The past few days of class have consisted of ways Grove City could improve its main website. Multiple student groups presented ideas for ways the college could improve its website. This raises an important question: How can a college use SEO to attract students? I would suggest that it would be actually quite easy to optimize a college’s website. the SEO manager would have to consider a few main points. First, he must decide which pages to optimize first. As an ex-prospective student, I would argue that the most clicked-on pages are Tuition, Majors, Admissions, and Athletics. So, the most reasonable step would be to optimize these pages first. For example, Grove City should do a deep audit of these pages’ rankings and efficiency and work hard to make them as optimized as possible. If a college isn’t visible, it’s nearly invisible to the rest of the world.
The next step an college’s SEO Manager should take is to optimize the Google searches and first impressions of their website. When applying to Grove City, many students search terms like “Christian Colleges in PA” or “Conservative Christian Colleges”… if Grove City is not optimized to come up after a search like this, they are fighting a losing game. A successful college should optimize and earn their place on the first Search Engine Results Page.
Finally, colleges should recognize their niche and target it with full force. Grove City is a small, Christian, Conservative college. We should not be trying to appear on a “Big Christian Universities” Google search; it would be a waste of our time and resources. Any college (or even small business) should find their niche and play to their strengths.
One Response
You raise a really important point about how SEO directly affects a college’s visibility, especially during the student search process. I like how you grounded your argument in your experience as a former prospective student—identifying pages like Tuition, Majors, Admissions, and Athletics makes a lot of sense because those are often the first places students and parents click when evaluating a school. Prioritizing those pages for optimization is both realistic and strategic.