A brand's online positioning is the way it communicates with its audience and conveys value through what it does. It is intrinsically linked to the concept of branding, which is the sum of strategies that aim to awaken a positive perception in the public in question.
Our mission in today's post is to check, together with you, whether your educational institution's website is taking advantage of all the opportunities to position itself well against the competition.
Here's what you'll find in this post:
Ready to move on?
The role of the institutional website in the online positioning of an educational institution
We know that an educational institution's website must comply with some requirements required by the MEC, such as providing an updated curriculum matrix, monthly fees, course recognition ordinance, among others. However, this is not a justification for your educational institution to have a website disconnected from its people.
We can transform the content of an institutional website into something truly attractive, which meets visitors' expectations and makes navigation easy, intuitive and interesting for those who interact with your educational institution. By doing this, you are bringing this important communication channel closer to your audience and showing that your institution is willing to dialogue on an equal basis.
Encouraging a conversation that is closer to the reality of your future students contributes to your online positioning because these people's perception of value in relation to the brand of your educational institution is strengthened. Furthermore, by using the same language as your audience, it becomes much easier to have your website found on Google.
With the popularization of voice assistants like Alexa and Google Assistant, adapting content for voice search has become essential. This involves using more natural and structured phrases in the form of questions and answers — a pattern that is increasingly valued in organic results displayed by voice.
Another factor that impacts positioning is the use of interactive content, such as career tests, scholarship simulators and tuition calculators. These resources increase the time spent on the page, increase engagement and help signal to Google that the site delivers a rich and relevant experience.
How to guarantee a competitive online positioning?
The construction of an institutional website must be designed to offer the best experience possible for the user, which involves planning from the platform to be used, through the information architecture, and arriving at the content that will be published. Below, you can see step by step what must be done to have a well-positioned website online:
Responsive design
Responsiveness is an attribute of websites that adapt easily to any type of screen, and can be viewed on both large monitors and small smartphones.
As mobile devices are a national preference when it comes to searching for information, especially among young people, your educational institution should invest in responsive websites to attract more visitors.
Codes
Even responsive website templates can have optimization problems in relation to the codes used, leaving pages heavy and difficult to load. It is not uncommon to find websites where resources such as CSS and JavaScript are not compressed, which slows down your institutional website.
The slowness of a website affects its performance, therefore, impacts the user experience. And Google knows this. It is for this reason that the speed of a website is one of the more than 200 factors considered by Google to rank a web page well. In this sense, to have a good online positioning, your educational institution needs to invest in resources that make your website agile.
Pages
Each page on an institutional website has a purpose, whether it is to inform about a course or to show the infrastructure of the educational institution. Therefore, for visitors to find what they are looking for, your pages must be well organized, each with its own title.
The page title and subtitles must be inserted hierarchically, in order to demonstrate to Google and also to visitors what is most important. This means formatting the page structure correctly.
The page title must always be formatted as h1. Secondary subheadings, such as h2. And so on. Any confusion in this regard, such as leaving the page title in h2, can confuse search engines and affect your online positioning.
A good practice of SEO linked to the structure of the page is to always have more than 300 words of content in each one, in order to demonstrate the relevance of the content to Google, and not to have more than 250 words of content for each intertitle.
Further Reading:
- What is a newsletter? The 8 best practices to use!
- Rank on Google: what is the ideal size of the blog post?
- CRO, SEO and UX: learn about these optimization techniques.
Keywords
Search engines are driven by keywords. The search entered by the student on Google must be connected to specific content on your educational institution's website so that the search engine returns your web page as one of the relevant results.
This is where using the right keywords throughout your content makes a difference. If you want entrance exam candidates interested in the Biomedicine course to reach your educational institution's website, you need to use, throughout the content of the course page, terms used by these students to search online.
To make sure that the correct terms are being used, it is necessary to analyze the searches carried out on the web, which is only possible if you use a technology like SemRush or Moz, for example.
It is worth noting that a high school student thinks and writes in a very different way than a university professor. So, if you really want to rank well online, your content must be optimized for students, not your faculty.
If your institution serves a specific city or state, it’s essential to apply local SEO techniques. This includes updating your Google My Business profile, using geo-targeted keywords (like “college in Recife”), and encouraging student reviews — practices that increase visibility in regional searches.
Images
The images on your college website also need to be optimized appropriately so that they contribute to your online positioning. Each year that passes, Google improves its image search engine and today, if you do a test, it even displays a small description of the page where the image is located.
In image optimization, keyword usage is equally important if you want people to find your educational institution through visuals as well. But, in addition, it is necessary to fill in a field called “alt text”, which refers to the description of the image.
A brief and precise sentence about what you see in the image is essential to properly optimize it for search engines and also to offer a richer experience for users with visual difficulties or limited internet connections.
When the image does not load, the text inserted in the “alt text” is displayed in its place, informing the Internet user what the image that should appear there is about.
Caption: Illustration of a hand holding a magnifying glass over online search elements, representing the concept of digital visibility and positioning of educational institutions on the internet.
Internal links
Links made between pages on your educational institution's website help Google crawl and index content more quickly, in addition to encouraging visitors to stay. They are, therefore, a basic premise for anyone who wants to improve their online positioning.
Always try to make links between similar pages, from the website to the blog and vice versa. This way you build a structure that allows the user to browse the website pages for much longer.
External Links
In addition to internal links, to obtain a respected online positioning, you need to acquire external links, or inbound links.
Inbound links are like votes of confidence from other websites for a certain page on your educational institution's website, which is highly valued by Google. The more inbound links your educational institution has, the higher the site's reputation.
Summary: The online positioning of educational institutions depends on an SEO-optimized website, relevant content, strategic keywords, responsive design, and good user experience. These factors increase visibility on Google, attract students, and strengthen the digital brand.
Did you like to know more about online positioning? Check out our post about ON PAGE SEO training now!
How can I improve my college's positioning on Google?
What is online positioning for educational institutions?
It is the way your institution appears and is perceived in the digital environment, especially in search engines like Google. This involves SEO, user experience, use of strategic keywords and content that speaks to students.
Why is the website so important for online positioning?
The institutional website is the main channel of communication with future students. When well structured, with optimized content, appropriate language and good usability, it increases the time visitors spend on the site and improves the page's position in search results.
What elements impact the SEO of a college website?
Responsive design, loading speed, organization of titles (h1, h2, h3), correct use of keywords, internal and external links, optimized images and updated content are the main factors that directly influence Google ranking.
How to use keywords to attract more college entrance exam candidates?
Use terms that students themselves search for, such as “Biomedicine college in Recife” or “Engineering course with scholarship”. Avoid excessive academic language. Tools like SemRush and Moz help you find the most relevant words.
Is it worth investing in local SEO for educational institutions?
Yes. Using Google My Business, inserting keywords with the city name and encouraging student reviews are practices that increase the regional visibility of your institution and attract potential students in the field.
How important is it to optimize images on your institutional website?
Well-optimized images with descriptions in the “alt text” field help Google understand the visual content and improve the user experience, especially for people with slow connections or visual impairments. In addition, they favor indexing in image searches.
Do internal and external links help with ranking?
Yes. Internal links keep visitors browsing your website for longer, while external links (inbound links) from other websites pointing to yours increase credibility and improve your position on Google.
Portugal