and revenue for others in the educational industry. For many, resolving the hidden SEO issues that hold sites back from the traffic you lose to competitors has made a real impact regarding the number of quality candidates they can choose from.