If you’re looking to get more prospective students to your website, start blogging!
If you’re looking to increase the number of visitors to your site, having engaging content is always a huge part of it. Want a simple way to produce more content? Start an official blog for your school! It isn’t too hard to maintain, and utilizing it correctly can make a huge difference in SEO success. The best part is that anyone can write these blogs, including students!
Inbound marketing, which is a type of marketing that utilizes on-site content as opposed to advertisements to attract users, is customer friendly and blog posts help attract interested leads to your website that may have not gone to your site directly. Blogs are also a dynamic medium for inbound marketing. You can feature a particular department, a new major, or answer students’ pressing questions!
Keywords are essential
Posting original and authoritative content can provide a nice boost on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP) in addition to any paid marketing efforts. Using keyword research, you can organically have your page noticed by search engines and prospective students. Just like blogging itself, taking advantage of keywords is completely free. As long as your blog post still sounds natural, weaving in keywords into the writing will increase traffic to your blog and website.
The advantage of using keywords in your blogs is that each blog post can address something different, meaning different keywords can be used to draw students to your site. Using long tail keywords also helps you capture potential students who are looking for much more specific information. For example, targeting the keywords “english program” is just as important as optimizing for “english major concentrations for writing”.
The more content, the better
Another benefit of blogging is simply adding more content to your website to be crawled by search engines. The more high-quality pages are on your site, the more likely your site is to show up higher as a search result. One of the best things about this blog content you’ll be producing is that it’s new and gives you the opportunity to update your website to keep it current. Posting on a schedule will provide new content on a frequent basis and shows search engines that you’re providing fresh content.
Writing new blog posts also allows for numerous SEO opportunities that wouldn’t make sense on other pages. You may already have a page that talks about campus life, but a blog post about a popular campus tradition can attract many new visitors and add more information about activities on campus.
Help answer your audience’s questions
A benefit of keeping an updated blog, aside from increasing traffic, is the potential to become a thought leader in your area. Using things like long tail keywords can help answer questions that people are searching. Not only does addressing your audience’s issues build a relationship with them, it helps attract new traffic to your website from prospective students who might have questions about particular majors or degree options.
For example, if you want to shine a spotlight on your philosophy or journalism programs, a blog post on popular undergraduate degrees for law school will help attract potential students. This way, you’ll attract both people looking for information on philosophy/journalism degrees, as well as people wondering what they should major in to get into law school.
Build internal links
Another benefit of increasing the amount of content available to potential students is internal linking. If your blog post is talking about an interesting course available for Biology majors, linking to the biology major page will help with SEO for both the blog post and the biology page. Linking to relevant content from your blog posts is always a good idea, not just for SEO, but for getting people to visit other areas of your website.
When search engines crawl your website, they follow the paths of links, which helps strengthen linked pages. Internal linking doesn’t end at program pages, either. Linking to your blog on your homepage can significantly raise its profile on search engines. Continuing to link to pages within your website is simple and can help promote pages that need attention.
Blogging isn’t an exact science and whether you’re updating it once a week or once a month, any new content will be beneficial to your website. There are countless topics for higher education institutions to blog about and the wider range of topics you address, the larger of an audience you can attract!
Wondering what to blog about? Check out Lehigh University’s blog IlLUminate to see how the College of Business and Economics is creating thought-leadership content.
Want to learn more about how blogging can help your college or university? Reach out now.