Yes, You Still Need SEO for Higher Education

Key takeaways:

• Strong SEO enables visibility across Google, AI Overviews, and large language models (LLMs).
• Higher education is the ideal playground for SEO strategies because it’s a high-involvement decision.
• Effective SEO hinges on understanding audience psychology, not just keywords.
• The term “search engine” can be limiting; discover where else you can make search impact (outside of Google).
• Sustainable enrollment marketing requires owned visibility.

Hey — I get it. I bet all you’ve been hearing about is “AI this,” and “ChatGPT that.” You’re seeing study after study show that the way students search is changing. To you, search engine optimization (SEO) probably seems so 2019.

But it’s not. 

In fact, SEO is the healthy foundation you need for AI visibility, from the strategies you implement on the front- and back-end to the results themselves. Traditional SEO wins, like ranking in the top 10 on the search engine results page (SERP), are still indicators that you’ll appear in AI Overviews and LLMs.

I’m getting ahead of myself here. If you’re a complete newbie to SEO and want a comprehensive overview, read on. 

But know that I’m also writing this article to make the case for higher ed SEO. For the institutions that haven’t invested yet, for the decision-makers who still don’t see its importance to their enrollment marketing strategy, and for the people who want to bypass SEO entirely because AI’s the hot new thing.

Let’s get into it, shall we?

Higher ed SEO and consumer behavior

I don’t want to bury the lede here. As far as visibility for your institution is concerned, investing in a solid SEO strategy has always been a smart move. The type of decision your prospective students are making requires significant involvement; there’s a lot of research that goes into it. Research happens on search engines (and now large language models [LLMs]), which is why an SEO strategy is so important.

Let’s dig a little deeper into the psychology, though. 

As consumers, every time we buy something, we’re making a decision that’s based on some sort of behavior. Some of those behaviors are habitual (I’ll take a Diet Pepsi any time I order a soda, please and thank you). Other times, there’s a desire for variety, like trying a new restaurant every time my husband and I go out to dinner. Both of those are examples of low involvement decisions (i.e., low risk and not expensive). 

Contrast that with decisions that require more involvement. When you need to find a new dentist, you’ll probably first check to ensure they take your insurance and then look at reviews. Outside of that, the dentists are probably pretty similar to one another — so much so that it might be hard to discern any differences between your options. What often happens with a decision like this one is that we engage in dissonance-reducing behavior, opting for convenience (finding the one nearest to home, for example). Later, we’ll seek further confirmation that we made the right choice.

And finally, there’s complex buying behavior, where there’s high consumer involvement and significant differences between brands. These purchases are often infrequent but expensive and potentially even risky. Consumers will research thoroughly before committing. They tend to hit every stage of the marketing funnel, from awareness through consideration and decision.

Does that journey sound familiar?

There’s no better example of complex buying behavior than investing in higher education. For prospective students, finding the right school has an outsize influence on their future: their group of friends, their career, where they put down roots, and how much money they make (not to mention how much debt they’re shouldering). That’s what makes SEO for schools so important.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it: be the school that answers their questions throughout the research process. Questions like…

• What can you do with a [degree]?
• How long does it take to get [degree]?
• How much does it cost to go to [University]?

But also questions that happen further up in the funnel — before a prospective student even realizes they’re in the market for higher education. Creating content that becomes “the answer” throughout the research process has a bunch of benefits:

• You create brand affinity and trust with prospective students.
• Students often opt in to your marketing themselves (a better experience!).
• You signal to the robots and the algorithms that you’re an authority in these specific areas.
• This new content signals to your peers that you’re a thought leader in your field.
• You end up with high-quality leads to supplement your digital marketing tactics. 

And here’s the kicker — SEO is a more sustainable enrollment marketing approach. Rather than overrelying on paid sources to get you the traffic and leads you need (a tactic that has to change in this new age of AI), a proper SEO foundation keeps working even after the campaign’s over. Neat, right?

SEO for higher education: a primer

If you’re looking for a vendor to help — or looking to implement SEO in-house — there are a few concepts I want to familiarize you with, including various SEO approaches, channels, and strategies, depending on your audience. It might seem like a lot, but don’t get discouraged by the amount of information here. You don’t need to be an expert in everything to make smart SEO decisions.

The various approaches to SEO

Within the wide world of search engine optimization, there are a few distinct approaches (for lack of a better word) with which you should be familiar. Each has its own tactics, metrics to measure performance, and stakeholders who need to be involved, though I’m only providing an overview here — it gets pretty weedy pretty fast.

Without further ado…

Content SEO

Does our content deserve to rank?

Content SEO is what’s directly on the page — what you’re saying, how well it aligns with search intent, and the user’s overall experience on-page. This includes:

• Keyword research and intent mapping
• Optimizing page titles, meta descriptions, headers, and body copy for the questions your prospects are asking
• Intuitive content structure and scannability
• Content freshness
• Accessibility (alt text, WCAG, contrast)
• Clear calls to action (CTAs)
• Signaling Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trust in all content (see our EEAT checklist)
• An internal linking strategy that’s grounded by a balanced higher ed content strategy, organized in topic clusters
• Optimizing for SERP features, GEO, LLMO, AI Overviews, etc.

Technical SEO

Can we rank?

Technical SEO is like checking under the hood of your website. Though it focuses primarily on how search engines crawl, render, and understand your site, issues with your technical SEO can impact more than just the bots — it can result in a poor user experience, too. (Explore these technical SEO tips!)

Here’s what technical SEO consists of:

• Crawlability and indexation
• Site architecture
• URL structure
• Page speed (and other core web vitals)
• Structured data (also known as schema markup)
• Canonicalization
• XML sitemaps and robots.txt
• Fixing duplicate content issues
• JavaScript rendering issues
• HTTP status codes (like 404s, redirects, etc.)

Off-page SEO

Do others trust us enough to rank?

Google, LLMs, and other emerging search engines rely heavily on authority signals when deciding how to rank and mention certain brands. This is especially true for a competitive landscape like higher ed. So, off-page SEO is pretty self-explanatory; it’s the authority that comes from anywhere other than your website. These signals affect trust and authority and include:

• Backlinks
• Digital PR
• Brand mentions
• Thought leadership content
• Partnerships and citations

Local SEO

Do we rank for those nearby?

Whether or not you have (or want) a local SEO strategy depends on what kind of institution you are and your student recruitment strategy. (Online programs need not worry!) Local SEO includes:

• Google Business profiles
• Name, address, and phone number (NAP) consistency across all platforms
• Local citations
• Reviews
• Local landing pages
  
  

The difference between SEO for undergrad vs SEO for grad

Bear with me — I know there’s more to the higher education landscape than undergraduate and graduate. There are community colleges, vocational schools, professional degrees, certifications, and more that I’m probably forgetting — all with their own audiences and behaviors. However, I think the big picture in terms of SEO can be boiled down to these two topics.

SEO for undergraduate programs and SEO for graduate programs differ less in tactics and more in audience psychology, search behavior, and decision dynamics.

Let’s break down the core differences between the two before diving deeper into the audiences themselves.

Undergraduate searchers

When it comes to finding the right undergraduate program, there are a lot of cooks in that particular kitchen: parents or guardians, counselors, coaches (sometimes), and the prospective students themselves.

For many students, it’s the first major life decision they will make. As such, it’s anxiety-inducing! Because the college you choose is automatically tied to your identity, belonging, and social proof. It feels monumental (until you realize transferring is an option). In 2025, Carnegie’s College Choice survey found that graduating seniors care the most about scholarships/financial aid, tuition price, degree options, location, and campus feel when it comes to their college decision. Boil that down, and it’s a lot about the affordability and the experience they’ll have at college.

Parents, on the other hand, tend to be more concerned with ROI and risk-reduction. It depends on the parents, but many are heavily involved in the decision-making process, since they often contribute to funding those degrees. They’re also concerned about the legitimacy of the institution and want to ensure their child’s safety. Big brand schools have the awareness they need. Combine a good reputation, high rankings, and a household name, and there’s implicit trust for both students and parents that unknown institutions have a hard time competing with. 

Here’s what you’ll see along the undergraduate search journey:

• Platform-bouncing (from Google to Reddit to TikTok to YouTube, etc.)
• Short, sometimes vague queries: ”Colleges near Chicago,” “Is [University] good?” “Best college for art”
• Collective decision-making: multiple stakeholders with different concerns (student: cost, degree types, fit, fun, friends; parent: safety, cost, outcomes; counselor: legitimacy, admissions odds)

Graduate searchers

Prospective graduate students range in age but are generally more pragmatic than their undergraduate counterparts. They’ve been through it already. Unless they are coming straight from their bachelor’s degree, they are or have been working professionals. They are self-directed. And they’re typically solving some sort of problem, whether it be career ennui, an income ceiling, a skill gap, a pivot, etc. 

Cost is a concern for the undergrad audience, but it’s a constraint for the graduate audience — as is time, particularly for those working professionals or prospective students with partners and/or children. Details matter. How long will the degree take? Is there flexibility? How much will they make when they’re done? They want explicit answers; for them, vague language might feel like a red flag.

Here’s what you’ll see along the graduate search journey:

• Clear trigger events (motivations)
• Deep research on a variety of search engines (AI-driven and otherwise)
• Comparison-driven queries around cost, format, outcomes, and requirements with words like “vs,” “worth it,”  and “salary”
• Long-tailed, specific, and intent-rich searches: “Online MSW for working professionals,” “MS in Data Science salary outcomes,” “Best cybersecurity master’s without GRE,” “Is an MBA worth it after 30?”
• A simplified decision-making process (not in timeline, per se, but in terms of the people involved — it’s largely individual)

Optimizing for the right channels

In the past, you mentioned SEO, and many people thought it just applied to Google. But Google was never the only search engine to optimize for, just the most popular. Search has changed so drastically over the years, as if to emphasize that point.

The focus now is on being discoverable across ecosystems, answering questions in the ways people prefer, and showing up where trust is built. Let’s optimize content for how and where people search today.

Traditional web search

In the United States from December 2024 to December 2025, Google commanded nearly 85% of the search market share. Bing came in second with around 9%, Yahoo was third at approximately 3%, and DuckDuckGo had a little over 2%. Clearly, Google still has an outsized influence amongst traditional web search engines, but we’ve talked about how to approach SEO for universities through the lens of Google before. So, let’s talk about the other three in a little more depth.

What you should know about Bing

• Microsoft owns Bing, so it’s no surprise that many Windows-powered devices (desktops, laptops, and tablets) push to their proprietary search engine. And since Microsoft has a larger footprint in the workplace, it makes sense that Bing’s share of the market amongst desktop and laptop users is higher (nearly 17%).
• From Edge and Internet Explorer to the Microsoft Office Suite and Xbox, you’re often using Bing without even knowing it. Many Microsoft products are integrated with Bing.
• In 2025, the number of Amazon Echo users was expected to reach around 69.9 million. That’s a lot of “Hey, Alexa?” to go around. And Bing is Alexa’s default search engine for general web queries.
• In addition to Microsoft Copilot (Microsoft’s entry into the AI market), Microsoft has a deep relationship with OpenAI, and ChatGPT Search integrates with Microsoft Bing. (Others do, too, however.)
• With less competition and a similar algorithm, many SEO experts say ranking on Bing is a quick win.
• Bing’s users are often Enterprise or B2B users, but not always. In terms of demographics, they skew slightly older (averaging 45 years old), tend to be more educated (50% have some college degree; 17% with an advanced degree), and are generally more affluent (a third of users have a household income over $100k). — Grad schools, this point’s for you.

What you should know about Yahoo

• Honestly? Not a ton. In doing this research, I was surprised to find that people are still searching on Yahoo. You learn something new every day!
• It’s primarily powered by Bing (Bing partners with a lot of smaller search engines). That also means that if you rank on Bing, you get visibility on Yahoo, too. Two birds, one stone.

What you should know about DuckDuckGo

• DuckDuckGo doesn’t track you, store personal info, use your search history, or integrate with social media.
• This search engine is privacy-focused, so it’s a go-to for users who are conscious about that — especially those who are tech-savvy. (Note: because of the lack of tracking, that last part is an educated guess. We can’t really know too much about DuckDuckGo users.)
• Technically, DuckDuckGo pulls results from Bing (it’s a partner, as well), in addition to its own crawler.
• When optimizing for DuckDuckGo users, SEO expert Neil Patel stresses a good website user experience, the importance of earning high-quality backlinks, intentional keyword choices (no stuffing!), and hyperlocal keywords in your site content, so you can rank for location-based searches — even without location tracking.

You can add any of these search engines to your SEO strategy — it really depends on the audience you’re targeting and your goals.

Video search

YouTube is technically a part of the Google ecosystem, a percentage of that 85% mentioned above. But it’s long been referred to as the second-largest search engine. While video results will populate on Google’s SERP, people also search directly on the YouTube platform, asking specific questions, looking for comparisons, hoping to learn how something works, and much more. 

Even outside of SEO, it’s important to have a YouTube presence; 84% of U.S. adults use YouTube, according to the Pew Research Center. A majority of adults 18-49 use YouTube daily. If you want to use YouTube to help fill the student recruitment funnel, your college or university channel should consider career outcome videos, “day in the life” content, faculty and/or student spotlights, and program explainers.

YouTube SEO requires a slightly different approach and includes adding or optimizing the following:

• Video titles and descriptions
• Chapters and/or timestamps
• Transcripts
• Thumbnails
• Engagement signals

Social search

In a March 2025 survey, the Pew Research Center found that most adult Americans (71%) use Facebook, half of adults say they use Instagram, and 37% of adults use TikTok. (Nearly 47% of younger adults (ages 18-29) use TikTok daily!)

Regardless of how you feel about the state of social media these days, how it’s used, or the rampant misinformation, more and more people are using social media as a search engine. In fact, 78% of internet users globally report using social media platforms for product and brand research. For the two generations higher ed is most concerned with, among Millennials, 35% prefer using social media over traditional search engines for discovery; among Gen Z, it’s 46%.

In the social search use case, TikTok acts as a discovery engine that can be optimized through spoken keywords, on-screen text, captions, and engagement velocity. For higher education, it can be especially strong for questions like:

• Is [degree] worth it?
• What is [school] really like?

Schools with niche, more aesthetic programs could post on Pinterest with an intentional keyword strategy. Universities with Instagram should pay attention to captions, hashtags, alt text, and reels for the prospective students who prefer to search there. LinkedIn is especially relevant for graduate programs and professional degrees; posts, articles, and company pages are all searchable.

Community search

Both Reddit and Quora are getting more facetime than ever before in the age of AI. (Reddit also falls under the social media umbrella, but I’m grouping these community-based forums for a reason.) Algorithms have started to favor these platforms because they hold more authority in the robot’s cold, mechanical eyes. These are real people, talking about the keywords you’re searching, answering the actual questions you’ve asked. This discourse is not only showing up on the SERP; it’s being referenced and provided as answers in the majority of AI responses.

I haven’t dug too deep into Quora as a higher ed strategy, but most higher ed institutions need a Reddit SEO strategy — like, yesterday. Think about what it looks like to create opportunities through authentic participation, AMAs, and helpful, educational answers (read: non-promotional!).

AI-powered search and answer engines

Last but not least, let’s discuss (at a high level!) the largest shift happening in search optimization: AI. 

(That being said, if you do want to get into the weeds, you should throw some time on my colleague Kirby Wilson’s calendar. She’s our Senior Optimization Strategist with a ton of expertise in all things SEO.)

Like I mentioned earlier, optimizing for Google’s AI Overviews, LLMs, or AI assistants starts with a foundation in SEO. Whether it’s your program pages, your blog, or your entire website, here’s what you need to know about some of the big players in the market today — and how to optimize for them.

What you should know about ChatGPT

• There are lots of uses, but many rely on this LLM for exploratory and early-stage research.
• Want visibility? Create clear, authoritative explainer content that demonstrates expertise. Also important — a strong heading structure, concise definitions, and FAQ style sections that answer questions directly.
• Topical authority matters more than keyword density

What you should know about Perplexity

• An LLM focused on supporting people who care about sources and credibility (researchers, analysts, etc.). Perplexity visibly cites sources, so credibility is critical.
• Get discovered with fact-forward, well-structured content; reference reputable sources and data.
• The pages it surfaces are often long-form and deeply informative.

What you should know about Google AI Overviews

• If you use Google, you’re familiar (whether you want to be or not). 
• These babies are responsible for a 61% drop in organic click-through rates (CTRs) and a 68% CTR drop in paid. (Note: don’t let this stat scare you; this is an internet-wide stat, not a higher ed one.) 
• Show up with succinct, direct answers to questions. Optimize for featured snippets and FAQs, too!

What you should know about Microsoft Copilot (Bing-powered AI)

• Users are a part of the Office/Windows ecosystem — this is relevant for professional and grad audiences.
• Ensure you have strong Bing SEO fundamentals, structured data, and clean HTML. You’re more likely to be visible with authoritative, plain-language explanations.
• It’s often overlooked, so take advantage of it!
  
  

What you should know about Claude (Anthropic)

• An LLM geared toward writers, researchers, educators, and knowledge workers.
• You’re more likely to show up if you avoid marketing language, publish deep, exploratory content, and emphasize reasoning, frameworks, and clarity.
  
  

This is a lot of information, and I wouldn’t blame you for being overwhelmed. But SEO for higher education is critical for student recruitment — now, more than ever before. So, do what you can with what you have. Don’t let vendors scare you into thinking you can’t do this yourself (you can)! Just — do something.

Really, the worst thing would be to not do anything at all.

Whether you’re taking SEO in-house or not, the Direct Development team put together an SEO and AI Visibility Playbook. We’re the Robin Hood of higher education, stealing strategies from the big vendors and schools and giving them to the enrollment marketers and admissions professionals who need it most. 

Download the guide; I hope you find it helpful!