It is the time of year when a new fiscal year for educational institutions is going to start and it is significant for them to focus on their goals and marketing plans for the upcoming year. When it comes to the marketing plans, SEO is the winner taking all the tactics but how educational institutions, especially higher educational institutions can benefit from the SEO in the real meaning. A college and university have a diverse system with multiple departments and programs offer to the students. This is why SEO for such institution is more complex and have its own challenges than the other fields or industries.
Usually, every university has its own IT department who owns web development and handles issues related to the IT. But sometimes there remain some technical changes on the part of SEO that need to be made by an SEO expert. Here are the best SEO focal points to be considered in colleges and universities when prioritizing their marketing plan.
Perform An SEO Audit
From where you should take a start? It is important to understand the ranking factors and what needs to be done first. So, start from an SEO audit to analyze the site health and performance in different areas. It will help you identify the problematic areas and also give a better insight what needs to be fixed in order to improve the performance and ranking of a website. You can easily perform SEO audit of your site by using the SEO auditing tools. Moz, Neilpatel, Ahrefs and SEMrush are the powerful tools that provide site performance on multiple ranking factors.
Review Keywords And Integrate New Terminology In The Content
As universities offer degree and masters programs in various subjects so it is a common practice they use course or degree name with the brand name. But the most important thing is the terminology has been changing frequently so keep integrating keywords and phrases in the site content which students are more like to use in queries. For example, some universities offer Bachelor in Human Communications which includes both corporate and public relation while some universities named this degree program as Bachelor in Public Relations. So, be sure to use keywords defining the Degree like Bachelors in Human Communication incorporating corporate and public relations. So, the students can easily understand that program you are offering. Moreover, using geo-targeted keywords in the title tag is a great way to capture the local queries.
Mobile First Index
Google’s Mobile First Indexing is going to be implemented in coming months and higher educational institutions also need to make the shift from desktop version to the mobile display. But there are certain problems such as complete site may not become mobile-ready and some portion of the website will be mobile friendly while others are not. So, it’s important to ensure that all the pages of your university site are mobile-ready. As a part of it, mobile site page loading speed also matters a lot. Commonly, different webmasters or SEO experts working on the different section of a college or university site and they may upload large images that lower the mobile page speed. Therefore it is also focal point in SEO that should be considered in colleges and universities SEO. Be sure to check and update the size of images before uploading it on the site.