SEO for Universities
Learn about the power of using SEO for universities to attract more students using data-driven strategies and user empathy.
SEO Services for Colleges and Universities
If you’re trying to attract more students or staff to your university, Avalanche Creative can help you graduate summa cum laude. We provide custom SEO strategies and content for educational institutions of all types to attract students. Our team loves helping colleges and universities get tangible, data-driven results that modernize the process of attracting more student leads.
SEO Strategy Plan
Avalanche Creative’s university SEO strategy plans are the keystone of our plan for helping colleges succeed and enroll more students. We’ll dig into the data of your existing website, research your competitors, and learn more about your target audience and how they think. From there, we’ll use the information we discover to develop a detailed marketing strategy.
Content Writing
We specialize in creating content for people first, rather than search engines—and we never let AI take the driver’s seat when we do. Where most agencies will add web content and blogs to your website for the sake of it just having written words Google can read, our content is designed to reflect how your students use search engines to find answers and insights. In turn, this allows you to build trust with prospective students earlier in the process through well-researched content.
Web Design & Development
SEO and good website design go hand in hand. Our web design team develops attractive, easy-to-navigate websites that prioritize search engine optimization and good user experience. This approach helps your website visitors convert into leads or potential students.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO is just as important as content writing for improving your search engine rankings. As part of our approach, our experts will analyze your website’s backend to ensure search engines can properly index all its pages. We’ll also look for broken links and make sure your pages are loading quickly, all to improve your website’s ability to rank higher.
Local SEO
In a world where completing your education is getting more and more expensive, more students may be looking for universities in their area so they can work toward their degree more affordably. That’s where local SEO comes into play. We’ll help you develop a location-based presence online and develop your Google Business Profile so potential students can find you through Google.
SEO Consulting
Our consulting services are an ideal resource for universities that have marketing or content departments with the bandwidth to create SEO content in-house. Our agency’s level of experience will provide your team with guidance, assistance, and recommendations to help your SEO efforts pay off.
Performance Tracking & Analysis
Tracking and analyzing your digital content’s performance with data-driven analysis is the best way to see if your SEO efforts are working. We’ll track the metrics that matter most to help your institution’s brand grow, which demonstrates ROI to your department leads and board of trustees—and shows us where to adjust our strategy.
Our Process
Keyword Research
Our approach to SEO for university websites starts with finding the best keywords that are relevant to your college and its programs. We may target keywords relating to the classes or certifications you offer, degree programs unique to your university, and phrases specific to your target audience.
Competitive Analysis
During a competitive analysis, we’ll review the keywords other universities and colleges are using on their websites and whether they’re ranking for them. The data we find during this process helps us determine if there may be opportunities your competitors haven’t leveraged yet. It also allows us to see if we can replicate what works well for their SEO strategy.
Sitemap Planning
Your sitemap helps everyone involved in your SEO and marketing efforts understand the strategies and tactics we’re using—and how to best build new website pages that attract prospective students to your pages. Our SEO team develops your sitemap based on the keyword data we uncover, which reflects your business goals.
Content Planning
After we’ve established an overall content strategy for your university, we’ll create a content plan that’s relevant to the students you want. Our team uses keyword data and information we’ve gathered from your marketing team to create topics that are relevant. We’ll also create new content plans every 90 days, adjusting our plans based on what’s working for your website.
SEO Audits
As an agency specializing in SEO for colleges and universities, we regularly audit your website to ensure our strategies are working for you. After all, what helps you see an increase in leads during the first several months could change after we’ve updated all your existing website content. Our findings during these SEO audits help us determine how to respond to changes in your industry and the needs of your potential students.
Ongoing SEO Strategy
No agency worth working with will offer you a one-size-fits-all solution. Instead, your strategy should change and grow with your university. Our approach to SEO for educational institutions entails creating customized strategies for each client. That way, we can help you find the right balance of services to help you get results for your budget.
Working with a Higher Education SEO Agency
Ready to optimize your university website to attract more students? Connect with the team at Avalanche Creative to set yourself up for success.
The Power of SEO for Higher Education
More High-Quality Leads
Our primary goal in creating a strategy around SEO for schools is to help institutions generate high-quality leads. This helps people who are more likely to become students find your school.
While some SEO agencies focus solely on increasing traffic, we don’t believe that should be the whole picture. After all, you can’t pay your faculty in website traffic. Instead, we prefer to drive the right traffic to your website so your leads will be more likely to enroll.
Brand Building
For more and more people, their first impression of your university may come from your website showing up in search results. Using SEO as part of your marketing strategy allows you to build your brand with an inbound strategy that you can more accurately measure and understand than traditional mailers, billboards, or even digital ads.
Improved User Experience
Your website is one of the first things prospective students will see when they try to learn more about you. By showing potential students what you have to offer them and making it easier for them to navigate your website quickly, you can get more potential applicants—and thus more enrolled students.
Higher Education SEO Packages
Let us handle researching, planning, writing, and publishing for your SEO strategy. We’ll keep you aware of what’s going on with reports and ask for your feedback every month.
This service starts at a minimum of $2,500/month. However, the cost varies depending on the work we need to do for your university SEO strategy and how quickly you’d like to see results. This package often includes:
- Strategy planning
- Monthly ongoing SEO
- 1–4 content pieces (or more) published per month
We’ll set you up for success, but executing on our strategic recommendations will be up to you. This option is great for colleges and universities with digital marketing departments that can take on SEO responsibilities.
Building your SEO strategy starts at as little as a $5,000 one-time payment that covers extensive research and key insights about your online presence. The cost of additional ongoing SEO content templates, reporting, and consulting can vary, but it is a budget-friendly alternative to our full-service SEO package. This package typically includes:
- Strategy plan
- Monthly SEO consulting & reporting
- 1–4 SEO content templates provided per month, with your team writing the content
Looking for guidance on setting your university or college up for success? Pick our brains with SEO consulting. This is a great option for institutions with a dedicated marketing strategy in place that needs an SEO perspective.
Our SEO consulting fee is a flat rate of $150 an hour. Please keep in mind that we take on only a few consulting-only clients to focus our energy on providing value for our clients who need more intensive expertise.
Through our custom packages, you can get the services you need to help your website attract potential students. The cost of custom packages can vary from small custom amendments to aggressive, full-service packages. Our custom services include:
- Web design
- SEO website migration
- CRO campaigns
- HubSpot management
- Web hosting
Work with an Experienced SEO Agency for Universities
Ready to help your website graduate? Connect with Avalanche Creative’s team of experts to explore how we can help your SEO and digital marketing strategy.
Start Here 👇
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
In short, it depends. Typically, it takes several months to start seeing concrete results once you start working with an SEO agency. However, our team can sometimes identify low-hanging fruit to help you start ranking for specific keywords quickly. It normally takes some time for Google’s algorithm to recognize your efforts and rank your pages higher in their search results.
However, the nice thing about SEO is that once one of your pages starts to rank highly, you can usually keep your brand in that position for a long time.
Related Posts
Building Strategies for SEO for Higher Education
If you’re looking to build an SEO strategy for higher education, we have the advice to help you be successful. Talk to our team for even more information