How to Increase Higher Education Enrollment with SEO

Colleges and universities increase enrollment with SEO by making their program, admissions, and financial aid details easy for prospective students to find in Google’s search results and in AI answers from ChatGPT.

Higher education SEO combines program-specific keywords, content that answers applicants’ questions, mobile and local optimization, and consistent program facts across the web.

Learn how to grow enrollment through SEO now:

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What is SEO for higher education?

Search engine optimization for higher education is the practice of improving a website so search engines such as Google and Bing can crawl, understand, and rank its pages in search engine results pages (SERPs), including Google’s AI Overviews.

Why is SEO important for higher education?

SEO is important for higher education because there are fewer-first year students, so showing up in search experiences when a student starts researching programs has a direct line to enrollment.

The share of high school graduates going on to college dropped from 70% in 2016 to 63% in 2024, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics figures reported by NPR.

If your website is not up to the standard that the search engines expect, you may not show up on the first page of search results or in the AI-generated answers students read first, meaning that your site is less likely to be clicked on by the right visitors.

In fact, it may not even be seen by potential students at all!

This is why it is so important to have a strong SEO for your higher education campaign: it ensures that your site receives the most exposure possible to the right audience.

Conversion results for higher education are often slower than many industries.

Such an important life decision needs careful consideration, with many prospective students converting weeks or months after first looking on a higher education website, and many continuing to visit the site multiple times during this period to find out further information.

This is why it is crucial for a higher education SEO campaign to be ongoing, as the timescale that individual users spend on the site may range from a number of weeks to a few months.

How to use SEO to increase enrollment

In order to engage with prospective students and generate a greater number of applications, it’s important to have a broad SEO campaign that encompasses a variety of features. Here are a few ideas.

Long-form content

Long-form content and blog posts, for example, are a great way to inform prospective students on various attributes of your school.

Whether this is in the form of student testimonials, interviews with professors or even advice on how to survive your first semester, increasing the amount of content on your website is a fundamental part of an SEO campaign.

For example, Mount Wachusett Community College paired keyword research with original content on its programs, campus culture, and student success stories as part of a broader SEO and PPC program with WebFX. The college saw a 25% increase in SEO sessions.

This content is highly shareable, often generating natural links across social media, which enables the search engines to recognize that your institution is both relevant and authoritative in SERPs and in AI-generated answers.

Because search results shape which institutions applicants consider, using SEO really can increase your enrollment figures and help you get the edge above your competitors!

Social media

Alongside this, maximizing visibility across social media networks is an ideal way to engage with potential students. Social media enables you to talk to prospective students in real time, answering their questions and directing them to your site.

Not only will this increase traffic to your site, but it will also enhance the user experience, allowing them to view your higher education institution as helpful and student-focused.

Social media also gives you the opportunity to connect with other educational associations, whether this be governing bodies, academics, or schools that are encouraging their students to enroll at your institution.

Responsive web design

Having a mobile-responsive site is also particularly important because many prospective students research schools on their phones, and Google uses the mobile version of your site to index and rank its pages.

Keyword targeting

Location keyword targeting may be another aspect that you should consider as part of your SEO campaign.

Often, prospective students are looking at institutions outside their state, sometimes even their own country, so attempting to rank for keywords that are specific to your location can be beneficial in generating the most qualified leads.

For example, “liberal arts school in Michigan” will be easier to rank for in comparison to just “liberal arts school.” There is usually less competition for these longer phrases, known as long-tail keywords.

Long-tail phrases also match how younger applicants search.

In WebFX’s analysis of 3,000+ search queries across four generations, Gen Z phrased 43.57% of its queries as questions rather than commands, the highest of any generation.

Program pages that answer questions like “What can I do with a public health degree?” in plain language fit those searches.

Taking advantage of these terms will be increasingly beneficial throughout the course of your campaign.

6 SEO tips for colleges and universities

Learn how to get better results from SEO for colleges and universities with this compilation of the most effective tips for growing enrollment, donations, and more via search engine optimization.

1. Create unique content and pages

Google ranks websites based on many factors, including how relevant, original, and helpful each page is for the searcher’s question.

Create useful pages that answer the questions prospective students ask search engines and AI assistants, rather than pages that only add to the size of your school’s website.

Of course, the operative word here is useful.

Don’t create pages just for the sake of creating pages. That will just make your site look cluttered and spammy. Instead, aim to create informative and relevant pages about topics like:

1. Individual degrees and programs
2. Faculty and staff
3. Financial aid
4. Admissions and application requirements
5. Campus and nearby cities

The amount of pages you can create ultimately depends on the breadth of your offerings. Pages with only one or two paragraphs rarely answer a student’s question, so aim to fully answer each page’s core question, such as costs, deadlines, or career outcomes, with depth matched to the topic.

2. Optimize page URLs

If your page URLs are comprised of random numbers and letters, search engines can’t understand them. As a result, those pages don’t rank very high, if at all.

Your page URLs should explain exactly what the pages contain. For example, if you are creating a page about financial aid, a logical URL would be, “www.yourcollege.edu/financial-aid.” As an added bonus, this will be easy for site visitors to remember and come back to later.

If possible, try to add page keywords. If a URL contains the terms that students are searching for, that can be a signal to search engines that it is relevant.

That being said, avoid “keyword stuffing,” or using as many keywords as possible in the hopes of ranking well. Google views this as spam, and will penalize your pages accordingly.

3. Build keywords and content around your ideal student

Who is your ideal student? A high school senior looking for a business degree? A full-time professional hoping to advance in his or her career? Or someone else entirely?

Build your content around your target audience, and choose the right keywords to go with it.

If, for example, you want to attract more military and veterans, concentrate on VA benefits, CLEP credits and other things that would be relevant to this population.

If you want to enroll more students in online programs, focus on phrases like “distance learning” and “online programs.”

4. Highlight individual programs

Prospective students look for a lot of things when choosing a college, but one of the most important is the quality of academic programs.

Because of this, many prospective students perform searches specific to their intended majors. Assuming that you already have unique pages for each of your programs (and you should!), you should optimize them for relevant keywords.

When optimizing your pages, consider the different terms and phrases people may search for. This will likely require keyword research.

For example, don’t just optimize the page about your business program for “MBA”—optimize it for “masters in business administration” and “graduate business degree.”

By including multiple keywords that people may be looking for, you increase the chances that the right ones will find you.

5. Consider optimizing for local SEO

Location can play a huge role in where a prospective student applies.

Adult learners, for instance, typically prefer to attend classes close to home, while high school seniors may see college as an opportunity to experience a new region or city. Both groups research based on location, so consider optimizing your website for location-based searches.

If your school is located in a large city, include that city in your web copy, emails and other content.

A complete Google Business Profile for each campus, with an accurate address, hours, and photos, also helps your school appear in the map results for searches like “colleges in Philadelphia.”

Local SEO can help you rank in local searches for your university.

6. Optimize non-text elements

Many site owners make the mistake of only optimizing the text on their pages, and while that’s certainly important, there are a few other elements to consider. Make sure to optimize your title tags, headers, and meta descriptions, as well as the alt text of your images.

These things may not be a big deal to you (or your visitors), but they certainly matter to search engines. Because of that, you should pay close attention to them on all of your pages.

They won’t affect readability or user experience, but they can make all the difference in whether a prospective student finds your site—and your school.

How should higher education SEO adapt to AI search?

Prospective students and parents now ask AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews to compare programs, with prompts like “affordable online MBA programs” or “community colleges with nursing programs near me,” before they visit a college website.

Higher education SEO needs to adapt to this shift by incorporating AI search into their SEO program, such as through the following strategies:

Ask AI tools about your programs

Run the questions applicants ask about your top programs and note which schools get named and which sources get cited.

OmniSEO®, WebFX’s platform for tracking a brand’s AI search visibility, monitors those prompts over time and shows which competitors appear beside you, so you know which program pages and outside sources to fix first.

Keep program facts identical everywhere

Publish tuition, application deadlines, accreditation, and program length on each program page, then match them on the directories, rankings sites, and review sites that AI tools pull from. Conflicting details give AI answers a reason to misstate your school.

Answer applicant questions at the top of program pages

Open each page with plain answers on cost, format, admission requirements, and career outcomes so an AI answer can quote your page accurately.

Follow AI referrals through to applications

Separate visits from ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other AI tools in GA4, and connect inquiry and application key events to your CRM.

In WebFX’s analysis of 2.3 billion sessions, visitors from generative AI platforms converted about 1.2x higher than organic search visitors.

Attract more applications with higher education SEO

WebFX can provide you with an SEO and AI search optimization campaign that helps you rank above your competitors for higher education phrases, earn mentions in AI answers, and increase the authority of your institution within the industry, whether for certain degree programs or location.

With RevenueCloudFX, WebFX’s platform for measuring how marketing drives revenue, our team connects that visibility to the inquiries and applications in your CRM, so you can see which programs and channels drive enrollment.

In addition to our SEO services, we offer everything from a full website redesign to reputation management and more. We are here to help you make your business as successful as possible online.

Contact us online to get your revenue roadmap!

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