NO LONGER A QUESTION OF GATING OR NOT GATING: So you’ve heard of conversational marketing — the methodology that eliminates gated content and instead uses conversational chat to collect information on prospective students. Conversational gating takes a page out of the conversational marketing playbook. It works by deploying a chat feature alongside your educational content. As the reader reads through the content, the chat supports the content by asking relevant questions and engaging in conversation, all along the way collecting valuable information about the prospective student.
Why you should care: With conversational gating, every prospect can get access to your great educational content and you can collect information on them in a frictionless, undisruptive manner. If you’re interested in eliminating forms in the conversion process of prospective students or looking to add form gates, but worried that it will impact the number of new leads/inquiries generated, look to conversational gating as that happy medium.
CRACKING THE TOP 3 SEARCH RESULTS IN 2020 FOR HIGHER ED: SERPWoo analyzed over 2,900 SEO variables across higher education websites and shared tactical insights on how to improve the SEO ranking of your program pages. For program pages ranking on page 1 and 2 of Google’s Search Results Page (SERP), pages had a Term Frequency score of 7, meaning high-ranking pages on average included the keyword seven times on the page. The data also showed that placing keywords in FORM tags can improve SEO ranking. Word length plays into ranking for program pages; while it takes on average 3,900 words to crack the first page of the SERP, it’s taking almost 4,800 words to crack the top 3 spots on the SERP. If your program pages are optimized with all of the above insights, the icing on top could be found in LI tags (list on your page). Pages ranking in position 1 more often than not have more keywords present in LI tags than competitors in positions 2-5.
Why you should care: SERPWoo’s 2020 analysis showcases several higher ed program pages that are doing SEO right (and wrong). Increasing page length, adding keywords in form and LI HTML tags, and including a keyword at least seven times on your program page could be the difference between prospective students finding your program page and your page being buried on the 3rd page of Google’s search results.
QUORA NOW OFFERING LEAD GENERATION FORMS: Lead generation forms are now coming to Quora, allowing schools to collect high-value information on prospective students via ads they have running on the Quora platform. . Similar to Facebook lead ad forms, Quora lead generation forms come pre-filled with user information that can help minimize user drop-off when filling out the form. These lead forms come with 12 potential question fields to collect information on prospective students, all directly on the Quora platform.
Why you should care: Maybe your school is partaking in the Facebook boycott, or maybe your advertising budget shrank. In any case, advertising on Quora could be an alternative and with the introduction of lead generation forms, a great way to capture new prospective students directly on the platform. Remember, Quora isn’t a traditional social media platform and should be treated differently. Compared to other platforms, content that performs best on Quora is typically dedicated to high quality knowledge-sharing and answers prospective students’ questions in an organic way.