Part 2: Colleges Don't Know What They Have
September 27, 2024
Sarah Gilbert
This is part two of the SEO for Enrollment Growth Series.
As a college is looking to expand their ability to reach more students and grow as an institution, they are often not utilizing one of the best tools they have – their website.
As someone who has marketed and grown several brand-new sites from Ground Zero, what colleges have at their disposal is unique, powerful and…mind blowing that they don’t use.
When I say ‘Colleges Don’t Know What They Have,’ I mean – you don’t know how difficult it is to get your site to have the authority and strength that is innate in a college website, and you should be using this as a major driver of enrollment in your institution.
Domain Authority of a .EDU Domain
One of these terms, coined by Moz, is Domain Authority. According to Moz, domain authority is a search engine ranking score that predicts how well a website will rank in the SERPs (search engine result pages). Domain authority was created to account for a previously-published part of Google’s search algorithm, which they called ‘PageRank.’
Anyone doing SEO for a while knows about PageRank. Google used to disclose how ‘strong’ your page was and its ranking would often correlate with this score. Several years ago, Google removed this from our view as marketers, but in a recent analysis of leaked Google algorithm documents, PageRank was still an active part of the algorithm.
Ahrefs has a different scoring system, called Domain Rating, that serves a similar function, and they also use something called UR, which looks at the ability of a single page to rank against the competition.
Analyzing these factors can help a college determine what their ranking possibilities are, and what competitive pages look like that will provide a good framework for content creation.
The Proof is in the Pudding – Case Study of Harvard’s Content Launches
High domain authority (DA) websites tend to rank more quickly for keywords due to several factors:
- Existing trust: Search engines already consider these sites authoritative and trustworthy.
- Strong backlink profile: They typically have many high-quality backlinks, boosting overall SEO.
- Content relevance: Often have a history of relevant, quality content in their niche.
- Crawl priority: Search engines crawl and index their new content more frequently.
- User signals: Higher click-through rates and time on site can positively impact rankings.
Let’s say Harvard decides to launch a new online course on “Artificial Intelligence Ethics.”
- Harvard creates a new page on their website about this course.
- Due to Harvard’s high domain authority:
- The page is crawled and indexed by search engines very quickly, possibly within hours.
- It immediately benefits from Harvard’s existing authority in education and technology fields.
- Within days, the page starts ranking for keywords like:
- “AI ethics course”
- “Harvard AI program”
- “Online artificial intelligence ethics”
Even though other universities or online learning platforms might offer similar courses, Harvard’s page is likely to outrank them quickly, appearing on the first page of search results.
This rapid ranking occurs despite the page being new because:
- Harvard’s domain has a strong backlink profile from reputable sources.
- Search engines trust content from harvard.edu due to its long history of providing quality educational content.
- The university’s brand recognition likely leads to high click-through rates from search results.
As people engage with the page (spending time reading, low bounce rates), it further solidifies its high ranking.
The Uniqueness of a .EDU Domain
For colleges and universities, the strength of their online presence is often rooted in their .edu domain. These domains are uniquely powerful in the digital landscape, reserved exclusively for accredited post-secondary educational institutions in the United States. This exclusivity, coupled with the inherent trust associated with educational institutions, translates into significant advantages in search engine algorithms.
The power of .edu domains is not just anecdotal. A study by Fatima Zohra Eddaoudia and Franz Enzenhofer, published in the International Journal of Interactive Communication Systems and Technologies, found that .edu domains had a higher average domain authority compared to other top-level domains, indicating their strong potential for high search rankings.
Google, the dominant search engine, views educational institutions through the lens of its E-E-A-T principle: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. As outlined in Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines, these factors are crucial in determining the quality and rank-worthiness of content.
When you search for terms related to degree programs that you offer, you may see websites that are not colleges showing up at the top. This is largely due to the work they have done to meet the E-E-A-T principles – work that a college hasn’t done.
It’s not that colleges don[‘t have E-E-A-T – they have a TON of Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness, but they rarely show it on their websites, save for on a few faculty pages.
There are ways to leverage the power of your .edu domain with the combination of adding expertise to individual pages to help them benefit from increased rankings.
Maintain Responsibility
While .edu domains offer significant advantages, they also come with responsibilities. You have a responsibility as a college to maintain high standards of content and user experience to preserve the trust associated with their domains.
Also – and this is important – you can’t rely solely on the strength of your .edu domain for traffic growth. As the landscape gets more and more competitive (maybe even as more schools read this blog), you will have to do more than just create content and hope it will rank.
Closing Thoughts
Look – SEO doesn’t have to be a bad word in the eyes of your institution (bad acronym, to be precise). More eyes on the pages of your website mean you are reaching more potential students.
You can build out SEO strategies that allow for traffic growth, while not compromising the quality of the students inquiring about your programs.
Use what you have, and capitalize on your strong websites. If you don’t, it will be another institution the prospects find that ends up getting the enrollment.