There is a wealth of information out there about search engine optimization and internet marketing, but most of it is rather general.  Dealing with clients every day has taught me one thing: everyone wants to know how the general information relates to their industry specifically.  After all, there is only so much theory you can learn before you want to put it into practice.

To answer the question “what about me” I’m going to start writing a series of blog posts concerning specific industries. For the first installment of the “what about me”  series, I’ll focus on the education industry.

I Am in Charge of a College. How can SEO benefit me?

The education industry is one of the most competitive both on and offline.  One of the biggest problems that schools face online is that lead generation companies spend tons of money in order to outrank the school’s websites so that they can intercept online traffic and resell the resulting leads.

SEO can help schools beat out not only their industry competition (other schools,) but also their online competition (other schools + lead generation sites.)  The result is that all of that online traffic will be funneled directly into the school’s website, removing the need to pay a middle man for leads.

How Much Interest is There for Schools Online?

Search volume for education (the number of people searching for education-related keywords) is astronomical.  The graph below is from Google Insights. It judges search volume not in terms of real numbers, but in terms of comparative popularity.  Using a scale of 1-100 Google judges how popular a search term is compared to all the other searches online. I used the word “College” the most general term I could come up with to benchmark industry interest and the graph below was the result.

As you can see, the percentage of searches online for the word “college” is huge.  People ARE using the internet to find potential schools.  This means that any school not actively competing for the firs page of Google is missing out on giant lead generation potential.

We Already Get Leads Through Affiliate Sites

This is one of the most common arguments we hear from people in the education industry.  What makes all the difference is that leads acquired through lead gen sites come at a premium, and as soon as you stop paying per lead, they dry up.  SEO is more of an investment than an expense.  Directing some of that marketing budget towards SEO efforts will leave you with long lasting, profitable results with minimal upkeep.

We Already Tried PPC and It Didn’t Work

Pay Per Click, or PPC, advertising is not the same thing as Organic search engine optimization.  With PPC, you pay more money to get ranked higher for specific search terms.  And, you’re paying per click—this means that even if the traffic isn’t interested in what you have to offer, you’re still paying for it every single time.  Organic SEO raises online visibility in the natural Google results.  Because you don’t pay per click, achieving top five rankings in the natural results has a much higher ROI.  Additionally, schools run into much the same problem with PPC as they do with buying leads from lead gen companies:  once you quit paying, traffic dries up.  That means that all the money you spent on that traffic is gone, with no continued return on investment.  As mentioned before, Organic SEO provides much higher return on investment.

Added to all this, PPC campaigns don’t provide nearly as high a click through rate as achieving top five results in Google.  The following is a heat map constructed by a third party web analytics company. It shows the levels of interest and clicks on a typical Google Search Results Page:

Click activity on the PPC ads on the right don’t even remotely compare to the activity on the top left hand corner.

The last reason why PPC is an impractical alternative to organic SEO is that in order to have a truly successful campaign and get all the bang for your PPC buck, you need to create special landing pages for the Pay Per Click adds.  These landing pages have to be optimized the same way you would optimize for a search engine in order to be as relevant as possible to the ad in question.  In other words, you’re performing SEO for the PPC campaign.  Why not just do SEO?

Organic SEO and Colleges

It’s highly unlikely that a college website will rank without a significant amount of outside help.  SEO is a full time job for sites in competitive industries, and all the tricks of the trade are necessary to achieve the desired results.  These results often have a much higher ROI than most other marketing media (such as radio and tv spots etc.) and are long lasting.

Advertising agencies often offer “SEO services” but beware: many times, they consider SEO a sideline project and won’t devote the time necessary to get the same results as a company that specializes exclusively in SEO.

SEO is an actual investment in your web presence, and should be treated as such.  The results will keep you competitive in the education industry for years to come.

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