Importance of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Schools and Colleges

A major concern which comes up when talking to K-12 schools, colleges and educational institutes is that feel SEO is all about marketing and they do not want to market their schools.

My answer to them is that search engine optimization (SEO) is something which as essential as having a website. Do you consider having a website as marketing yourself? You do not. Similarly, you should not consider SEO as totally marketing. It is about ensuring your website is optimized to be better placed on search engine result pages (SERPs).

To understand this better, let us get into the discussion of why a school needs a website? Some of the major reasons for having a website are:

1. Improved communication with parents, staff, students, potential parents, potential staff etc.
2. Establish your school identity
3. Reach out to global audience 24×7
4. Central place to update things

A website is only useful if people are able to find it easily. With about 80% of the traffic originating on search engines, it becomes absolutely important for schools to be found there.

Search engine optimization strategies help your website reach out to your target audience easily.

Imagine a family which has moved to a new city and wants to find a school for their kid. What would they do? May be they will ask their neighbors but most likely they will seek help of search engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing to look for schools using terms like “schools in <city/locality>”, “good schools in <city/locality>”, “colleges in <city/locality>” etc. If they do not find your school/college (going forward school represents schools, colleges and other educational institutes) then you do not exist for them! SEO can help your school target and position its website on major search engines for such terms so that parents are able to reach you, isn’t that what you wanted?

I remember having a discussion with a school where they felt that their school name was too complicated to be spelt correctly by most of the people. What this meant was that even though parents wanted to reach the school website, they could not because they spelt the name wrong. SEO can help solve this issue and ensure people looking for a school are able to reach its website without much hassle, even though they do not know the exact spelling!

Recently Wordstream released data on Top SEO College Websites and the top 3 winners were:

1. Drexel University (drexel.com, the online division)
2. University of Phoenix (phoenix.edu)
3. Capella University (capella.edu)

The study also revealed that most of the school and college websites flunk the SEO grades miserably!

We have successfully executed several SEM and SEO projects for schools and educational sites in USA, Canada and India. If you are looking at ways to strengthen your school’s presence online get in touch with us right away.

About the Author Vikas Sah is the Founder and CEO of Zitz Solutions. He has great interest in internet marketing in particular in Search Engine Optimization and Social Media Marketing. Connect with him on: twitter, LinkedIn