It's very likely that this isn't the first time you've come across a post about SEO. Even if you already follow the blog da 4RevOps, you must have read other content about online positioning for educational institutions. But why is all this so important?
One of the main goals of educational institutions is to increase enrollment. Over the last few years, managers and marketing teams at institutions have been introduced to ideas and strategies for SEO no inbound marketing and they don't always know how to deal with it all.
The point is that, before discovering how to implement the best SEO practices, you need to understand what, in fact, the importance of SEO for attracting students. And that is precisely the starting point of this post!
Here's what you can expect from this blog post:
Get ready for an engaging read!
After all, what is SEO in inbound marketing?
SEO is an acronym for search engine optimization or search engine optimization. In practice, this means adopting techniques in the production of content and formatting of posts, pages, blogs and websites in order to meet criteria for the online positioning for educational institutions.
Google, the main search engine, has its own criteria for evaluating and ranking a digital address. The idea behind SEO is to make the content of your educational institutions result in appearing at the top or in the first positions on the Google results page. Later, we will see why this is so important.
The issue here is that, as you may already know, content marketing It’s a powerful inbound marketing strategy. It is this strategy that directs the production of blog posts with texts, infographics and videos that present topics relevant to the target audience of your educational institution. And it is this content that a student finds when doing a search through the search engine.
What the adoption of SEO techniques does is precisely favor the performance of the content produced by your institution. In other words, it makes them well-regarded and highlighted by Google. Therefore, paying attention to SEO and inbound marketing is the way to guarantee access to the institution's education needs so that your strategies and campaigns meet the objective of increasing enrollment numbers.
Take a look at these fascinating articles:
- CRO, SEO and UX: learn about these optimization techniques;
- How to improve the organic positioning of your content;
- SEO checklist for educational institutions: what cannot be missed.
The importance of online positioning
Now that you know a little more about the relationship between optimization tactics and inbound, it’s time to understand the importance of SEO for attracting students. To do so, it is necessary to do what inbound marketing teaches us: consider more the side of the student who may interact with their educational institutions.
When a potential student searches for “entrance exam writing tips,” they are met with a list of results provided by Google. Put yourself in this student's shoes and bring to mind any research you have done and your own behavior. Hardly anyone ignores the first results and looks for online addresses that only appear at the end of the results page or on the next page.
The student would only stop paying attention to the first results if they did not correspond to his search. And bearing in mind that countless educational institutions develop content with "tips for writing in the entrance exam", the one that appears at the top of Google wins.
The preference for content that appears first on the results page is not a mere deduction! According to search engine watch, the result that appears in the first place on the Google page gets 36.4% of the total hits. This results in a number of visits equivalent to the sum of accesses to the pages that appear in second to fifth place.
In short, worrying about the online positioning for educational institutions is to ensure that the content produced by educational institutions don't be in vain. Ensure it is easily found and favour attracting new students to the institution.
Attention, we talk about organic positioning!
You may have come this far thinking that it is easy to solve the problem of your institution's positioning: just pay to occupy the first position in the Google rankings. But not quite!
Everything we talk about concerns achieving top positions without investing money as a gimmick. We address the importance of investing in SEO to attract visitors who naturally enter the institution’s online address.
It is worth keeping in mind that the student knows the digital environment well and understands that the results that Google highlights organically are the best. In fact, it's not just the practicality of not having to scroll to the end that generates more clicks to the content that appears at the top.
The understanding related to the quality of what the educational institutions deliver to those doing the search also influences the decision regarding which content to access and read.
The relationship between SEO and attracting students
Increase in enrollment is related to different factors of inbound marketing. We can mention as examples a lightweight website with a good layout, a responsive blog, the production of relevant content, as well as solid planning and a good strategy for publishing and disseminating this content.
What we want to highlight here is the idea that, without giving due attention to the importance of SEO for attracting students, none of the inbound marketing strategies for educational institutions have the expected effect.
A blog full of good content, but without proper formatting in its posts, does not generate enough hits. Likewise, quality content does not yield enough conversions if it is not optimized to be featured on Google.
In short, investing in SEO makes all the difference to Google's reading of digital addresses and content of institutions education, which is crucial to attracting more qualified leads. Something that, in turn, improves the conversion rate, especially during campaigns developed for university entrance exams.
Do you better understand the relationship between SEO and enrollments? Enjoy and read Online Placement: Is Your College Doing It Right? and know what to consider to improve the results of your educational institutions!
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