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SEO Strategies for Your Online Education Business: Tips and Tools

Look at some SEO best practices and tools to enhance the visibility of your online education business on search engines.


Running an online education business today is very different from what it used to be. Students are self-aware and know what they want in terms of knowledge and education. This is largely due to the digital boom. With the internet bringing everything to our fingertips, searching for the best online course or educational institution has become much easier.

So, here is the question. If there are people out there searching for an online education business like yours, how do you increase your visibility on search engines? What can you do to make sure that your online business is found by your target audience? If you thought SEO, you guessed correctly. With a strategic approach to SEO, you too can drive greater traffic to your online education business. In this article, we’ll discuss how.

Why is SEO important for online education businesses?

Many students prefer to take the route of online education these days. In fact, a 2017 report found that over 6 million students in the United States were enrolled in online education programs at the time. And this number has only grown since then. With so many students interested in online learning, you would want to ensure that your business website is among the top results when they come searching.

SEO helps you with that. With the right strategies and some useful SEO software, you can –

  • Increase your website’s visibility
  • Provide a better experience to the website visitors
  • Boost organic traffic
  • Drive more inquiries/enrollments
  • Beat your competitors
  • Gain more experience ranking for keywords on Google

SEO can also help you get better visitor engagement on advertising platforms like Facebooks Ads or Google Ads. Edits – SEO Companies can also help you get better visitor engagement on advertising platforms like Facebooks Ads or Google Ads.
Outsourcing SEO agencies in Europe can help to ensure that your online education website is performing at its best. By optimizing the website for search engine performance, it can reach a much wider audience and attract more visitors to view the educational content you offer.

So, it’s safe to say that SEO can be the determiner of your online education business’ success.

 

SEO tips for online education business websites

1. Spruce up your website

To make sure that you are setting yourself up for digital marketing success, it’s a good idea to start with a website audit. This is done to identify any issues with your site that may prevent search engines and users from properly indexing/using your website. You can use a tool like Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider to identify both existing and potential issues with your website.

Screaming frog website screen shot

With this tool, you can –

  • Find any errors or broken links in your website.
  • Identify any redirect chains or loops.
  • Review any URLs blocked by robot.txt
  • Analyze on-page issues like incorrect/missing headers, alt text for images, meta descriptions, duplicate content, and more.
  • Look at the site architecture

After identifying all SEO issues with your website, it’s a good idea to plan how you’re going to address them. Create a list of action items based on priority, along with timelines for fixing these issues.

2. Make your content SEO friendly

 

Pay special attention to your website content to understand where you are ranking on the search engine results. What makes the core of every successful website is the ability to align the content with the users’ search queries. You also need to ensure that you deliver your content in a clear and concise way. Narrato AI Writer App can help you here. As for the SEO side of things, a great tool to use would be Google Search Console. With this tool, you can use search analytics data to optimize your content for better visibility. It gives you a complete overview of how your readers are looking at your content in SERPs. You can use best AI SEO tools that will help you create content that is optimized for higher rankings in SERP, but keep in mind that there is an AI detector platform to differentiate AI-generated content from humanly-written

Google search console screen shot

We can’t talk about optimizing content for SEO without touching upon the topic of keywords. For online education businesses, there is an endless list of keywords available on the web, just waiting to be picked up. All you have to do is find them and look for ways to integrate them into your content. The time you spend researching the right keywords for your content will certainly pay off in the end (we can assure).

It’s important to approach keyword research and content optimization the right way. Here’s how it’s usually done –

1. Keyword research: To start with keyword research, brainstorm with your team to come up with a list of phrases that your target audience would be searching for. With tools like Google Keywords Planner and Narrato’s SEO Content Brief Generator, the job of researching primary and secondary keywords becomes easier. Google Keywords Planner also allows you to look at search volumes, future forecasts, and historical trends for a list of keywords, while Narrato gives you a list of secondary keywords with counts that are automatically updated as you start writing in the editor.

 Narrato's SEO Content Brief Generator screen shot

When researching keywords, make sure that you look for keywords with varying lengths. Your initial research will bring up some great 1 or 2-word keywords, but long-tail keywords (with 4 words or more) can be very useful for generating traffic. A dedicated long-tail keyword research tool like LongTail Pro can be very useful here. Once you have your list of keywords, it’s time to integrate them into your content.

2. Adding keywords to content: After you’re done with keyword research, you can include the selected keywords in –

  • The page title
  • The first paragraph or first 100 words of content
  • Headings (H1, H2, H3)
  • Meta Description
  • Names of the image file
  • Alt Tags on the images
  • Page URL

You’ll also want to include the researched keywords throughout your text. According to an OptinMonster article, there are strategic places in your content where you can place specific keywords. The general keywords (shorter ones with 1 or 2 words) that have a high search volume are great for headings (H1, H2, and H3). For the body of the content, long-tail keywords with a medium search volume are best.

When you are adding keywords, make sure that you don’t overdo it. Keyword stuffing will do you more harm than good in the long run, since Google recognizes it as a negative ranking factor. Try to integrate keywords in such a way that it adds value to your content.

3. Analyze your content SEO performance: After optimizing for keywords, you can use a tool like Moz to see how well a page is ranking for a keyword and identify any improvement opportunities.

MOZ website screen shot

3. Add internal links

Most education business websites contain a lot of information that’s spread out in different sections. When prospective students (and search engines) come looking for information, finding it can get difficult. Internal links can make this much, much simpler. They essentially help in establishing an information hierarchy. When you litter your content with relevant internal links, it helps visitors in navigating the website and finding information more easily. Internal links also provide search engines a roadmap for crawling the website. So, make sure that you have an internal linking strategy for your online education website.

To get started with this, first decide on what you want your website structure to look like. Usually, the home page will go on top, and then the individual pages and posts. Also decide which content pieces you’d want to highlight. This is the content that’s performing well for you. Now, add contextual links between pages and make sure that you use the right anchor text.

4. Make the most of Local SEO

To drive additional traffic to your site and make your education business stand out in the search results, make sure that you leverage Local SEO too. With Local SEO practices, you can increase the discoverability of your business in local search results. To get started with this, you can set up your Google My Business profile. Before you add any information, do some local keyword research. KWFinder by Mangools is a great tool for this purpose.

Mangools website screen shot

5. Make your website mobile-friendly

With smartphone usage becoming more commonplace, it’s important to optimize your website for mobile too. Your site’s performance on smaller devices can affect your search rankings too. Have a mobile-first policy and make sure that your site and page speeds are at optimal levels. If your site loads slowly, the visitor might get discouraged from exploring your website any further.

Merkle’s Mobile First Index Tool is great for checking how your mobile site stacks up against the desktop version. After you enter the URL into the tool, you can test it for any content discrepancies, images, links, structured data, and more. With this information, you can start making the relevant changes to your mobile site.

Merkle's mobile first index tool

 

SEO Cheat Sheet

Here’s a roundup of all the SEO best practices –

  • Image Use: Adding engaging visual elements like images, infographics and videos can enhance your search rankings.
  • Keywords: Avoid keyword stuffing, and naturally integrate relevant keywords into your content to increase discoverability.
  • Page Architecture: Divide your content into different sections, and use titles and header titles like H1, H2, and H3 to guide crawlers through your page architecture.
  • Content Quality: The best way to increase your website authority is by providing your audience with relevant content that they would find useful.
  • Content Length: Whether it’s articles, blog posts, or explainer videos, long-form content usually tends to perform better when it comes to SEO.
  • Content Frequency: Your rank on the SERPs also depends on how consistently you come out with content.
  • Mobile Friendliness: Make sure that your website is optimized for mobile if you don’t want your ranking to take a hit.
  • Link Building: Backlink building is important because links are one of the major ranking factors of search engines.

Wrapping Up

This covers all the SEO tips and tools that can help you increase the online presence of your education business. With just a few tweaks in your website and content, you can drive more traffic and generate more leads for your business. So get started with your website optimization today!fre

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