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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.

1. Understand the industry challenges affecting education SEO 

When researching this post, I received this question:

It’s a fair question.

The short answer: if enterprises and non-profits had babies, they would be like 99% of the world’s educational institutions. High operational complexity, little money to run them.

The long answer comes down to understanding why aiming for rankings and traffic doesn’t really matter in this industry.

Most educational institutions have high authority online, and they can often rank without even trying.

Instead, your SEO success will come from understanding the unique and complex challenges affecting this industry and creating more nuanced marketing strategies to overcome them. Challenges like:

• Budgets are low across the board: Both government-funded and private educational institutions target audiences with limited budgets to invest in education.
• Demand for traditional education is waning: Due to high student debt, potential students are questioning the value of a degree. Career-wise, a degree alone doesn’t go as far these days.
• Educators rarely have business skills: They know they need more enrolments but often don’t know how to get them due to limited business and marketing knowledge.
• Enrolment rates affect economies: For instance, in Australia, education is the fourth-largest export, 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.

2. Solve problems for end users, even if they aren’t the buyers 

Another major challenge in education SEO is that the audience is almost always fragmented and multi-layered:

• Students: They’re often the end users of most educational products and services.
• Parents: They’re the buyers that private or independent educational organizations target.
• Teachers: They’re often the end users of business-to-educator (B2E) products and sometimes the buyers of student-focused services.
• Administrators + faculty heads: They’re the buyers of most B2E products and services.

All of these audience segments can search for the same keywords to try and solve the same problems. What unifies them isn’t that they’re searching for similar things to solve their own problems.

Rather, they’re all searching on behalf of the end-users. That’s why “end-user personas” matter more for education SEO than “buyer personas”.

Parents and teachers are looking for similar things to students. Like how to help kids struggling to get motivated, overcoming exam stress… both parents and students search for these things. To reach decision makers, you need to understand the student’s pain points because they search on behalf of their kids, not themselves.

There are going to be one of two end-user personas that matter to your SEO campaign:

• Students: The majority of the time, you’ll need to understand the exact student segments that matter for your campaign. Focus on unpacking their pain points at various stages in their academic journey.
• Educators: Although a rarer audience, many EdTech companies exclusively offer B2E services with educators as the end users. Often, they aim to solve administrative or organizational challenges.

Since in most cases, students will be the end user you’re targeting, here’s an example of how you can start to analyze various student segments:

Student Type	Decision-Making Power	Pain Points	Opportunity
K-10	Parents and teachers decide for them.	Finding the best learning resources, tutoring, or support for struggling students.	Optimize for searches made by parents or teachers (e.g., “best math apps for kids,” “how to help a struggling reader”). Provide expert-led guides and resource roundups.
Year 11-12	Increasing independence in education choices.	Academic stress, exam preparation, and choosing subjects for university.	Create exam prep hubs, “best subject choices for [career],” and stress-management content targeting students.
High School Graduate	Fully autonomous; they choose their education pathways.	Uncertainty about career paths, cost of education, and alternative options.	Focus on early career building questions like “Is a [degree] worth it?” and “Best alternative education paths.” Focus on ROI of different degree pathways and career outcomes.
Adult Learner	Self-directed learners looking to upskill or switch careers.	Finding flexible, affordable, career-advancing education.	Target career-switching keywords like “How to transition to [career]” or “Best online courses for [skill].” Use success stories and salary comparisons.
International Student	Mixed decision-making (some depend on parents, agents, or visas).	Visa requirements, affordability, cultural differences, and value of studying abroad.	Address visa/finance concerns: “How to get a student visa for [country],” “Scholarships for international students,” “Living costs in [city].”

This is a simple example to get you started.

You’ll need to go much deeper to understand the exact student segments that matter to you and how the education system in their region affects their learning pathway.

For instance, in Malaysia, the higher education sector remains largely offline, with agencies playing a key role in student placements. Transparency around university admissions is a major issue, leaving students unaware of costs and requirements.

The opportunities for an EdTech startup like 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.

3. Use keyword seasonality and growth to deliver the right message at the right time 

The great thing about the education industry is that there is predictability as to when certain types of information will be most helpful.

Timely content before key exams performs better than generic evergreen guides.

You can use the seasonality of key academic events to plan your content strategy around things like:

• Start and end of school
• School holidays
• Key exam periods
• Annual school events
• Application due dates
• Student loan repayments
• Campus open days

Identify the experience your target audience is having around these key dates. This will give you a wealth of insight into when certain pain points are more relevant.

For example, the keyword “ap exam schedule” spikes every May:

The keyword “when does school start” spikes around July in the US and January in Australia. Knowing the relevant dates in your target region makes a difference.

But, these predictable spikes aren’t all that matters. You should also prioritize topics that are growing in the long term.

For example, the topic of lesson plans appears to have a lot of search potential, with just under 100,000 different keyword variations being searched globally 1.3 million times every month.

But the topic is in decline overall, despite seasonal spikes:

If you’re not looking beyond search volume, you’ll miss bigger-picture growth trends and seasonal patterns of your target keywords.

4. Expand from TOFU content to MOFU opportunities 

Education SEO is heavily skewed towards top-of-funnel (TOFU) content, with most institutions and EdTech companies investing in high-traffic, informational content.

SEO is a big opportunity for education institutions with many intent-based keywords and top-of-funnel content marketing opportunities available.

For instance, 95% of Harvard’s SEO success comes from top-of-funnel, informational intent keywords.

This pattern holds across local education businesses, online schools, and EdTech companies where informational opportunities disproportionately outweigh all others.

However, with the recent introduction of AI Overviews, there is an industry-wide reduction in traffic potential from such keywords.

Google is now directly answering people’s questions within its platform using AI:

The reality is that education organizations that have solely relied on top-of-funnel visibility are experiencing unrecoverable traffic losses. The winners are the ones who shift their focus to mid-funnel (MOFU) content.

Mid-funnel content improves brand awareness and also helps searchers along their journey to making a buying decision.

For example, we can take a page out of Steve Toth’s notebook when working with higher education institutions or course providers.

If keywords like “data science course” are too competitive for you to chase, you can target keywords earlier in the funnel (i.e., the middle of the funnel) and that precede a buying decision like:

• How to become a data scientist
• What companies hire data scientists?
• Do you need a degree to become a data scientist?
• How much do data scientists make?

These questions are all crucial for helping potential students decide whether they will pursue a given career path and which specific course will best position them to develop the necessary skills.

This strategy performed exceptionally well for 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.

5. Find high-intent traffic (without clear BOFU keywords) 

Part of the reason why top-of-funnel content is so widely used in the education industry is that for many institutions, there are surprisingly few bottom-of-the-funnel (BOFU) opportunities leading to a conversion online.

High-intent BOFU keywords often don’t exist in a clean, obvious way for the education sector. Instead, intent is fragmented across different audience segments, and the same keyword can have mixed or competing meanings.

For example, if you think that keywords like “bachelor of science” are as low as the funnel can go for a university, you’d be wrong.

People don’t convert from these searches even though they are literally about the exact product a university has to offer.

Rather, the best BOFU opportunities come from keywords containing modifiers like:

• For a physical campus: Location modifiers like “near me” or mentions of a specific suburb or city.
• For an online institution: Keywords containing “online”, “correspondence” or “remote”.
• For hybrid institutions: Depending on the service, a mixture of both of the above.

There’s only so far that online research takes students, especially for undergraduate studies.

Their offline experiences when visiting career fairs, campus open days, and attending in-person events play a more critical role in their decision-making.

SEO is very effective when offering online programs or for increasing your enrollments to graduate programs.

Most of this audience is already in the workforce. They need a degree to advance in their careers, and they’re looking for the best option for them. Unlike undergraduate students, they don’t necessarily want to have an on-campus student experience.

They’re mostly looking at this from the point of view of ‘how efficient is this for me’… that’s an important aspect to keep in mind when you’re building your education SEO strategy.

There’s also a pattern of mixed-intent BOFU keywords that affects other business models or services in the education industry.

For instance, Third Space Learning is an EdTech company that sells online math tutoring to schools. Its business model is what Sophie Bessemer calls “business to educator” (B2E).

If we apply traditional SEO thinking, then Third Space’s commercial keywords should include the word “tutoring” since that is the service they offer.

And while they do rank for hundreds of such keywords…

…there’s an alignment issue.

Many of these keywords are searched either by students or parents looking for private tuition outside of school. Even if Third Space did rank number 1, a lot of their effort would be wasted in reaching a mostly low-converting audience.

Instead, they need to attract teachers, school administrators and faculty heads. They can do this far more effectively by focusing on keywords around worksheets, and the day to day needs of educators and school leaders such as math activities, teaching guidance, and closing the attainment gap.

These still have commercial intent and attract the right audience.

While these keywords don’t immediately sell tutoring services to schools, they attract the right audience that can then be retargeted with ads on other platforms. They also expose educators to Third Space’s brand.

6. Don’t prioritize link building (unless you need to build authority online) 

Education is one of the few sectors that naturally 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.

7. Overcome website governance bottlenecks to fix technical issues 

If you can’t implement any website changes, chances are you won’t get much SEO success. You’ll have to focus exclusively on off-site activities like local SEO and backlink building.

Most people working in education SEO face enterprise-like governance struggles when it comes to making any changes.

• No single person owns the website
• Multiple departments conflict over priorities
• Changes take forever to get approved
• Legacy systems might be wreaking havoc
• The website has had no updates since it was launched
• A school management platform controls the site

Smaller schools and organizations may have a WordPress website, which makes it infinitely easier to implement SEO changes. However, getting access to the website is another matter.

Be prepared to help school administrators or their technical teams figure out how to access the website so they can then give you access.

Sometimes there’s a mindset in this industry that a website can be finished, like ‘okay, we finished the website, now we can focus on something else.’

Getting the idea across that the website now needs to be updated on an ongoing basis can be a challenge.

The other thing is that sometimes there’s staff turnover in some of these schools. So, if they had a custom website built and the person who created it is gone, then it becomes quite difficult to go back and get access or even to change it.

Where possible, it’s best to resolve these access control issues upfront and ask for full access so you can directly implement technical changes as needed.

If the website is part of a more intricate technical ecosystem, like being a part of the school’s management platform, you may need to work with multiple stakeholders, including technical teams, to get any changes implemented.

The good news is that once you get access to the website or have an established process in place for prioritizing SEO changes to the website, the rest is fairly stock standard.

For example, most of the experts I interviewed see the biggest performance improvements after fixing very basic issues like:

• Redirecting deleted pages with 404 errors
• Adding internal links to orphan pages
• Simplifying and optimizing the URL structure
• Addressing thin content from events or newsletter pages
• Fixing all super-basic on-page issues
• Removing or re-writing duplicated content

With Ahrefs’ Site Audit tool, it’s very easy to help client-side developers identify performance issues and errors that require immediate attention.

You can also show the dev team how to interpret each issue listed and find the steps they can take to fix them by clicking on the “?” next to specific issues.

8. Reach international students with a regionally adapted strategy 

We’ve already established the sheer potential for education institutions to reach international students. Remember, it’s not just an institutional objective; in many countries, it’s also an economic one.

But you can’t just go treating it like you would any other 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.

9. Win local search with branding that resonates in your hometown 

Education is one of the rare industries where you may have to optimize your visibility internationally and hyper-locally at the same time.

There aren’t many other local businesses with a physical presence that also attract substantial international interest.

Although there’s a lot of potential internationally, smaller schools, colleges, and universities earn their bread and butter from students in the local area. Private on-the-ground educational services, like tutoring companies, also do this.

If you want to attract more students from your local area, you should do the following as a bare minimum:

• Optimize your institution’s Google Business Profiles
• Create local citations for each of your campuses
• Get featured on “best schools in {location}” posts
• Show up in every relevant local directory
• Be engaged in the community and show up in relevant local news stories

If your local laws allow, make sure you also ask students and parents for online reviews. Many local schools have a woeful amount of reviews compared to the network of families they’re connected to.

When students and parents search for local education services, they usually want to compare options. Your goal should be to seem like the standout option in the local community.

And that comes down to branding.

From an SEO standpoint, you’ll want to ensure that your institution showcases its expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (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.