Education SEO for Higher Education, EdTech and K-12 Schools

If you’re doing SEO for higher education institutions, schools, or EdTech startups, this is hands down the only education SEO guide you’ll ever need. 

Before I started SEO, I was an educator for about 10 years. To say education is close to my heart would be an understatement.

But, the real value of this post comes from the expertise shared by these industry leaders:

Education is a complex industry. Below, I’ve distilled our combined experience into a practical roadmap for education SEO covering different business models, regions, and industry sectors.

Let’s dig in.

worth over $47.8 billion, in 2023. Attracting more students is not just an institutional goal; it’s often an economic one.

Governments have a huge influence: Globally, governments affect educational institutions with budget, policy, and curriculum changes that indirectly influence how they can market themselves.

Because of these factors, traditional marketing and SEO approaches don’t always translate to success in education.

For instance, let’s look at the issue of declining enrolments.

Educators think it’s an economic issue. Traditional SEO thinking would have you believe it’s an on-site conversion issue.

In reality, it’s a value proposition issue that centers on potential students considering the long-term ROI of a degree.

Student loan debt is massive. It’s the problem everyone has on their mind. Is it worth going into debt and then paying off a loan for years, maybe decades, to get this education? And what’s the ROI of that? So, because of that, students are more conscious than they have ever been about the decision they’re making.

Better rankings and more traffic won’t help in this case. Instead, you’ll need to tailor your education SEO services to focus on things like:

• Identifying high-value degrees with strong career demand.
• Minimizing advertising spend on degrees with low career value.
• Using search data to understand shifting student interests and patterns.
• Tailoring branding and messaging to reach the right audience segments.
• Removing online barriers that may block enrolments for high-value degrees.

Rankings and traffic won’t cut it. You must turn search demand into bums on seats for it to work.

If you can do that, you’ll have buy-in for SEO from key educators and stakeholders at the institutions you’re working with.

Uni Enrol in such a market go beyond providing degree-related information. Rather, it’s in offering the much-needed transparency students are lacking in terms of hidden fees, scholarships qualified, and alternative cost-effective study pathways.

Choosing the right education path is no longer just about prestige—students and parents now have unprecedented access to scholarships, financial aid, and career information.

The future of EdTech isn’t just about learning; it’s about empowering students to make optimized, financially sound choices. And Uni Enrol seeks to organize all relevant information and pathways to help students easily discover and secure these opportunities.

Without deeply understanding the end user’s pain points, you won’t know how to best reach decision-makers either.

Yes, understanding your audience is important in any industry, but for education, it’s the lifeblood of your SEO campaign.

Notebook Agency’s higher education client, earning over 50,000 clicks in the first year and growing significantly in the following years.

Had they used paid ads to attract these clicks, they would have paid $500,000 to $1,000,000 per year.

Some other examples of educational mid-funnel content you could consider include:

• Calculators and tools
• Curriculum-led content
• Worksheets or lesson plans
• Alternative assets like PDF documents
• Quizzes for career selection

Check out my article on mid-funnel content for ideas on how to use these content opportunities in your strategy.

Focus on things that lead to a buying decision, build trust in your brand, or cannot easily be answered by AI Overviews.

attract high-quality links, often without trying. Backlinks are the internet’s version of citations.

They’re a loose indication of how popular your brand and content is among relevant online audiences.

We’re talking about the kinds of backlinks most SEOs would trade an arm and a leg for:

• .edu backlinks
• .gov backlinks
• Non-profit links
• Natural press mentions
• Local news mentions
• Links from research journals
• Relevant blog mentions

If your education institution doesn’t already have such links, or if there’s a gap in your online authority compared to competitors, link building is worth focusing on. Otherwise, you’ll probably get better results focusing on content creation and technical optimization instead.

Here’s the thing: all .edu sites are very authoritative by default. So, as soon as you start to make changes like optimizing content, creating new content, and fixing technical issues, you will see results.

But then, for the most competitive terms or institutions with lower authority, link building can still move the needle. 

To determine if you need to focus on link building, enter your website into Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and look at your Domain Rating:

This is a measure of how strong your backlink profile is. It can also be used as a proxy to determine your website’s online authority.

Then, do the same for the top institutions or websites you’re competing against. If there’s a large gap between your score and your competitors’, you can close it with link building.

Start by ensuring you earn links from the partnerships and press mentions you already get. For instance, if you frequently announce news, start posting it to your website to attract natural links.

The University of Sydney has earned almost 40,000 links from over 10,000 websites just to its news articles. These articles also get 373,000 estimated visitors from SEO per month:

Likewise, if your institution produces original research reports, you could actively share those with relevant government and industry organizations.

Over time, they will naturally link to you. For example, this university has links from over 100 government websites globally, and almost all of these links are dofollow:

Smaller educational businesses, like the tuition company Art of Smart, can also earn lucrative links from government and educational websites.

The key is to play to your strengths.

For instance, if you have interesting stories of student successes, try pitching these to journalists who’ve written similar stories about students from other schools.

If there are local businesses you’ve partnered with, share the news about the partnership while also ensuring each of your partners links back to you.

There’s no limit to what you can earn links for in the education space.

• If your institution has been around a while: Make sure you have your own Wikipedia pages for every relevant brand or department connected to your institution.
• If you offer scholarships: Reach out to other schools with potential applicants. Ask for a link to your scholarships page. Also, ask for links from organizations that list their scholarships on your website.
• If you host community events: Connect with local reporters to drum up some publicity before the event. Ask for links in any online content about the event.
• If you make announcements of any kind: Create press releases and distribute to journalists. Make sure you also publish these on your website so you can earn more links naturally.
• If you publish research papers: Connect your researchers to reporters so they can be featured experts in relevant news articles about their respective fields.
• If you have in-house experts: Offer to write guest posts in relevant industry blogs so their expertise (and your brand) can connect more directly with your audience.
• If your EdTech has developed a new educational solution: Get in touch with tech reporters and publications that write about progress in EdTech.

Much like citations, the goal is to earn mentions and attract website visitors from multiple sources. In doing so, you’ll also improve your brand’s authority and credibility online.

international SEO strategy for a few reasons:

1. You may need to optimize both globally and hyper-locally (within your city) but without alienating either audience.
2. English is the dominant language students search in, and there’s often no benefit to translating it.
3. You cannot reshare content from one country to another without culturally adapting it (even if it’s in the same language).

It comes down to targeting. The sorts of questions that people are asking depend on where they’re from.

It’s very culturally driven… but they’re likely to be searching in English because they’re not going to be searching for courses in the US in another language.

It’s not like selling a product. You’ve got to also answer questions around housing and visas and all of those things that enable them to study abroad.

What George describes here is a “single language, multi-region” approach to multilingual SEO.

Other than search volume, another reason why your SEO would have to be in English, even for international content, is that it acts as an audience filter.

It’s a way of ensuring all students speak a proficient level of English and are able to succeed academically and thrive socially if they study at your institution.

There are various English language tests used around the world like IELTS and TOEFL. These allow students to get study visas and also prove their level of English.

You don’t want to attract people who can’t speak English at your institution because your student retention will go down. They won’t achieve academically and it will bring your rankings down as a university. So, English is a better target language for that reason. 

The key to success comes down to understanding student needs.

Take the time to speak with international students from the cultures you’re targeting in your SEO campaign. Learn about how they think about education and any cultural influences that affect their decision to study abroad.

That’s what you should be creating content about, even if it’s in English.

It should not be a copy of the content you use to connect with local students. Even if you’re only targeting English-speaking countries (like how Third Space targets UK and US schools) you’ll at the very least need to adapt for local curriculums and terminology used.

International SEO for the educational space goes beyond just translating content, you have to understand and interpret how people think and how they teach.

E-E-A-T) online.

However, you should also work on developing a unique brand voice. For example, the University of Wyoming launched a campaign in 2018 with the bold statement that “the world needs more cowboys.”

The university redefined the idea of a cowboy in its anthem, developing a unique voice that distinguishes it from other schools in the area.

It also defined a campus culture that could appeal to students who resonate with its ideology of chasing restless curiosity, hungering for challenge, and embracing the spirit of the underdog.

If students in your local area are shopping for a unique college experience, your marketing needs to show them how you’ll provide it. This is marketing 101: Develop a brand, identify your unique value, and share it with the right audience.

Many schools and educational institutions don’t do that; therein lies your opportunity.

Local schools and universities need to invest in their branding to differentiate themselves. Just by standing out a little bit, people go ‘That’s cool. I can see myself studying there.’

While SEO is a very important tactic, at the end of the day, it needs to support your brand, not the other way around.

Final thoughts

SEO for education is unlike any other industry.

Whether you’re optimizing for a local school or tutoring center, a global EdTech platform, or a university attracting international students, the strategies you use must align with how students, parents, and educators search for information.

From navigating bureaucratic roadblocks to leveraging seasonal trends and mid-funnel opportunities, education SEO isn’t just about rankings—it’s ultimately about helping students find the right path forward, even when they’re not the ones searching for a solution.

If you take one thing from this guide, let it be this: the best education SEO campaigns solve real problems. Focus on delivering value, and your rankings—and enrollments—will follow.