How to Write SEO-Friendly Content for Academic Institutions

• More than 90% of online experiences begin with a search engine

• Google is leading the global search engine market followed by others like Bing, Yahoo etc.

• As reported by SEOTribunal.com, Google handles 3.8 million searches per minute on average across the globe

• Long-tail keyword searches have a click-through rate 3% to 5% higher than generic searches.

Do you wish to grow your brand outreach and drive conversions at the same time without extra spending on your marketing budget? Read our latest blog on how to produce SEO friendly content.

Here’s how it goes.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of creating visibility of a website or a web page through web search engines.  A website appears frequently in the search results list if it is ranked higher on the search results page.  This simply means that more and more audiences are visiting your content thereby giving you the opportunity to convert these visitors into customers.

What is SEO friendly?

SEO-friendly content is simply that type of content which follows certain rules of search engine algorithms. This means that the content should be authentic, without duplication and errors. It should have relevant search keywords. It shouldn’t have broken links. In a nutshell, the search engines should be able to connect your content to the topic it is covering and should be able to link it with the search keyword / phrase.

All this will help the search engines in high indexing of your content during an online search. Making your content SEO-friendly doesn’t have to necessarily mean over stuffing of keywords alone.

This blog will tell you that it takes much more than that. Search engine optimized (SEO) websites are ranked higher in the search engines. Needless to say, if you want your college or university to attract prospective applicants, you need to make sure you are writing SEO-friendly content.

How to write SEO-friendly content

You can also produce SEO friendly content for your college website by simply following these practices

#1- Incorporate Headlines and Sub-Headers

Incorporating headlines and sub-headers gives a proper structure to your piece of writing and hence easily readable for your readers. Such type of content is more likely to be shared than the one which is unstructured and lacks bundling.

Technically speaking, when search engine bots will crawl through your content, they’ll recognize your content through its headlines and use them to back-link it to the search phrase.

#2 – Use Backlinks to earlier content

Backlinks are considered a healthy SEO practice. SEO friendly content must have lot of backlinks – both with internal pages as well as external. The more your content is covered by other portals, the higher it will be ranked in search results.

Backlinks help the search engine bots to relate your content with the keyword searched and throw your web content in search results accordingly. In addition, embedding links of your web content on popular external sites and search directories increases the authenticity of your content. The better the links, the higher your page will be indexed in search results

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Related Blog – How Does Voice Search Impact SEO For Colleges And Universities

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#3 – Optimize the length of your article

Now, it’s not enough to write 300 word articles anymore. In the last several years, Google has shown that it gives higher priority to longer, higher-quality content. Such a content generally aims to provide their target audience with best possible information for taking an informed decision.

You can always review performance of your content through Google Analytics. It will tell you which all content were most visited and which ones were able to engage your target audience for the longest amount of time. Also, it will indicate which ones were successful in generating the highest conversions.

The insights from Google Analytics can be used to find the best suited content for your target group to engage better.

#4 – Are you choosing the relevant keywords

Your college content must be curated wisely. This means that it should have all the relevant keywords embedded to achieve best SEO results.

Before developing content, you should do a keyword research to identify the trending and relevant keywords or phrases to your topic. These are generally the keywords that users are currently using on search engines to find information. There are several keyword planning tools available for this that will help you suggest the most relevant set of keywords for your content.

#5 – Embed images / info-graphics to achieve optimal SEO result

Info-graphics or images increase engagement level of your content. Such type of content is more likely to be shared by people. Photos help in creating a greater connect with your target audience.

Photos can also be optimized by adding titles or tags containing keywords to the image files. Make sure you also optimize the size of the photo. Pictures that are too large will slow down the load time and hurt the SEO efforts.

#6 – Ensure that Content Is Mobile Friendly

Do not forget to make your website content mobile-friendly by following some simple rules. Break things down into short paragraphs, use subheadings, bullet points, and numbered lists.

Don’t use images that aren’t optimized.

 Final Word

The increasing usage of internet and digital media services is impacting the way people look for information for making purchase decisions. Be it an electronics item, clothing or educational products, millennials google it first to know about the product or service.

Over the years, a major influence of online search behaviour is being witnessed in the field of education. Today because of the growing familiarity and access of digital devices, your target audience i.e. students are hooked online constantly. In fact, parents and students are now assessing a school or college based on the merits or demerits of its online presence.

You need to make sure that your college or university has a strong online profile. Optimizing online brand visibility through SEO strategies is hence crucial for education institutions to attract prospects.

So, in order to achieve optimal SEO results, develop a data-driven SEO strategy for your institute and increase your online visibility.