College Digital Marketing Agency

Reach Prospects by Degrees With SEO

SEO involves tweaking your website content so that it comes up higher in online search results than competing colleges’ pages. This is done directly on your site by creating content that speaks to the interests of your prospects as well as to the “spiders” that Google uses to rank web pages. You can also use off-site SEO techniques such as guest posting to create links back to your site that drive traffic organically.

To create an effective SEO campaign, you’ll want to be aware of the metrics. What are the keys that differentiate your campus, or that your prospects are looking for in a college? What words and phrases are they using to search for the college that is best for them? Used strategically, the right keywords help your website rank high in search engine results for these things. Effective keyword selection and implementation is an exact science; enlisting the help of an experienced college marketing firm can significantly speed the rate of return on your SEO campaign.

SEO grows in effectiveness over time. However, there are times when you will want to generate a large amount of traffic fast. That’s when PPC rules the game.

Extra-Credit Traffic When and Where It Counts

Use pay-per-click ad campaigns to implement a more targeted, scalable and controlled online college marketing campaign, and drive traffic exactly where and when you need it most (such as during peak enrollment seasons, when you are hosting an open campus event, or scholarship competition.) If you are just starting to use PPC, Facebook is often the most cost-effective and easiest place to start. Once you have ads that work well on Facebook, you can roll them out to Google and other PPC outlets.

The beauty of using PPC in conjunction with SEO is that they both use keywords. What you learn in one, you can put to use in the other. You can keep track of these on your own or engage the services of a college marketing company with advanced methods of tracking and keyword optimization.

Email Follow-Up Rocks Enrollment

One of the biggest mistakes colleges make in their marketing is inadequate follow-up. Once a prospective student has shown interest in your institution, be sure to follow up frequently via email. Don’t make the mistake of letting up once you’ve received their application; the trend these days is for students to apply to at least three schools. Many apply to a dozen or more. Your personalized email campaign can be hugely influential in their decision to ultimately enroll with you.