Higher Ed SEO & Digital Strategy: What Universities Get Wrong (and How to Fix It) with Paula French

If you enjoyed this podcast, please like, subscribe and share it with friends who might find it valuable. Your support helps us reach more listeners and continue bringing you expert insights from the world of higher education. Welcome to this new episode of the enrollment critic by Guest Today is Paula French. She is the director of sales and marketing at Search Influence, which is a digital agency based in New Orleans. Thank you, George. Thanks for having me. It's great to have you here. SEO is definitely one of those things that is on top of mind of every single university institution, but also it's one of those things where everybody struggles a bit with it. Different institutions struggle within a different level. But before we dive into that, just tell me a little bit about Search Influence. Tell me a little bit about the work that you guys do in the space and outside of the space. So we Search Influence is a 20-year-old digital agency, who are actually a woman-owned business. We were founded with a deep focus on search engine optimization. While we do meta-ads, Google search ads, programmatic, email, we have a great, great analytics practice. Search engine optimization really remains at the core of the value that we deliver for our clients today, almost 20 years later. Find Search Engine specific, I mean, I think of digital marketing as just sold abroad, right? That is a great question. Back when we were founded, Google was really somewhat new. But at the time, searchers or consumers, really, they weren't searchers yet. They were just customers back then. They were making the shift from the yellow pages to online search engines. And so our co-founder saw that shift in the marketplace, and they knew that they could help local, small businesses get found when people went to Google. And so we have been super fortunate that we have worked with so many local, small business as our company has really grown. We've been able to work with much, much larger institutions. So that's one of the ways that we got into the higher education space a decade ago was the fact that universities did begin to see the need for search engine optimization as well because their student was changing and their enrollment funnel was changing. And I know that your customer list, in terms of industry, is very varied. Do you see much difference between say, you know, the entertainment business versus the higher ed business versus the hospitality industry? Yeah, the three industries that we really focus on are higher ed, healthcare and hospitality. And there are a lot of similarities in those three industries. And of course, there are a lot of differences as well. And the journey, the life cycle that somebody goes through to make that purchase decision is sometimes similar. Sometimes it's a little bit longer depending on the thing that you're selling within those industries. And sometimes it's a little bit shorter. One of the things that is similar, especially talking about SEO, is the complexity of their websites. And so in order to do search engine optimization well, you need to have a deep understanding of complex websites, how Google understands complex websites, how they crawl and access your site and what they're looking for. And that's one of the things that we find to be really rewarding ultimately about the work we do and the industries that we work with because we love the puzzle of a complex website and the opportunity of it and how you can use your website to continue to build essentially a powerhouse that can rank on Google. And what are the main reasons for basically doing this episode together is because I will like to dive into your research, SEO research that you did with OPC. And there research specifically for continuing adult studies and online studies. Now is that your core in terms of what you focus on, you know, SEO and higher ed or is it more broad? Within higher education, our focus is on professional continuing and online education. And the reason for that is because it is a different student. It's a different learner than a typical student that's entering undergraduate from high school. You know, there's a very different enrollment funnel for undergraduate education than there is for somebody looking for professional education or an even online, you know, depending on the level of education that they're looking for. And so those individuals are able to be reached and influenced with search and optimization and advertising, paid search, email, etc. all of those things are more relevant for the adult learner. And you know, talking about the decision cycle, that is a, that is a, it can be a very long decision cycle. And also they don't have to make the choice to pursue that education. There are a lot of like replacement products or they might simply make the choice that they don't want to pursue that education. Whereas the typical undergraduate student, they're usually not deciding whether or not they want to go to college or not. They're, once they've decided they're going to go to college, I'm just trying to figure out where they're going. And so that's another difference in that audience. And one of the reasons why we think it's really interesting to work within the professional continuing and online space because there, it is very complex and there are so many things that you can do to reach that learner. Okay, so continuing education and the adult learner, we're talking about this are students who maybe have some classes and are going back to complete their degree or what are we talking about here. It could be that or they already have an undergraduate degree, they already have a master's degree and they're looking to upskill or re-skill. And so they might be looking to get a certification that will help them to grow within their company or get learned a totally new thing that will help them make a lateral move into a different company or a different industry. And I know that a lot of institutions now talk about this because there's an upcoming enrollment cliff for undergraduates. There's an upcoming enrollment cliff for international students and I feel like the new word of the day is adult learner, online learner and things like that. Do you think it's more of a trend or is it just kind of like we got nothing else left so let's just go after this market? Right, I just feel like everybody talks about it but it's more of a very high level and there's really no clear strategy, right? A lot of universities are approaching it differently and there are some universities that are very, very well invested in this area. I don't think it's a trend. I do think that the labor market shows us that people do need this type of education and people are seeking to learn new things. They're seeking new information and so university has a great opportunity to be the one to provide them that information. And as long as the learners will appreciate the fact that this education is coming from a university, universities can win. I think that that's something that universities really need to do is to help learners understand why come to us instead of LinkedIn learning or going to YouTube. What are the benefits of being in a classroom setting, even if it's virtual? Well, what's the accountability that's there? What's the level of intensity that you're going to get from a true university program compared to just watching videos online? That makes sense and it's a great segue into the core of what we're talking about here is the research that you've conducted with UPC and for people in the audience that don't really know. And UPC is the university professional, continuing education association. Why do you specifically choose them? Is it because of your core focus on continuing study? Yes. And so they are really seeing as either the top or the top two associations within this space of professional and online education and they have an amazing research team. So they conduct high quality research that helps their members understand trends and what's going on and to help them make strategic decisions. And so that's actually the reason why we partnered with them because of the fact that their research is so well respected and so well done. And so we wanted to know, we saw anecdotally that search engine optimization was not done well within universities. Of course, some people are doing a great job, but by and large, there's just so much opportunity. And so we wanted to understand, is this as widespread as we see it? And what do universities, what do marketers and institutional leaders at those universities think about search engine optimization? Do they see it as a core part of their strategy? How well do they think that they're doing? Because we knew that. better understanding that would ultimately help us with speaking to those universities about the opportunities that they have on search engines. And the research shows that over 50% of the institutions don't have a strategy. Were you surprised with that number? Were you expecting it higher and lower? What was your expectation? I would say it's about right. You know, I think that most universities do things that look like S.E.O. in their regular or some marketing. A lot of universities spend time making great content, but they're not necessarily doing it with an S.E.O. strategy in mind or working towards S.E.O. specific goals. They're doing PR, but they're not leveraging it for S.E.O. PR can be an S.E.O. powerhouse. It can do so, so, so much for you. And everybody's doing PR, but they aren't necessarily leveraging it for S.E.O. So, you know, S.E.O. also can be something that you think that it's something that you just do for a little bit, and then you feel like you kind of check that box and you move on to doing other things, but there are things that you can do repeatedly in work that you're already doing that will push your S.E.O. in the right direction. And it really is. S.E.O. is really like a snowball effect. Kind of like, once it gets going, it just gets bigger and bigger and better. And ultimately, you know, having an S.E.O. strategy will help you do it in the right way. Yeah. I mean, you're right because I also see it in my, you know, life and in the trenches in the operation side of the university where, you know, there's a lot of tactics that are done, but there's no clear strategy. And I think part of that is, and this is, I'm doing a little bit of me marketing here and just kind of my experience and it's just a data point. But, you know, my boss always used to come to me and say, "Hey, you're not doing this. I don't see a tactic. I don't see a tactic." And then when you go, "Well, listen, we need to have a strategy." And so, "Well, let's not waste time with that. You know, we don't have time where the semester is coming up or whatever the situation is. So, I kind of feel the pain from an operation side." Now, just some of the, some of the, the districts that we're in the research are pretty interesting. So, 84% of the leadership, CSO, is crucial, but 51% don't have a strategy. 61% of leaders, they say they need more info from their team and only 35% of them get reports. That was crazy to me with that. You know, only 35% of the leaders actually get SEO reports. Where is the disconnect there? Is it a leadership issue? Is it an operations issue from your experience? Where do you see that happening? I think that the root of it is the misconception about what SEO really is. And people just, many people don't see SEO as the foundation of their strategy. They see it as this kind of like techy thing that technical people do. And it really is just such a core thing of everything that we are doing or should be a core thing to everything that we're doing. What I think is really missing in House at University is, or even out of House, is lacking an SEO leader or an SEO champion. So, somebody who really understands SEO best practices, they're going to create a strategy. They're going to integrate SEO into the work that the team is already doing and they're going to evaluate results in report to, to stakeholders, to leadership about how well they're doing. And what I think that this comes down to is, more lacking the capabilities, we're lacking the capacity to do these things. So, we're lacking the skill and we're lacking the time for an individual with any university, marketing team to be able to do this on their own. That's actually an interesting point to have an SEO leader or champion within the organization. And I'm wondering, what are some, what set of skills does this person need to have, what type of seniority level does this person need to have? I don't know, maybe you have a thought about that or what are your thoughts on it. If they're going to be a champion, they need to have some type of leadership position because they need to be able to rally the troops, align stakeholders, hold people accountable, give feedback, show them the results, tell them changes that need to be made and everybody needs to respect them in order to do that. It all depends on the culture of your organization. If that can be, you know, a mid-level person, then great, if it needs to be for somebody further along in their career, that may be required as well. But it definitely needs to be somebody who is used to rallying the troops, creating alignment and holding people accountable. Yeah, just to continue with the trend of some of the data that came off from the report, another thing that was really surprising to me is that on the 49 percent of the leaders that said, "My institution has a strategy," about 55 percent of them said they don't like the strategy. You know? So, and I'm wondering, and maybe that's what it is. I think you probably hit the knee on the head that there's a misconception there on what is a CL. You know, the reason they maybe don't like the strategies because either the leadership doesn't understand what a CL is. Or maybe the team just kind of doesn't really understand what that is, you know, what the CL is. Well, so very, very interesting. But from your perspective, when you come in as an agency, how do you help fill that gap? How do you better improve these numbers as an agency when you come in? Well, we never, when we start with the strategy, so we work with the university to understand what are their initiatives for the year at a high level. You know, what are the key programs? Where do they need to be driving more enrollment? What are their best programs? And then we take that and we use search engine optimization data in order to balance the university programs with what we're seeing actually happening in the search engines. So if you have on a great program that does really well, but it doesn't rank well on search engines, then that's an amazing opportunity because that program, if it did rank, you know, is going to ultimately drive, you know, drive more students. You might have a, in contrast, a low performing program that doesn't rank well. Maybe that's contributing to the fact that it's a low performing program because nobody knows about it. Sometimes the low performing programs just don't have a lot of demand, though. And so there's a balance, right? That's where that balance comes in of, okay, well, maybe search engine optimization. The engines aren't right, the right place for this particular program. And so we'll set realistic expectations and work with the university on realistic goals for what search engine optimization can do for particular programs. So once we lay down that strategy, we work with them to figure out, okay, these are the things we need to be doing. Is your internal team going to do it? Are we going to do it? Which things can your team do versus our team? And even when their team is going to be doing the content writing or the execution technical SEO, our team is writing alongside, we're consulting. We do a quality assurance check on any work that our clients implement themselves so that we can make sure that it was done correctly so that you're ultimately going to get the results from the work. And then we take on the, all the full responsibility of reporting your results. And then we have the data that are certain trackers that we set up for your keywords or certain ways that we're looking at your SEO data and performance. And we report back on what's going well, what's not, what changes do we need to make in this next period in order to continue to grow our success. And, Boa, how do you keep leadership involved in your process as well? One of the things that came out of the research is that 67% of leaders get an SEO report once a quarter or in the last. So there's basically zero visibility in terms of what the team is doing or at the most, once every three, four months. And how do you get them involved so that the work that's being done kind of rises up to the top? And there's a couple of ways that we do that. One is the way that we format our reporting. So we set smart goals with our clients. Like we align with them at the beginning of a period. What is the most important thing that we affect in this quarter? And so if when we're talking to the leader, we are going to focus on that one particular thing. And that's usually something, of course, it's going to be something quatchifiable. But it's usually something that they care about and that they can understand so that they can say, "Okay, great. Check. This is working." The other thing is having different kinds of meetings with different kinds of stakeholders. So we might have a weekly or a bi-weekly meeting with our day-to-day contacts that we're in the trenches with. And then quarterly, we have a higher level leadership update to department heads or the directors of certain programs that are involved in the work that we're doing. And on the flip side, what should university leaders do to get more involved in this? What are some of the things that they can do with their team? Yeah, you can connect organic traffic to leads. So most universities at this point are tracking the source of their leads. does something like 72% we have a different study that we did, which is the Marketing Metrics Research Study with the same group. And most people are tracking the source of their increase. And so they should be able to show 20, 40, 50 percent of our leads are coming from organic search. And that is a very telling number to be able to see how many people are entering your website from Google organically and ultimately converting. And that's the number that you get to watch increase over time when you're starting to rank higher on search engines when you're getting more traffic from search engines. One of the difficulties that I'll bring into with specifically tracking is because, you know, statistically they say that before a student becomes a lead to your university, they've gone through a thousand touch points, you know. And out of those thousand touch points, maybe a few hundred of them are just going back to the website, going back to the website. But where do you really, how can you really attribute whether it was just word of mouth, or it was an aunt or an uncle who just, you know, how do you really do real attribution? How much of that do you just make assumptions on? There are certainly some assumptions, but there are, you know, of course there are different attribution models you can use. You know, last click, last click attribution. So where was the last? What's the last source that somebody, what's the, what's the, what is the last source that sent someone to your website? That is the most common attribution model. And it is, it is the most simplest. What CRM's allow you to do, most CRM's allow you to see the multiple touch points within the funnel. And then you can kind of understand better, okay, first they came from this place and then they came from that place. You tend to do those things sort of an aggregate. And so it doesn't give you the best picture. There are certainly a lot of assumptions that are made because of the fact that the funnel is complex. If you have, if you can have different touch points along the, along the student journey that are measurable, that makes doing that a lot easier. So if they are, you know, coming to your website and downloading something or coming to your website and signing up for something, those things are more inherently more measurable and will give you more data to go on because then you can see the source that sent them to each of those individual touch points. Got it. And going back to the research, one big part of that was, obviously, the survey of 100 random was elected institutions. They are just to kind of see what their SEO readiness were or was. And I think the average score was maybe like 58 out of 100. So right down the middle. Can you talk a little bit more about that? Like, you know, what were some of the criteria that were being looked at? And really, I mean, this, you know, maybe 100 is not an achievable number, right? But it's 58 where is that a good average? I would have hoped that the number would have been higher. You know, this did, this did look like a fair, at a fair spread of different size organizations that were all up to the members. And so the, the things that the audit looked at were, there were four key things. Number one is authority. So this includes how many links were pointing back to your website, which ultimately increases Google's trust in your site. Number two was technical site health. So how easy is it for Google to access and crawl your website? The third was we looked at the uniqueness of title tags and meta descriptions. So we use this as a proxy for how well optimized is your content because there was no way we could look at content optimization at scale for 100 universities. And arguably looking at the uniqueness of the title tags and meta descriptions is, is kind of a low bar. But it was actually surprising that not everybody had 100% unique title tags and meta descriptions, which is, you know, a super, like super low hanging fruit when it comes to SEO. And the last thing that we looked at was accessibility. Because the strong accessible website practices typically go hand in hand with SEO best practices. And so if you have an accessible compliant website, then usually you have some good stuff going on for SEO as well. Okay, so accessibility we're talking about, you know, speed of the website. Speed it's more about how well can someone with disabilities access and use your website? Yes, that kind of accessibility. Got it, got it, got it, and you know, out of the universities, I mean the average was about 58. What were some of the main areas like out of these four areas? What was the one that needed most help or were universities were really lacking? The, I would say the technical, the technical site health was definitely a big thing. But when we, the other was really content. And so we did, you know, while I said that, you know, the, the assessment looked at content at scale. There are, you know, a number of these universities that we spoke to after the fact and delivered the audit to them and actually looked a little bit deeper at some of the things. And what we saw was that the content was not well optimized with keywords, which we were going to keywords. And it was not giving them the content that searchers ultimately wanted. And so it wasn't really providing them the answers that they would need in order to sort of like self evaluate if they wanted to choose this university. Got it. And when it comes to content, what is your recommendation? And I see a lot of universities either try to do that in-house or try to outsource it. And now obviously we have AI and there's also some that are kind of trying that area as well. What's your, from your experience, what your, you know, what is your recommendation on content and how should the university tackle that? So, number one is understanding what searchers are looking for. So I say it like that because I'm not saying exactly what keywords are they searching for. But what information are they looking for? And so by doing keyword research and topic research, you can understand what do they actually need to know in order to make a decision of whether or not to reach out to your university. And so this is one of the ways that SEO is the foundation of your marketing plan because you're using SEO research to understand your audience, not just figure out what keyword is search the most. So you take that data, you write your content to provide the information that the searchers are looking for. And that could be pretty expansive. The way you write that content should be more simple than you think it should be and it should be more broken down and to nice headers, different paragraphs, lots of bullet points, FAQs, make the content easy to read, easy to digest. So that's somebody who is used to looking at short videos online, looking at short snippets of captions online so that they actually want to engage with your content and it's not just you know book a web page. And as we come close to the end of this interview, we did talk a little bit about AI and I know that AI is one of those things now that has become a big part of the search habit really and I catch myself too, just kind of going on chat GVD and just using that to search. A lot of the things that I'm looking for, how does that affect SEO in general, how does that affect your work? You know one of the, well okay let's start off, people search behavior is changing a little bit. Now there is a difference in what people use Google versus chat GPT4. There is a new one, it's in the different things that they're searching for on those different places. There's also a new one to the kinds of things that an AI answer is going to give you versus what you need to go to a website to give you. And so just talking about Google, so Google has their AI overviews that appear at the top of some search results. The AI overview is most often shown for informational searches, so like high level searches somebody's looking for an answer to something. They show very infrequently when somebody is doing a transactional search, so looking to buy something or sign up for a service and if they're doing a local search, they're looking for a local business near them. AI overviews very, very, very infrequently show up for those kinds of things. And so when we're talking about that, which in our world sometimes refer to those as money keywords, there's not that much of a change. AI doesn't change that that much. But informational, which could impact your visits to your blog as an example, that can change the way that you approach SEO. So there's also the fact that people are searching different things in different places. So if you want to get picked up by the AI engines, your content needs to be more conversational, more direct and simpler, kind of as I was talking about, you know, just about a little minutes ago. And so writing in those shorter, more concise statements make it more likely that A AI is going to pick up your snippet, and Google could even pick up your snippet and put it straight at the top of their page in their AI overview. And so that is, at this point in time, most relevant for your informational content. But I would also be thinking about writing your transactional content in that way as well for the time that AI does sort of enter lettering now. Got it. So one last question that I'd like to ask a lot is, what is one thing that we're not talking a lot about or that we should be talking more about when it comes to SEO and higher education? One of the things that we haven't gotten into and that I don't see all that many people talking about is social search. So just in the same way that consumer search behavior is beginning to be in chat GPT and other AI search engines, we also see people searching on social media. So that could be directly on TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, YouTube at one point in time was the second largest search engine. So right behind Google, it had the most searches happening on the internet. And so people are diversifying the places that they're looking for information. And so when you think about publishing your content, you should be publishing in the places where people are searching and thinking about SEO when you do it. So if you see in your SEO research that people are looking for a certain piece of information, so you create a blog post about it, you should also be creating a social media post about the same thing and optimizing it in that same way thinking about the keywords that people would be searching for. Yeah, that's interesting. And I'm with you. I was looking at research and YouTube was basically number two driver in terms of turning somebody from awareness to really becoming the lead in higher education. But one interesting thing that I saw was that TikTok only less than 5% of the respondents said TikTok was really what God then interested in the school or anything like that. And what that is is that go ahead and advertise on TikTok, get your brand awareness there, and it's really not going to be a driver. A decision maker for people to come to your university or just choose higher education. Was do you think that's an outlier? The research I looked at, because I do see a lot of talk about TikTok being where it's at. And that's where everybody's spending most of their time in terms of social media time. But I really don't see that as driving higher ed. It's just so hard to ignore, right? No, yeah, no, I think you're thinking about the right right, right? Because how can you ignore it when people are spending so much time there and the right demographics are there as well? And so I think that you would be remiss to not be present. But then on the university side, when you're looking at where your leads coming from and you're not necessarily seeing TikTok in that list, it can be hard to justify that. And so if you think about TikTok as awareness, that could potentially be a way to think about it in the same way that you might think about, you know, TV advertising, that's what a thing. But I think it depends. And you need to test it. And you need to see what works. Like not even just like what works for your university, what works for certain programs. So not all universities are thinking about their marketing on a program by program basis. But in today's segmented market, when there are so many places you can be, you really have to be thinking about for this program. Where's my audience? What's the funnel for this program and how can I reach these reach this audience best? Yeah, it almost makes me think of, you know, 20 years ago, there was a buzzword that was everywhere, a permission marketing. Everybody was talking about permission marketing. Like you can't be there because you're not permitted to be there. And I actually kind of feel like a lot of these things that we have, a lot of this, just breaking down of all this different sources, it almost brings that up again, you know, maybe TikTok is one of those places where just people don't expect you to be there. Yeah. Anyway. Yeah. On the note of permission marketing, I mean that brings up email and the fact that when somebody gives you permission to email them, that's a big deal. Now email is not appropriate for all demographics, but for those, it is appropriate. Email is incredibly valuable and you would absolutely be remiss to not be an email. You know, talk about, okay, yeah, there's all these millions of people in TikTok. Well, there's also millions of people who are checking their email every day. And so if you're not in their inbox is kind of frequently, that's a missed opportunity as well. Do you think email is dead? I see you don't know. Certainly not. No, no. SEO is not dead. Email is not dead. And for certain demographics, that's not going anywhere. Awesome. Well, Paul, thank you. One last thing. Where can people find you when working? I mean, find certain influence. Yeah, so for me personally, connect with me on LinkedIn. It's listed as Paula Keller French at Search Influence. So it's looked for me there. And for Search Influence, we have a lot of amazing resources on our blog. We publish pretty regularly. So if you search, you know, Search Influence Blog or Search Influence Higher Education, you'll also find a nice page with some higher education resources specifically. Awesome. Thank you so much. Thanks for being here. All right. Thanks George. Have a great day. [BLANK_AUDIO]