On-page SEO: an action plan for education marketers

Part of our #SEOseries.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to a website through optimising organic search engine results. Our #SEOseries will breakdown the process, giving hints and tips on how to improve a websites ranking on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

What is On-Page SEO?

On-page SEO refers to all the steps a marketer can action directly on their webpage to optimise that webpage's search engine results page (SERP) ranking.

This is in addition to off-page SEO tactics such as building backlinks from external URLs, having an effective social media strategy in place, and/or distributing press releases to established publications. Having content that is being mentioned and has incoming links from external sources helps to establish the quality and worth of a webpage, which is a factor that search engines consider when determining the SERP ranking of that webpage.

On-Page SEO Tactics

It is imperative that a webpage's content is written comprehensively and uniquely, quality content that evidences expert topic knowledge is a must. For education marketers this will be useful content that represents the personality of an education institution - exam revision tips, 'a day in the life' student vlogs, facility pictures.

Once this is in place, the webpage hosting the content can be supplemented with the following on-page SEO tactics to boost its SERP position.

Utilising Keywords

The first step in on-page SEO is keyword research. Collate a list of some short-tail keywords alongside a majority of long-tail keywords, as these better match the search behaviour of internet users. Create and optimise website content around this keyword research. Content needs to be engaging, answering any questions prospective students may have and evidencing that a select school, college or university is the right place for them.

Meta Description

The meta description is a short snippet of around 160 characters that summarises a webpage's content. Search engines can sometimes show this description on the search engine results page when it includes the phrase that has been inputted into the search engine. As such, it is useful to use keyword research to optimise meta descriptions. Using brand voice and ensuring that the meta description matches the content are also important.

Try to include a call-to-action to entice users to click through i.e 'Sign up here','book a tour', this should help improve organic click through rate (CTR) which is another factor search engines consider in there ranking algorithm.

Title Tag

The title of a webpage is the called the title tag and is the main text heading that appears on the search engine results page. The title tag is another place to include relevant keywords and phrases to boost page SERP ranking, but shouldn't be any longer than 60 characters. Every page should also have a unique title, avoid duplication which can lead to confusion when search engine bots are crawling a website to determine which content to show in the SERP.

Alt Text

Picture files which are included in blogs can be assigned words and phrases called alt text. Alt text can be viewed and considered by the search engine bots that roam a webpage to determine the relevance of a webpage's content in relation to an inputted search. Alt text also shows up in a box if an image link is broken to let the page viewer know what the image should be. So for example, an image of a music recital hall could have the alt text 'college-music-recital-hall'.

With this is mind, whilst alt text is an opportunity to further try and use keywords and phrases it needs to be relevant to the image and also a minimum amount of characters so it is able to fit inside the designated space for the image on the webpage.

Internal Linking

Internal linking is the practice of inserting links on a webpage to other relevant webpages hosted on that website. This helps search engines 'crawl' a website's content easier, helping it to determine its suitability to match a search query, and also encourages website traffic to click through to other pages and content keeping them engaged for longer. This is called 'bounce rate' and ideally you want it as low as possible, mean that website traffic has navigated through to different parts of a website and not 'bounced' away after viewing the first page the clicked through to.

Pillar pages are a great way to bring internal linking into play. Pillar pages are those built and dedicated to a specific topic. All content relating to that topic is highlighted and linked on that pillar page, to increase both the user experience and boost 'searchability' for search engine bots trying to rank the value of the content by having it all in one place. Pillar pages also help websites to have an easy to navigate, ordered URL structure. URLs containing (relevant) keywords help users to understand what the page contains and as such are likely to have a higher click through rate, as well as being memorable.

An example of a pillar page that education marketers could consider would be a 'Sports' pillar page; so, alovelyschool.co.uk/sports. This 'Sports' pillar page could contain a main body of text describing a school, college or university's Sport offer with internal links to specific sports, facilities, team score boards, details of upcoming fixtures, information on sports kit and where to buy it etc.

Page Performance

Quality content and organised website structure are important on-page SEO factors but, it is also key to optimise the performance of a website and its pages. Webpages that take a long time to load or aren't device adaptable will lead to high bounce rates and lower ranking on SERPs. Ensuring that webpages are mobile responsive is necessary with a bigger percentage of all internet users being mobile users. Page performance can be optimised by ensuring that image files aren't too big in size, minimising the number of redirects to webpages and also the amount of HTML and CSS commands on webpages.

We can help attract people to your website. We offer SEO audits for education providers, we delve into your site and your competitor's sites, check what needs improving and provide a full report with clear action points to improve your SEO.

Pricing starts at £240 for a one-off audit and report of your site with action points.