How Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Can Help Higher Education Online Marketing Professionals Do More With Less
Having serviced multiple higher education online marketing clients through my agency, WebAdvantage.net, I know from firsthand experience the positive outcome colleges and universities can realize from strategically crafted and professionally executed online marketing plans. Even with buy-in challenges, limited budgets and internal resources, with solid online marketing you can raise your institution’s Internet visibility and awareness, boost recruitment event attendance, and impact student enrollment application requests.
Based on our recent survey of higher education online marketing plans and challenges, more than half of you have attempted or will be utilizing Search Engine Marketing (SEM) as part of your online marketing plans. More of you are opting for organic or natural (free) Search Engine Optimization over Pay Per Click (PPC) campaigns, indicating your limited budgets are less than $10K a year. Adding to that limitation are internal staffs of less than five, with 32% of you indicating you rely upon only one internal staffer to implement your marketing. Given this mandate to “do more with less,” I urge you to leverage SEO.
With organic or “natural” search, search engines generate results by algorithms that pull from their vast databases of web pages (think the left-hand side of Google). The process of affecting a site’s natural search engine results is called “search engine optimization” or SEO. SEO involves implementing keyword-driven changes to a website to remove hindrances to search engine “spiders” that crawl the site. This blog entry reinforces organic SEO, a tactic which fits even the most limited budgets.
Though SEO is not a certainty, can take time (up to nine months) to have an impact on your site rankings, and often requires changes to your site and the development of new content, its low-cost, high impact ROI is one of your most viable online marketing solutions. Here’s why:
Nearly 80% of all web traffic now begins at a search engine. Nearly 41% of web surfers now use search for navigation, typing a company name or URL into their search bar instead of into their browser’s address bar. Google continues to dominate these searches with 55.2% of the market, followed by Yahoo! at 23.5%, Microsoft at 12%, Ask.com at 4.7% and AOL at 4.4%.
Market studies have also found that searchers often ignore sponsored (PPC) ads (PPC ads are usually denoted as such by “Sponsored Listing” or “Sponsored Ad” in small text). Recent eyetracking maps, (a method which reveals how searchers focus their attention on results pages), show that many searchers focus primarily on the upper left hand corner of Google search results pages. While this includes the top two to three paid listings, the major focus is on the first organic results and many do not look at the sponsored listings on the right hand side of the page.
Conversely, increasing a website’s natural search engine rankings through SEO has a direct positive impact on the site’s traffic and ultimately your institution’s branding and enrollment. Studies have shown that second or third page rankings can increase website traffic by up to nine times. Top 10 rankings, or first page listing, can mean an additional six-fold increase in traffic. And, whereas paid search is an ever-accruing expense, SEO costs can be amortized over time.
Search can also impact one’s competitive advantage. Many clients realize too late that their competition in a search engine may be completely different than their real world competition, and it’s all a matter of who ranks higher. A relatively obscure organization could see pronounced growth from top rankings while a leading institution, with a search engine unfriendly website, doesn’t even appear. Similarly, if a real world competitor appears in organic search and you do not, that competitor is certainly deriving a lion’s share more traffic from the Internet. SEO can be used to offset negative search engine listings, i.e. listings for negative press coverage and lawsuits. Studies have shown that 36% of search engine users believe that the organizations whose websites are returned at the top of the search results are the top brands in their field.
For you higher education marketers, start with the dean. Since they typically like data, provide them with the aforementioned industry research and proof of your lack of search engine keyword rankings to enlist their internal and financial support. Also try surveying recently enrolled students and prospects about their media habits and Internet use. Branding and school pride are really important to higher education institutions. Unfortunately, this can impose upon thinking like Internet users, particularly when it comes to search and keyword phrases for your SEO campaigns. You have to persuade the decision makers to sign off on the keywords and phrases that your target audiences use vs. the institution’s own vernacular or your search program will be ineffective. Once your institution’s decision makers reap the benefits of your well-executed SEO program, you should be able to enlist their ongoing support, and possibly even more of the budget you want and need to appeal to today’s Internet-wired audience.
The bottom line is this: promote and protect your school’s brand, your competitive edge, and increase your bottom line assets by improving your search visibility.
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What else is on your mind? Please let this be an interactive dialogue where you voice your questions and concerns, and I can try to answer them. For the month of October, I’m here to help.
Hollis Thomases
President & CEO, WebAdvantage.net
hollis@webadvantage.net
1 comment October 15th, 2007
