How SEO Best Practices Can Help Capture Students In The Research Phase

Choosing a college or higher education institute isn’t the same as simply buying a t-shirt online. It’s a significant long term decision. So it makes sense that it will take anywhere from months to years of research before deciding on an institution.

So, can you use SEO to create compelling content that helps capture students that have yet to decide on where they would like to study? The answer, of course, is yes. You certainly can use an effective SEO strategy to attract and convert your future students. Here are some SEO best practices you need to implement into your strategy to get students to sign up for your RTO:

High-quality content

SEO and content are inextricably linked, and they are quite useless without each other. Without well-thought-out SEO practices, your incredible content will simply never reach an audience; poor content – even with an SEO strategy – will end up in keyword stuffing and unintelligent articles that will rank poorly.

Think of your SEO as the introduction and conclusion to a book and the high-quality content as a body. In the introduction, you set the pace with decisions like the type of content, topics, page structure and target keywords; the conclusion then consists of title tags and meta/image descriptions. Your high-quality content is the meat of the book in the centre that ultimately enriches the lives of your prospective students – the part that gets them to buy the book.

Make it mobile-friendly and easy to navigate

In this day and age, when it comes to SEO best practices, there is simply no way that you can get by without a sound mobile strategy. Check out these crazy stats on mobile usage in Australia from Yump. The article shows that 15.3 million people in Australia owned a smartphone in 2015 – a huge increase from the 11.1 million in 2013.

You need to make sure your web page is easy to navigate and convenient. It should display correctly on mobile devices (this applies to your content too). Look into utlilising apps and tools that will enhance your users’ experience.

Finding the right audience and retargeting

Marketing for vocational and higher education institutions is tricky when it comes to high school audiences. This is because most students will have their heart set on attending somewhere that a friend or relative attends/attended and this makes it less likely that they will do as much research. Targeting adult learners is a much more effective strategy, as they often start their research online.

Retargeting is an essential and highly effective marketing strategy for prospective students. Track who has looked at your website and then target them with ads. This means that whether they are doing more research or simply skimming social media – they will have constant reminders of your organisation.

Keyword strategy

Keywords are hugely important for reaching the right audience and determining how many people get to see your ads. While it makes sense to bid for keywords such as “higher education” or “RTO”, these will have huge competition and are likely to be expensive. You will have a higher success rate by targeting keywords that are specific to your RTO, such as the programs that you offer.

 You can’t simply find a keyword and hope it works – you need to have a well-thought-out strategy when it comes to keywords to ensure they are successful. Check out this blog from Kissmetrics to get some tips for doing your keyword research the right way.

 Now that you know all about SEO best practices, it is time to create amazing content that is effectively optimised to convert those students that you haven’t managed to capture yet.

Lupo Digital is an inbound marketing agency that specialises in inbound marketing for RTOs, helping them with their student engagement and building strong on-going relationships with their prospects and students. We have a passionate, experienced team dedicated to bringing all the benefits of inbound marketing to RTOs. For more information about how inbound marketing works for RTOs, download our executive guide to inbound marketing for RTOs.