Imagine a prospective student asking an AI, “Which colleges offer the best online MBA for working parents?”
Instead of matching keywords, the AI delivers an answer drawn from credible, connected content that blends facts, context, and intent to guide the decision.
For higher ed leaders, this represents a major shift. Institutions that adapt will earn greater visibility in search, attract more qualified prospective students, and convert curiosity into enrollment growth. The old playbook of targeting single, high-volume keywords just isn’t enough anymore.
AI-driven search rewards comprehensive, connected, and trustworthy content ecosystems, and institutions that embrace this approach will be the ones students find first.
The AI search shift in higher ed
Traditional search engine optimization (SEO) rewarded institutions that could identify the right keywords, create targeted pages, and build backlinks. But generative AI and conversational search have changed the rules of the game.
Here’s what’s different now:
From keywords to context: AI search models don’t just match words — they interpret meaning and intent, returning results that connect related topics and concepts.
Authority signals matter more: AI favors sources that consistently provide accurate, in-depth information across multiple touchpoints.
Content is interconnected: A single page doesn’t win on its own. Its value depends on how it fits within the institution’s broader web presence.
This shift also raises the bar for internal collaboration. Marketing, enrollment, and IT can no longer work in silos. AI search success depends on shared strategy, consistent messaging, and coordinated execution.
The takeaway? Institutions need to stop thinking about SEO as an isolated marketing tactic and start treating it as part of a broader content ecosystem.
Why a content ecosystem beats keyword lists
A content ecosystem is the interconnected network of program pages, admissions information, faculty bios, student stories, news, and resources — all working together to answer your audiences’ questions.
It’s the difference between a brochure and a campus tour. A brochure offers quick facts; a tour immerses prospects in faculty, classrooms, student life, and services—building a fuller, more confident picture.
A keyword list is the brochure. A content ecosystem is the tour — immersive, connected, and designed to guide prospects from curiosity to commitment.
When built intentionally, a content ecosystem gives institutions three clear advantages in today’s AI-driven search environment:
Increased relevance
AI search tools don’t look at a single page in isolation; they interpret the relationships between topics across your domain. Internally linked, topic-rich pages show the depth of your expertise and help algorithms recommend your institution for nuanced, conversational queries.
Example: A prospective student searching “flexible RN-to-BSN options for full-time nurses” is more likely to find you if your nursing program page is connected to articles on nursing career paths, flexible modality, and student success stories.
Compounding authority that builds lasting trust
Authority isn’t built from one or two high-performing pages. It’s earned when every part of your online presence reinforces your credibility. Program descriptions, faculty bios, and testimonials must align in tone, accuracy, and quality. Outdated or inconsistent details can quickly erode the trust signals AI uses to rank content.
Conversion that’s built in
A keyword list may bring someone to your site, but a content ecosystem keeps them there and moves them closer to action. When visitors can move seamlessly from an informational blog to a program page to an application guide or chat with an advisor, conversion becomes a natural next step.
The most effective ecosystems are living assets — constantly updated, monitored, and optimized to reflect evolving programs and audience needs. For institutions looking to compete in an AI-powered search landscape, that adaptability is the real competitive advantage.
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How to build an AI-ready content ecosystem
At Collegis, we help institutions take a holistic approach that bridges marketing, enrollment, and IT. Here’s how we see it coming together:
1. Gather actionable data insights
Don’t just chase the most-searched terms. Look at historical enrollment, inquiry trends, and page performance to identify the queries that actually lead to applications and registrations, not just clicks.
2. Map content to the student journey
From the first touchpoint to enrollment, every content asset should serve a clear purpose:
Top of funnel: Informational articles, career outlooks, program overviews
Middle of funnel: Financial aid resources, student success stories, faculty profiles
Bottom of funnel: Application guides, event sign-ups, chat support
Linking these pieces guides prospective students through the decision process seamlessly.
3. Optimize for AI discoverability
Structured data, schema markup, and well-organized site architecture make it easier for AI tools to interpret and recommend your content. Accuracy and consistency are critical — outdated program descriptions or conflicting statistics can undermine authority signals.
4. Create continuous feedback loops
The work doesn’t stop at publishing. Monitor how content performs in both traditional and AI search, then feed those insights back into planning. AI search algorithms evolve, and so should your content strategy.
Turning visibility into meaningful enrollment growth
AI search is changing how students discover institutions, and how institutions must present themselves online. It’s no longer enough to appear in search results. You need to appear as the most authoritative, most relevant, and most trustworthy source for the questions that matter to prospective students.
By building an AI-ready content ecosystem, colleges and universities can meet this challenge head-on, earning not just visibility but the confidence and interest of future learners.
Collegis partners with colleges and universities to design content strategies that aren’t just visible, they’re built to convert and scale across the entire student lifecycle.
Ready to see how your institution stacks up in the age of AI search?
Request your AI Readiness Assessment to receive a personalized report outlining your institution’s digital strengths, content gaps, and practical next steps to boost visibility and engagement. It’s your roadmap to staying competitive in an AI-first search landscape.
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How SEO for Universities Powers Sustainable Enrollment Growth
There’s a good chance you landed on this article after typing a question or a set of keywords into a search engine. That’s because we optimized this article for said search using search engine optimization (SEO) strategies. As a university marketer, you should be doing the same thing to reach prospective students.
Today’s recruitment landscape is digital, and a search engine query is often the first and most critical step a prospective student takes toward enrolling. SEO for universities is a central driver of discoverability, engagement, and application starts.
By employing higher education SEO tactics and investing in strategic, search-focused marketing, institutions can build sustainable enrollment pipelines. But how do you build an SEO strategy that goes beyond plugging keywords into program pages?
In this article, we’ll cover:
Why search is the cornerstone of student decision-making.
How SEO aligns with every stage of the enrollment funnel.
How universities can improve their rankings, engagement, and lead quality.
Why higher education SEO efforts deserve long-term strategic investment.
Why Universities Use SEO Strategies for Enrollment Growth
In an increasingly competitive enrollment landscape, SEO offers higher education institutions a sustainable, cost-effective foundation for long-term growth. Unlike time-limited paid campaigns, SEO builds momentum and equity over time, positioning your institution in front of prospective students at the exact moment they’re looking for options.
Today’s Students Start With Search
Before a prospective student ever talks to an admissions counselor or clicks on an ad, they almost always begin with a Google search. In fact, a majority of students report using search engines as their first step in looking for college and university options, according to recent research from EAB and Modern Campus.
If your institution doesn’t show up organically on the first page of results, you’re not in the conversation.
What makes organic search results particularly powerful is the trust factor. While ads can drive visibility, organic rankings signal authority, relevance, and credibility, especially in the eyes of Gen Z prospects, who are increasingly ad-skeptical and research-savvy.
Additionally, mobile-first behavior and voice-assisted searches for terms such as “best online MBA program in Texas” or “affordable RN to BSN degree near me” raise the stakes for technical SEO. A university’s site must not only be optimized for keywords but also be fast, intuitive, and responsive to be able to meet students where they are: on their phones, on the go, and expecting answers immediately.
Long-Term ROI of Organic vs. Paid Media
SEO is an investment, not a line item. While a paid search ad can generate quick visibility, it’s fleeting, as your ad disappears the moment the budget runs dry. But SEO creates a compounding return. Each blog post, landing page, and FAQ that’s optimized for student search behavior becomes an evergreen asset that continues working long after it’s published.
Over time, this strategy leads to a lower cost per inquiry compared to paid media. And, more importantly, SEO brings in better-qualified leads from students who find your programs through specific, intent-driven queries. They are more likely to be engaged, aligned with your offerings, and prepared to convert.
Mapping SEO to the Student Enrollment Journey
To maximize the impact of SEO for your university, you need to guide prospective students through a decision-making journey that’s often long, nonlinear, and filled with questions. The most effective SEO strategies map content to each stage of the enrollment funnel, from first touch to final application.
Awareness Stage Content
At the top of the funnel, students are exploring their options. They’re not searching for your university by name. They’re asking broad, future-focused questions such as “What degree do I need to become a UX designer?” or “What are the best jobs in environmental science?” This is where search-driven blog content plays a critical role.
By creating optimized articles with titles such as “Top Degrees for a Career in UX Design” or “10 Top Environmental Science Jobs in the Next Decade,” an institution can capture early interest from prospective students who haven’t yet narrowed their choices. These types of pieces not only build organic traffic to your site but also establish your institution as a thought leader in career-aligned education.
SEO-optimized pages that provide detailed degree overviews and career outcome lists can further reinforce your institution’s relevance while helping students begin to connect their goals to your academic offerings. Remember: This stage is about visibility and value, not a hard sell.
Consideration Stage Content
Once students have a clearer sense of their path, they shift into the consideration phase, digging deeper into specific programs and comparing schools. They want evidence of factors such as faculty expertise, curriculum relevance, and positive student experiences.
This is where midfunnel content shines.
Detailed faculty bios, curriculum guides, and sample course descriptions — each optimized for key search phrases — can improve your search rankings while offering meaningful substance to prospective students. For example, a student researching “online master’s in public health with epidemiology focus” should land on a program page that mirrors those terms and provides them with real answers.
Video content, especially when paired with keyword-rich titles and descriptions, helps tell the story of your institution in a more human, engaging way. Students’ testimonials, day-in-the-life videos, and faculty spotlights can also help move students from interest to intent, especially if that content is discoverable via search.
Conversion Stage Content
As prospective students near a decision, they seek clarity and confidence. They’re looking for reassurance that they can take the next step, and that it’s the right one. Conversion-stage SEO content should answer students’ practical, high-intent queries about your institution, such as “how to apply to [University Name],” “[University Name] financial aid for graduate students,” or “[University Name] application deadlines for fall 2026.”
For institutions with campus-based programs, locally oriented SEO becomes critical at this stage. Optimizing for geographic search terms, such as “colleges in Chicago with data science programs,” ensures you show up in local map packs (the local business listings that appear with a map in location-based Google searches), directory listings, and mobile searches.
It’s about being visible and accessible right when students are ready to act.
Optimized admissions FAQs, application checklists, and explainers on cost, scholarships, and financial aid reduce friction and address students’ common concerns. These pages nudge students across the finish line.
Proven SEO Strategies for Universities
To truly move the needle on enrollments resulting from organic search results, universities need to go beyond the basics of content creation. SEO success in higher education relies on a layered approach that blends technical excellence, strategic content development, and an optimized student experience.
Technical SEO as a Foundation
No matter how compelling your content is, it won’t perform if search engines can’t access and interpret it. That’s why technical SEO is the critical first step in building your search visibility.
To help your site show up in search results, you need to fix problems such as broken links, too many redirects, slow-loading code, or pages that are hard for search engines to reach. Tools like Google Search Console and Screaming Frog can help you identify these hidden roadblocks.
One particularly valuable tactic for universities is adding schema markup — structured data tags — to your content, especially on pages with information designed to respond to high-intent queries, such as those containing academic program descriptions, faculty bios, and FAQs. With schema, search engines can better understand the structure and purpose of your content, making it eligible for rich results, such as showing up in featured snippets and accordions. That visibility boost often translates into higher click-through rates from searches.
Content That Matches Searchers’ Intent
Great university SEO content is as student-centric as it is keyword rich. The most effective universities use keyword research to inform their content strategy, ensuring that it aligns with the questions, concerns, and goals of prospective students.
This includes building program clusters, or content hubs, around key degree areas. For example, a hub for your Master of Science in Data Science program might include pages on career paths, curriculum breakdowns, faculty Q&As, students’ success stories, and downloadable guides — all linked together to establish topical authority.
Modern search results also reward content that demonstrates experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (EEAT). Universities are naturally well positioned to feature real instructors, cite data, and include named authors with academic credentials to increase their credibility with both students and algorithms.
Student Experience + SEO
The student experience is not separate from SEO. Google’s algorithm increasingly favors sites that provide clear, intuitive pathways to information, particularly on mobile devices.
For universities, that means streamlined site navigation and a logical content hierarchy that surfaces pages with key data such as program offerings, admissions steps, and tuition details within two or three clicks from the homepage. Critical content shouldn’t be buried beneath layers of institutional jargon or outdated menus.
Internal linking is another underrated but powerful tactic. By connecting related content — such as linking from a faculty bio to a program page, or from a blog post to an application checklist — you improve the crawlability of your site, increase the depth of information you provide on a topic, and keep students engaged longer.
The result? Higher page authority, better rankings, and more informed prospective students.
Treating SEO as a Strategic Enrollment Asset
In many universities, SEO is still siloed within the marketing team and treated as a narrow tactic for improving search engine rankings. But SEO should be reframed as a long-term, strategic asset that drives enrollment growth and informs data-driven decision-making.
Holistic Attribution Models
One of the biggest missed opportunities in SEO for universities is how it’s measured. Traditional models often rely on last-click attribution, a model that gives 100% of the credit for a conversion to the final touchpoint a student interacted with before taking action. This underrepresents SEO’s influence, particularly in a student journey that spans weeks or months and touches multiple channels.
Universities should adopt holistic attribution models that track assisted conversions, or interactions a student has with your marketing channels that contribute to their conversion, not just their final clicks. A search may not be the student’s last touchpoint, but it often plays a vital role in their early awareness or during their midfunnel research. Ignoring that role means underinvesting in a channel that silently drives consideration.
To see the full picture, it’s essential to align tools like Google Search Console and Google Analytics with your customer relationship management (CRM) system. Mapping behaviors based on organic search results, like blog visits, program page views, or FAQ engagement, to downstream enrollment actions helps quantify SEO’s true impact and justify investment at the leadership level.
Collaboration Across Teams
Your SEO team shouldn’t live in a vacuum. They intersect with admissions, content strategy, web development, student experience, and even academic department teams. When these teams operate separately, SEO efforts stall. But when collaboration is intentional, the entire enrollment ecosystem benefits.
For example, admissions teams can surface real students’ questions to inform keyword targeting. Student experience teams can help optimize navigation for both search bots and prospective students. Academic departments can contribute subject-matter expertise to improve your pages’ EEAT and topical depth.
SEO-informed content planning — whether for a blog calendar, landing page update, or digital ad campaign — ensures every piece of your content is geared toward a discoverability goal. This strengthens your SEO’s performance and boosts the efficiency of your other marketing channels, from paid search ads to email nurture campaigns.
Preparing for What’s Next
The SEO landscape is evolving rapidly, and universities need to anticipate what’s coming, including search tactics driven by artificial intelligence (AI). With Google’s AI Overviews (also known as Search Generative Experience, or SGE), zero-click searches, and the growing prominence of featured snippets, institutions must rethink how visibility is defined.
Ranking No. 1 doesn’t guarantee clicks if the answer is shown directly in the search result. That’s why future-ready SEO strategies focus on content depth and authority. Winning in AI-driven search engine results pages requires comprehensive, well-structured content that answers layered queries, not just surface-level questions.
Institutions should also monitor how AI tools interpret their content and brand. Structured data, semantic markup, and content clarity all influence how your pages are represented in machine-generated summaries and voice search results.
Ready to Make SEO a Strategic Pillar for Your School?
SEO for universities isn’t a mere marketing tactic. It’s a foundational strategy for long-term enrollment growth, helping to future-proof your institution’s enrollment efforts in a volatile higher education market.
While SEO is critical, it’s also complicated, which is why Archer Education provides colleges and universities with the expert insights required to create a truly strategic SEO plan that integrates with other elements of your marketing strategy.
Contact us to learn more about how SEO can ignite your institution’s growth over the long haul.
If you’re a university leader today, you’re juggling a lot: enrollment challenges, tightening budgets, shifting student expectations, and the rise of non-traditional competitors. Amid all this, one asset might not be getting the attention it deserves — your university’s brand.
No, not just your logo or tagline. We’re talking about brand equity — the value your institution holds in the minds of students, parents, alumni, faculty, employers, and the public. It’s about reputation, trust, recognition, and connection. And in a competitive market, it matters now more than ever.
What is brand equity in higher education?
Think of it this way: Brand equity is what people think and feel when they hear your university’s name. It’s the difference between being someone’s first-choice school versus just another option.
It shows up in the pride alumni feel when they wear your sweatshirt, the confidence prospective students have when they see your graduates succeed, and the trust employers place in your credentials. It’s shaped by every experience — from the way your website tells your story, to how your faculty engage in the classroom, to the tone of your communications during a crisis.
It’s what drives alumni to give, students to enroll, and faculty to choose you over other institutions. When a university has strong brand equity, people trust it, recognize it, and feel loyal to it. That kind of reputation can spark a ripple effect of positive influence across an entire institution.
Understanding the impact of brand equity across an institution
Brand equity touches every dimension of institutional life, influencing how people experience, perceive, and engage with your university across the student and stakeholder journey. Let’s take a look at its impact in six key areas.
1. Enrolling new students
Choosing a college is a huge decision for students and their families. Today’s students are more informed than ever and expect an institution that’s respected, innovative, and committed to their success.
That’s where your brand can make an impact. If your university has a strong, positive reputation, you’re more likely to make their shortlist. Schools with solid brand equity are seen as high-quality, forward-thinking, and worth the investment, which makes all the difference in a world where competition is fierce and the landscape is changing fast.
2. Attracting top faculty
It’s not just students who care about a school’s reputation — faculty and academic leaders do too. A strong, well-respected brand sends a clear message: This place is serious about excellence, values academic freedom, and encourages innovation.
It’s not just about prestige — top talent also wants to be somewhere that fosters genuine, supportive relationships with students. A respected brand signals a vibrant academic culture where everyone’s invested in each other’s success.
3. Fostering alumni pride
When a university has strong brand equity, it’s not just about reputation — it’s about the sense of pride and connection it creates. Alumni who feel proud of their alma mater are more likely to stay involved, whether that means attending events, volunteering, or giving back financially.
A strong brand also helps foster a lasting sense of community and belonging well beyond graduation. In short, when your brand is trusted and respected, alumni remain engaged — and they’re more likely to support the institution not only with their resources but by recommending it to future students within their networks.
4. Securing strategic partnerships
Whether you’re aiming to partner with major companies, secure government grants, or build global collaborations, having a strong brand can be a significant factor. Organizations want to work with universities they respect, trust, and recognize as leaders in their field.
When your university’s brand is strong and clear, opportunities that are imperative to your institution open up more quickly. Meanwhile, lesser-known schools often struggle to get noticed. Building a strategic and strong brand is your best way to stand out and secure meaningful partnerships that benefit your students and your bottom line.
5. Staying resilient amid market disruption
Higher education is under pressure from various directions shifting demographics, financial constraints, and evolving expectations. A strong brand is essential to stay resilient and relevant.
When controversy, crises, or big changes hit, your brand becomes your safety net. People are far more likely to give you the benefit of the doubt if they already respect and trust you. That reputation can be the difference between weathering the storm and facing long-term damage.
6. Boosting visibility through rankings
While rankings aren’t everything, they do influence perception. Many ranking systems factor in peer reputation, which is directly tied to your brand. The same goes for media coverage. The stronger your brand, the more likely you are to be recognized as a thought leader and trusted voice in the field.
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Practical tips for building brand equity that lasts
University leaders can’t afford to view brand as merely a marketing function— it’s so much more than that. Brand must be seen as a strategic asset embedded in everything from big-picture planning to day-to-day decisions. It’s part of how you attract students, build partnerships, and earn trust.
So how can you turn brand equity into a competitive advantage for your institution? Here are a few key moves to get started:
1. Know what you stand for
Start with a clear sense of who you are and what makes your school unique. What do you want people to feel when they think of your institution? Your brand promise should reflect your values, vision, and personality — and it should feel real, not like something cooked up in a boardroom.
2. Take time to truly know your audience
What matters most to your students, parents, alumni, and faculty? What are they proud of, and what do they wish were better? Take time to listen — through surveys, conversations, and social media — and use those insights to shape your strategy and message.
3. Tell one clear, consistent story
Your brand shows up everywhere: your website, your campus tours, your social media posts, even how your staff answers the phone. Make sure that story feels authentic, easy to understand, and consistent across every touchpoint. Developing comprehensive brand guidelines, share them widely across the institution, and conduct regular audits to ensure every touchpoint reinforces a unified, memorable experience for all audiences.
4. Get your people involved
Your brand isn’t just a logo — it’s how people talk about your institution and the trust they place in it. That means faculty, staff, students, and alumni all have a role to play. Keep them in the loop, give them the tools to share your story, and make them feel like part of the bigger picture. Want to get more people talking about — and proud of — your school? Make it easy for them. Share what’s happening through newsletters and social media and provide your community with tools that help them show off their connection. When faculty, staff, students, and alumni feel informed, celebrated, and included, they’re more likely to stay engaged — and more likely to brag about being part of your institution.
5. Make sure the experience matches the message
If you’re promising innovation, inclusivity, or career readiness, you better be delivering that on campus, in the classroom (both online and in person), and beyond. Brand equity grows when expectations match real experiences. That’s why creating a seamless website experience is so important — it directly impacts how much trust students place in your institution and it’s offerings.
6. Get the word out (strategically)
Raising awareness isn’t just about marketing louder — it’s about marketing smarter. Use the right mix of channels, from digital ads and social media to speaking opportunities for university leaders. And don’t forget about earned media and storytelling that highlights real student success. Do this by building a strategic content plan that aligns messaging across platforms, targets the right audiences, and consistently showcases the impact your institution makes.
7. Keep a pulse on your reputation
What are people actually saying about your school? Check in regularly using surveys, online reviews, social listening, and even informal feedback. This will help you spot issues early and see what’s working.
8. Be prepared to evolve
Higher ed is changing fast, so your brand needs to be flexible. Stay grounded in your core values, but be open to shifting your tone, visuals, or messaging as your audience and the world around you change.
Build a brand with a lasting legacy and immediate impact
In an age of increasing competition and shifting student expectations, brand equity is no longer a luxury — it’s a leadership priority. With students having endless options, donors getting more selective, and reputations spreading instantly, your brand equity can be a serious competitive edge.
Investing in a strong, authentic, and trusted brand can lay the foundation for long-term success. The institutions that thrive in the years ahead will be those that treat their brand as a central part of their overall strategy instead of a marketing afterthought.
Because in higher ed, your brand isn’t what you say it is — it’s what people believe it to be. And that belief? That’s your brand equity.
Ready to strengthen your institution’s brand equity? Explore how a strategic marketing approach can help you stand out and thrive. Let’s talk!
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Pitching compelling storylines and sources are the crux of any public relations strategy. In the higher education digital marketing space, we at Archer Education leverage the expertise of professors from our partner institutions to help increase the school’s visibility, student enrollment, thought leadership, and brand awareness.
Professors make excellent sources for stories through unmatched expertise and experience in their respective fields, but without the correct messaging and communication strategy, this opportunity could be missed.
In this article, we’ll go over how to write a media pitch in higher education and review the most common types of media pitches.
What Is a Media Pitch?
Media pitches in higher education are strategic communications sent to journalists, editors, or media outlets to promote faculty expertise, research, or institutional initiatives. These pitches typically highlight faculty insights on current events, groundbreaking studies, or thought leadership in their field.
These pitches are particularly key to faculty promotion because they enhance visibility, establish credibility, and position faculty as subject matter experts. Media coverage can lead to invitations for speaking engagements, collaborative research opportunities, and increased citations — all of which contribute to professional advancement for the faculty member and enhanced institutional reputation.
How to Create Your Media Pitch
Before we dive into best practices, tips, and examples of PR pitching, let’s go over some of the basics of how to structure a media pitch. Creating a set standard for yourself and your team will not only streamline the process and allow you to be as efficient as possible, but it will also ensure consistency amongst your team and allow for smooth training programs.
Select the Right Type of Journalism Lead
Before you even start writing a pitch, you want to make sure you find a lead that will entice whoever you are reaching out to. The lead is the angle into your story that makes everything relevant. You can look for two types of leads that are applicable throughout journalism:
A news peg is a trending story or topic in the news that relates to what you’re pitching. For example, leveraging a political debate or a new medical study that was just released. This allows you to hook the reader with a relevant and widespread story.
A time peg represents an upcoming date or event. For example, anniversaries of days like 9/11 or Hurricane Katrina, days or weeks dedicated to specific causes like “Health IT Week” or “Mental Health Awareness Day,” or even months like “Breast Cancer Awareness Month.”
These types of dates and events can be easily leveraged for PR purposes as media outlets will often shape content around significant or relevant time pegs. In order to keep track and take advantage of these dates, it’s helpful to create and consistently update an internal editorial calendar with your team.
Develop Your Pitch Structure
Below is the basic outline/structure you should consider when writing a media pitch:
As mentioned above, start with the lead. This should be the first thing the reporter or editor reads. An enticing lead that is relevant to their beat will ensure they continue through your pitch.
The second part is your call-to-action. This is the action you want your audience to take. Whether it is writing a product review, publishing a piece of content, or conducting an interview, it’s important to make your intention here as clear as possible.
Next comes your value proposition. This is a key piece of the puzzle as it will be the meat of the pitch; this is where you can showcase the value of what you are offering and why they should be interested in it. It is essential in differentiating yourself from the hundreds of other pitches they receive.
The last piece of the pitch is your conclusion. This is a straightforward recap that includes a recap of the call-to-action and a thank you.
Use the Right Subject Line for Your Pitch Email
Subject lines are the first and sometimes only thing that a media contact will see — often determining whether they will even bother to open your email or not. Ensuring that your subject line is clear, concise, and enticing is critical. According to Omeda, subject lines with 20 characters or fewer achieve the highest open rates, averaging 29.9%. Open rates decline to 17.3% for subject lines between 20 and 124 characters.
Interestingly, subject lines exceeding 174 characters see a slight recovery in open rates, averaging around 23%. However, due to potential display issues and the risk of being cut off, it’s generally recommended to keep subject lines concise. Prioritizing brevity ensures better visibility across various devices and enhances the likelihood of engagement.
While creating a subject line that produces an “open” should always be the goal, you should make sure to avoid using “click-bait” phrasing as a tactic to draw in the recipient, as this is considered unprofessional. The last thing you want to do is mislead your audience or appear spammy.
How to Pitch the Media: Communication Strategies
Now that you understand the basics on how to write and structure a media pitch, let’s cover some media pitching strategies that can lead to greater success.
Use Timely Stories and Research
Don’t deprive yourself of using relevant news pegs or research as your hook for your pitch. It’s no secret that the media lives off of news pegs, trending topics, and new research to tell their stories. To increase the chances of someone showing interest in your pitch, it’s important to make their job as easy as possible. It’s a good idea to spell out the story for them so that your source or story fits in seamlessly with trending news topics and their target audience’s interests.
Reporters and editors receive hundreds of pitches every day, so providing them with a story that their readers will be interested in and offering sources to help supplement that story will make them more compelled to move forward with the conversation.
Along these same lines, always try to include hyperlinks to any research or statistics that you reference in your pitch. You don’t want them to shy away from expressing interest or continuing the conversation simply because they don’t have time to do the legwork to track down the sources themselves.
Know the Reporter’s Beat
You can have the best pitch in the world, but if it doesn’t align with the reporter’s beat (the types of stories they cover), then it will provide no use or value to them. In fact, it will only blatantly show that you are sending out mass email distributions and aren’t doing the appropriate research and legwork before pitching them. While it’s not always realistic or feasible, personalize pitches whenever possible and mention any related articles that they recently wrote.
Keep it Concise and Know Your Story
As previously mentioned, media contacts receive hundreds of pitches a day. If you’re lucky enough to get yours opened, the worst thing that someone with very little time can be confronted with is an unnecessarily long pitch. Find out how to say everything that you need to say in a paragraph or less (with rare exceptions). The more specific and focused you can be, the better. It’s also crucial to understand and communicate the story you’re trying to tell and how it aligns with the larger media trends yet provides a unique angle to the storyline.
Follow Up Is Key to Media Pitching
Following up on initial email pitches is one of the most crucial elements of the pitching process. This is where most of your interest and responses will come from, so ensure that you schedule reminders to follow up.
Generally, it’s appropriate to wait about one week until you send follow-ups out; this will ensure that the media contact has sufficient time to get through their emails and respond if they are planning to. If the story is incredibly time-sensitive, you can follow-up a bit sooner. Similarly, if it is not a time-sensitive story at all, then waiting a little longer than a week can be a good strategy. Just be sure to include your original pitch at the bottom of your follow-up email to help jog the recipient’s memory and provide more context.
Media Pitch Examples
Now that you have the information that you need to be successful with your pitch writing, here are some real-life examples of media pitches and pitch letters that our team sent to the media.
1. Cold Pitch
A cold pitch is an unsolicited email or message sent to a journalist or media outlet with whom there is no prior relationship. It typically introduces a faculty member’s expertise or research in hopes of securing media coverage.
2. Pitch for Established Contact/Relationship
This type of pitch is sent to a journalist or media contact with whom a relationship already exists. It builds on past interactions, making it more likely to be well received and result in coverage.
3. Personalized Pitch
A personalized pitch is tailored specifically to a journalist’s interests, past work, or the needs of their publication. It demonstrates a clear understanding of their audience and increases the chances of engagement.
4. Follow-Up Pitch
A follow-up pitch is sent after an initial pitch to reinforce interest, provide additional details, or remind the recipient about the story idea. It’s essential for maintaining momentum and increasing response rates.
How to Write Media Pitches That Consistently Convert
In today’s media landscape, consistent PR exposure is essential for faculty members looking to establish themselves as thought leaders and elevate their institution’s brand. At Archer Education, we specialize in crafting strategic media pitches that align with timely news cycles, ensuring professors and researchers receive the visibility they deserve. Whether through cold outreach, leveraging existing media relationships, or personalized pitches, we help faculty secure media placements that enhance their credibility, attract prospective students, and showcase their expertise to a broader audience.
Our experience in higher education marketing allows us to effectively position faculty members in conversations that matter, increasing opportunities for interviews, guest articles, and thought leadership features. Don’t let valuable media opportunities go untapped — connect with us today to develop a custom PR strategy that amplifies your faculty’s impact and strengthens your institution’s reputation.
You’re under increased pressure to make better, data-informed decisions. However, most colleges and universities don’t have the budget to build the kind of data team that drives strategic progress. And even if you can hire, you’re competing with other industries that pay top dollar, making it hard, if not impossible, to find the right data resource with all the skills to move your operation forward. Don’t let hiring roadblocks make you settle for siloed insights and stagnant dashboards.
How to Build a High-Impact Data Team Without the Full-Time Headcount Thursday, June 26 2:00 pm ET / 1:00 pm CT
In this webinar, Jeff Certain, VP of Solution Development and Go-to-Market, and Dan Antonson, AVP of Data and Analytics, break down how a managed services model can help you create a high-impact data team at a fraction of the cost and give you access to a robust bench of highly specialized data talent. They will also share some real-world examples of nimble, high-impact data teams in action.
You’ll walk away knowing:
Which data roles are needed for success and scale in higher ed
How to rapidly scale data operations without adding FTEs
Why managed services are a smarter investment than full-time hires
Ways to tap into cross-functional expertise on demand
How to build a future-ready data infrastructure without ballooning your org chart
Whether you’re starting from scratch or trying to scale a lean team, this session will offer practical, flexible strategies to get there faster — and more cost-effectively.
Who Should Attend:
If you are a data-minded decision-maker in higher ed or a cabinet-level leader being asked to do more with less, this webinar is for you.
Presidents and provosts
CFOs and COOs
Enrollment and marketing leaders
Expert Speakers
Jeff Certain
VP of Solution Development and Go-to-Market
Collegis Education
Dan Antonson
AVP of Data and Analytics
Collegis Education
It’s time to move past the piecemeal approach and start driving real outcomes with your data. Complete the form to reserve your spot! We look forward to seeing you on Thursday,June 26.
In today’s competitive digital landscape, higher education institutions must continually evolve to reach and engage prospective students. YouTube has evolved from a video-sharing platform into a dynamic search engine where students explore campus life, academic programs, and authentic student experiences. That’s why developing and optimizing a higher education YouTube channel is more important than ever.
Smart video SEO strategies can significantly improve visibility, build brand authority, and support enrollment goals for institutions. A well-crafted YouTube strategy plays a crucial role in this effort, ensuring that content reaches and resonates with prospective students.
Why YouTube SEO matters for higher ed video marketing
YouTube SEO goes beyond views. It positions your institution within one of the most influential search engines in the world. YouTube has become the second-largest search engine after Google, and for today’s prospective students — many of whom are digital natives — video is a primary method of discovery and research.
Whether exploring campus life, comparing academic programs, or seeking authentic student voices, prospective learners turn to YouTube to gather insights that influence their decisions. A well-optimized higher education YouTube channel offers a range of benefits, including:
Builds credibility and trust by providing authentic, engaging content.
Expands visibility on a platform used heavily by prospective students.
Drives enrollment by surfacing at key moments in the decision-making journey.
Strengthens your digital footprint through content that aligns with search behavior.
Supports multi-channel strategies by integrating with websites, email, and social media.
Improves AI-driven search visibility as AI-powered search results increasingly prioritize video content. (Tools like YouTube’s auto-transcription and AI tagging can further enhance discoverability.)
Optimizing your channel ensures your content appears when it matters most and positions your institution as a leader in digital engagement.
“Video content is the future of marketing—it’s authentic, engaging, and capable of building trust with your audience faster than any other medium.”
— Neil Patel, digital marketing expert
Build a strong SEO foundation for your higher education YouTube channel
Every video your institution shares is more than just content — it’s an opportunity to shape perceptions, highlight your strengths, and connect with your audience. Before diving into more advanced strategies, it’s essential to ensure that each video is built on a solid SEO foundation.
When executed consistently, these foundational elements can make the difference between content that gets buried and content that drives meaningful engagement. Foundational elements include:
Accurate video transcripts: Ensure transcripts are complete and error-free. This enhances accessibility and helps search engines understand your content. Also, include captions and alt text to enhance accessibility and meet ADA standards.
Optimized video settings: Configure each video correctly (e.g., mark as “not for children”, assign relevant categories, add strategic tags) to improve discoverability.
Robust video descriptions: Use keyword-rich, detailed descriptions aligned with your academic offerings. Think like a prospective student searching for programs or campus life.
SEO-friendly video titles: Titles should be compelling, clear, and keyword-focused. Avoid jargon — focus on what the viewer will gain.
Apply advanced channel strategies to stand out
Once the foundational elements are in place, it’s time to move beyond the basics. Elevating your higher education YouTube channel requires thoughtful planning and strategic segmentation. This is especially important for institutions with diverse academic offerings and multiple audiences, such as prospective undergraduate and graduate students.
Taking a more advanced approach can help differentiate your content, make navigation easier for users, and deliver tailored experiences that align with varied student needs. To elevate your channel’s performance and support segmented marketing goals:
Create dedicated channels: Maintaining separate channels for different audiences (like graduate versus undergrad) allows for more targeted messaging and cleaner audience segmentation.
Use playlists strategically: Group videos by topic or series and apply consistent naming conventions. This improves navigation, boosts engagement, and supports channel SEO.
Optimize thumbnails and preview content: High-quality thumbnails and concise preview text boost click-through rates, especially on mobile devices.
Ready for a Smarter Way Forward?
Higher ed is hard — but you don’t have to figure it out alone. We can help you transform challenges into opportunities.
Enhance viewer engagement
Even if your department isn’t directly producing every video, there’s still an opportunity to influence engagement and performance. By implementing a few proven tactics, institutions can increase viewer interaction and strengthen their presence on YouTube.
These strategies work in tandem with foundational SEO practices to extend the reach and impact of your video content:
Include clear calls-to-action (CTAs): Ask viewers to like, comment, subscribe, or visit your website. These actions signal relevance to YouTube’s algorithm.
Leverage end screens and cards: Use these to direct viewers to related content, encouraging longer sessions and deeper engagement.
Maintain consistent branding: Ensure videos reflect your institution’s visual identity and messaging tone to reinforce brand equity.
Integrate video into your broader strategy
YouTube content shouldn’t exist in a silo. When part of a cohesive higher ed video marketing approach, your higher education YouTube channel becomes a versatile asset that supports communication and engagement across platforms.
To truly maximize its value, it must be woven into your institution’s broader marketing and communication ecosystem. When aligned with your website, email campaigns, and social media channels, your YouTube strategy reinforces key messages and creates a cohesive experience for prospective students.
YouTube videos can be a powerful asset across multiple marketing channels:
Website integration: Embed program overviews, testimonials, and campus tours to enrich landing pages and drive engagement.
Email campaigns: Incorporate personalized video content into outreach and drip campaigns to boost open and click-through rates.
Social media amplification: Repurpose YouTube content into short clips for Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and LinkedIn to reach broader audiences.
Virtual events and webinars: Leverage recorded content as follow-up resources or promotional teasers.
Advertising and paid media: Use high-performing videos in YouTube ads or across PPC campaigns to increase reach and ROI.
Stay agile and stay ahead
YouTube SEO isn’t a one-time effort — it’s a continuous process. Use YouTube Studio to track key performance metrics such as watch time, engagement, and search impressions. These insights help guide your strategy and identify opportunities to improve content.
Monitor analytics regularly, refresh metadata, and adapt to changing viewer behaviors. Institutions that stay agile will be better positioned to engage digital-native audiences.
Take your higher ed video marketing to the next level
YouTube remains a powerful tool to build institutional visibility and connect with prospective students. At Collegis Education, our expansive marketing services are backed by deep expertise in higher ed SEO, digital strategy, and content performance. Whether you’re refining your current efforts or starting fresh, a smart, scalable strategy can turn your YouTube channel into a powerful tool for student engagement.
Let’s connect and start building a smarter strategy today.
Innovation Starts Here
Higher ed is evolving — don’t get left behind. Explore how Collegis can help your institution thrive.
Why College Student Personas Are Critical for Enrollment Marketing Success
Every message has an audience. Even this article was written with you in mind: someone navigating the complexities of higher ed marketing and looking for a smarter way to connect with students.
In the competitive world of college and university marketing, developing comprehensive college student personas is essential. A well-crafted persona helps you move beyond generic outreach and into the realm of meaningful engagement, putting you in the shoes of your prospective students to tell the story of:
Where they’ve been
Where they’re headed
How your program can help them get there
A story-driven, persona-based approach allows you to lower acquisition costs, boost student engagement, and reinforce your institution’s mission. But more importantly, it helps students feel seen. When students feel welcomed and understood, real connection happens.
That’s when a prospect takes a first step toward becoming a future graduate.
What Are Student Personas?
College student personas are fictional, research-based profiles that represent key segments of your institution’s prospective audience.
A persona can help you understand an audience group’s motivations, goals, challenges, backgrounds, and even decision-making behaviors. Rather than marketing to a broad, faceless group, personas allow you to tailor your messaging to be more relevant and compelling.
A well-detailed student persona might include details such as:
Age range
Academic interests
Career goals
Financial concerns
Preferred communication channels
Ideally, each persona will be grounded in data from multiple sources including surveys, interviews, feedback from admissions, and digital marketing analytics, if available.
How Personas Enhance the Student Journey
Student personas are a critical jumping-off point for marketing and enrollment efforts in higher education. Persona identification should occur early in the brand development process to ensure that the brand, messaging, and story align with each audience — whether it is career changers, veterans pursuing education in civilian life, or working nurses looking to advance in their careers.
A persona-driven approach focuses on a multifaceted view of your college or university’s core audiences, primarily consisting of their demographics, psychographics, and behavioral attributes.
While developing multiple custom personas for all your degree programs may seem daunting and can be time consuming, the effort will pay off in the long run in terms of enrollment and student success.
Aligning all key stakeholders involved in developing and deploying the story and identity of a brand around key student personas is also critical to creating a more cohesive and clear experience for students throughout their journey. These personas should inform and influence all teams and stakeholders in their strategies — from paid media ads and targeting, to blog content, to website copy and landing pages, to nurture campaigns.
No matter where students are in their educational journey, having a seamless experience across all channels and touchpoints is more important than ever before.
Utilizing various forms of primary and secondary research in the form of interviews, focus groups, market research, historical student data, and more, we at Archer Education are able to craft a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of what prospective students care about and how to most effectively reach and engage with them.
Steps to Create College Student Personas
Creating college student personas starts with research. Whether your enrollment marketing team does the research itself or relies on secondary sources (we suggest using a combination of both) the information-gathering process for developing student personas is essentially the same. Enrollment marketers will want to begin by gathering a lot of information from a wide range of sources.
1. Conduct Discovery Interviews
Interviews with key institutional stakeholders including program directors, enrollment and admissions teams, faculty, alumni, and current students are an important source of information for understanding student aspirations and goals, challenges and pain points, and even lifestyle circumstances.
We recommend speaking with as many stakeholders as possible to gather diverse insights and perspectives through one-on-one discussions, group interviews, and focus groups to inform robust college student personas. The interviewer’s goals are to:
Learn who students are by gathering demographic and psychographic data. Psychographics focuses on understanding students’ values, goals, interests, and emotions to gain a complete and accurate picture of them as individuals.
Discover why students want to enroll in a particular program.
Explore why they’re attracted to a particular institution.
Learn what challenges or pain points they face.
Find out what they want to accomplish after graduation.
Stories and examples gathered during interviews with current students and alumni about how your program helped them achieve their educational or career goals are especially effective for connecting with prospective students.
2. Mine Historical Student Data
Existing student demographic data (if available) including age, gender, prior education (degree type and level), and job title can help provide very tangible and relevant information for student personas. Institutions that consistently track and report data have an advantage, while brand-new programs that lack historical data may need to lean more heavily on other sources.
Student or alumni reports or survey results, if available, can provide great supplemental information for getting to know prospective, current, and former students better.
3. Conduct Market Research
Many students today, and nontraditional adult learners in particular, are hyperfocused on outcomes and looking for a return on investment in their chosen degree program. Marketing tools and resources enrollment marketers can use to make their program’s case to prospective students include:
Government data on job growth and salaries from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics
Insights from sources such as Lightcast, an aggregator of economic, labor market, demographic, education, profile, and job posting data
Industry-specific articles that highlight opportunities and motivate students to enroll
4. Leverage Audience Intelligence Tools
The ability to gather insights into audiences through social listening and other data sources — known as audience intelligence — is gaining traction with marketers as tools become more advanced. At Archer, one tool that our team uses is Sparktoro, an audience research tool that crawls millions of social profiles and web pages to learn what (and who) your audience reads, listens to, watches, follows, shares, and talks about online. This is a helpful supplemental tool that can help provide a clearer picture of your audiences across various data points and attributes.
If you’re not in a position to pay for audience intelligence tools, some free tools are available, such as CareerOneStop, which is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor. This tool is more limited to demographic information, but it can be helpful for learning more about certain industries or occupations that relate to a given student persona.
Facebook Audience Insights is another free tool that we have leveraged in the past to gain a better understanding of users connected to our partners’ pages, as well as to learn about the interests and affinities of a given audience. The tool has become more limited as Facebook has tightened up its access to users’ data and profile attributes, but it still may be worth checking out — especially if Facebook is one of your primary marketing channels.
5. Synthesize Research and Outline Personas
When discovery interviews are complete and market, audience, and other research has been gathered, it’s time to begin synthesizing what you’ve found and outlining your data-informed personas.
Depending on the scope of your project and goals, the structure and template you decide to use for college student personas may look quite different. Personas developed for the entire graduate school of an institution, for example, will probably look very different from personas created for one specific program.
Regardless of the scope and subsequent approach, you should ensure that you’ve covered your bases across the spectrum of core audiences while trying to make each as distinct as possible from one another — either in terms of shared interests and goals, or in terms of demographic factors such as incoming occupation (such as being a working nurse) or lifestyle circumstances (such as being a stay-at-home parent returning to school).
Once you’ve identified the distinct student personas you want to focus on, it’s time to build them out in greater detail. The more in-depth information you’ve gathered, the easier it will be to create distinct, detailed personas that are applicable. When creating personas, make sure to honor your institution’s commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion by representing students of different races, ethnicities, gender identities, and abilities. Don’t let your personas reinforce stereotypes.
There are many different templates and approaches you can use to develop personas — and there is no “right” way. Again, it really depends on your specific goals and how you can make the personas as applicable and actionable as possible.
At Archer, our teams find that including areas such as skills, interests, incoming occupations, age, education, media usage, and more are important. Also, we highly recommend including a “story” section (as in the examples below) to humanize your fictional student and create a clearer picture of who this persona is and what they care about.
College Student Persona Examples
When we are tasked with creating personas across multiple programs and verticals, we like to create a persona architecture with overarching personas and subpersonas so we can plug them in across various programs, depending on our partner’s needs and goals. This gives our enrollment marketing teams options to target student personas on a broader or more granular level, depending on what makes the most sense for the program.
The persona examples for students below feature overarching personas for a mix of tech/coding bootcamp programs with detailed subpersonas for each target beneath.
Technology is a broad field with opportunities for individuals who come in with a diverse mix of experience, education, interests, and skills. Developing a broader overarching persona (with subpersonas underneath) can help provide a high-level snapshot into a broader group of individuals who still share important commonalities. You can include things such as an overview and some of the top motivations that are most relevant to that audience, in addition to other elements that help showcase who this audience is and what they care about.
Then drill down using the data and stories you’ve collected in your research to animate your multiple subpersonas. Below is a subpersona we created for a partner’s tech bootcamp degree program.
The next example below is a program-specific persona created for a single degree program. Programmatic personas typically include more in-depth and detailed information than personas designed to encompass more than one program. Notice the inclusion of sample job titles and skills.
Developing student personas will not only help your institution attract the right students, it will help your marketing teams, enrollment specialists, and administrators identify and better understand your students’ needs and goals — a win-win for educators and students alike.
Creating Student Personas to Drive Enrollment
Persona-based marketing is a tried-and-true tool for customer acquisition, and higher education is no exception. When exploring colleges or degree programs, students want to know which one will be a good fit for them. Recognizing themselves in your marketing materials can make the difference between their moving forward in the enrollment funnel and moving on to a competitor.
At Archer Education, we partner with dozens of institutions to craft story-driven, persona-based approaches to student acquisition. Request more information and see what Archer can do to help you connect with and enroll the right students.
Your students are already running to AI for answers. The only question is — what’s it saying about your institution? More importantly, are you in the conversation or being left out? If you’re not actively shaping how your school shows up in AI-driven search and decision-making platforms, you’re not just invisible — you’re irrelevant.
Digital Darwinism in Higher Ed: Adapt Your Marketing for AI — or Get Left Behind Date: May 29, 2025 Time: 2:00 p.m. ET / 1:00 p.m. CT
In this webinar, Collegis Education’s Ashley Nicklay, Sr. Director of Marketing, and Jessica Summers, Director of Web Strategy, will unpack what “AI-ready” really means for higher ed marketing and enrollment leaders.We’ll explore how generative AI influences the student journey from search to selection, why most websites and content strategies are falling short, and what forward-thinking institutions are doing to lead the algorithm, rather than get buried by it.
This isn’t just about better SEO or smarter ads. It’s about understanding how AI evaluates your institution — and making sure you’re feeding it the right data, signals, and story to stay in the game.
What You’ll Learn
How AI impacts the early stages of the enrollment journey: Understand how tools like ChatGPT and Google’s AI Overviews influence what students see when exploring colleges.
Why AI prompt bias is real — and how to beat it: Learn how content, structured data and reputation shape AI responses.
What AI actually sees when it looks at your website (and what it may miss): Explore how site structure, clarity and technical markup shape what AI-based tools can find and summarize – and what they may overlook.
What it really means to have an AI-optimized website: We’ll show you our checklist of what your .edu needs to show up in AI-generated answers.
How to future-proof your marketing model in an AI-driven search landscape: Assess your current channels and content strategy for resilience as search becomes more conversational and less click-based.
Future-Ready Starts Here: Secure Your Spot
The institutions that will thrive tomorrow are learning how to market to machines today.Reserve your seat and find out what it takes to survive the AI era of higher ed marketing.
Complete the form on the right to reserve your spot.
AI is no longer a distant disruption. It’s already influencing how prospective students and families search, navigate, and make decisions on higher education websites. As teams responsible for delivering seamless digital experiences, we need to understand the behavioral shifts underway and how to respond strategically.
Across the institutions we support, we’re seeing early but consistent signals: users expect smarter, faster, and more personalized interactions. These changes are subtle in some places and dramatic in others. But they’re accelerating.
How AI is changing search behavior
AI tools like Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE), ChatGPT, and other large language models are changing how people expect to interact with information. According to a 2023 Pew Research study, 58% of U.S. adults are aware of ChatGPT, and younger audiences are among the most active users. Meanwhile, Google continues testing SGE, which presents AI-generated summaries above traditional search results.
Students are learning to type full, natural language questions — and they expect precise, context-aware responses in return. This behavior is now showing up in on-site search patterns.
Across higher ed websites, here are a few things we’re noticing:
A rise in long-form, conversational search queries, especially within internal site search tools
Increased use of search bars over menu navigation (particularly on mobile). A recent E-Expectations Trend report found that half of high school students use the site search to navigate a website.
Across the higher ed websites we support, we see stronger performance on pages that are tailored to high-intent topics like cost, admissions, and outcomes. A recent analysis of over 200 higher ed sites found that 53% of engaged sessions come from organic search — highlighting the importance of content that’s built for both SEO and AI-driven discovery.
Additionally, research indicates that 80% of high school juniors and seniors consider an institution’s website the most influential resource when exploring schools. This highlights the critical role of personalized and relevant content in engaging prospective students effectively.
These findings emphasize the necessity for higher education institutions to develop and maintain website content that is specifically tailored to the needs and questions of their target audiences to enhance engagement and support enrollment goals.
Parents and adult learners demonstrate similar behavior as they vet institutions with a clearer sense of goals and outcomes.
Ready for a Smarter Way Forward?
Higher ed is hard — but you don’t have to figure it out alone. We can help you transform challenges into opportunities.
We still need to get the fundamentals right
It’s important to say: AI-driven search doesn’t eliminate the need for strong site structure. Navigation menus, clear page hierarchy, and thoughtful content design still matter — a lot. Most users move fluidly between browsing and searching. What’s changing is the expectation for speed, relevance, and control.
To meet this moment, higher ed websites should focus on:
Modernizing internal search tools to move beyond keyword matching and support relevance-based or semantic search with tools like Vertex AI in full-site search tools or even program finders.
Designing content around user intent, not just institutional priorities. Emphasize topics that students are searching for — like affordability, flexibility, and outcomes — rather than internal program structures or catalog-style descriptions.
Making calls to action easy to find and easy to act on (especially for first-time visitors.) We help partners optimize for conversion with AB testing for placement, messaging, and functionality that best resonates with your audience.
Better leveraging personalized and dynamic content to deliver tailored experiences based on user behavior, location, or stage in the journey. For instance, high-intent pages like “How to Apply” can be leveraged to serve personalized content blocks based on the visitor’s context. A returning user who previously viewed graduate programs might see a prompt to schedule a call with a graduate admissions counselor. A visitor browsing from New York in the evening hours could be shown a message about flexible online options for working professionals. These dynamic cues guide prospective students forward in their journey without overhauling the entire site.
Why this isn’t a one-time fix
This is not a single redesign or one-time upgrade. Optimizing your site for how people actually use it needs to be a continuous process.
This should include the following:
Reviewing analytics and user behavior regularly
Conducting search query audits to identify gaps
A/B testing calls to action and user pathways
Collecting both qualitative and quantitative research to understand different audience needs
Higher ed website performance is directly tied to enrollment growth. According to a 2024 survey conducted by UPCEA and Collegis Education to better understand the perspectives of post-baccalaureate students, 62% of respondents said not being able to easily find basic program information on the institution’s website would cause them to disengage.
The survey focuses on program preferences, delivery methods, and expectations during the inquiry and application processes and offered insights into how these preferences vary by age and degree level.
How to prepare for what’s next
To stay competitive and relevant, institutions need to invest in both smart search experiences and a streamlined digital journey. Here are some high-level recommendations:
Audit your internal search functionality. How are users searching your site, and are they getting the right results?
Map user journeys for key audiences. This includes traditional students, adult learners, and family decision-makers.
Evaluate AI integration options. Tools like Google’s Vertex AI or other semantic search platforms can enhance search accuracy and personalization.
Don’t overlook AEO (answer engine optimization). As AI-powered tools reshape how students discover and evaluate schools, it’s time to think beyond traditional SEO. AEO focuses on structuring content to directly answer the natural-language questions students now ask in tools like ChatGPT and Google’s SGE. We can help you begin integrating AEO into your strategy and content planning, so your institution stays visible in the next wave of search.
Treat optimization as ongoing. Staying competitive in the AI era requires continuous improvements grounded in data, user behavior, and evolving search trends. Ongoing commitment to this initiative is crucial.
Smarter web experiences start now
The future of higher ed websites isn’t just about making information accessible. It’s about making it findable, meaningful, and actionable – and being able to act fast and stay committed to this work.
Institutions that recognize how AI is already reshaping user expectations, and respond with thoughtful, strategic digital experiences, will meet today’s learners where they are and build trust for the long-term.
We’re paying close attention to these shifts and helping institutions make smart, scalable updates. If you’re rethinking how your website supports recruitment, engagement, or conversion, now is the right time to start. Collegis Education supports institutions with strategic marketing and web solutions designed to meet these evolving needs.
Let’s talk about how we can work together to future proof your web and digital experiences to best support enrollment growth for years to come.
See how your website stacks up — Contact us to request your AI Readiness Assessment.
Innovation Starts Here
Higher ed is evolving — don’t get left behind. Explore how Collegis can help your institution thrive.
Let’s cut to it: Higher ed is sprinting toward the AI revolution with its shoelaces untied.
Presidents are in boardrooms making bold declarations. Provosts are throwing out buzzwords like “machine learning” and “predictive modeling.” Enrollment and marketing teams are eager to automate personalization, deploy chatbots, and rewrite campaigns using tools like ChatGPT.
Not because you’re not visionary. Not because your teams aren’t capable. But because your data is a disaster.
AI is not an easy button
Somewhere along the way, higher ed started treating AI like a miracle shortcut — a shiny object that could revolutionize enrollment, retention, and student services overnight.
But AI isn’t a magic wand. It’s more like a magnifying glass, exposing what’s underneath.
If your systems are fragmented, your records are outdated, and your departments are still hoarding spreadsheets like it’s 1999, AI will only scale the chaos. It won’t save you – it’ll just amplify your problems.
When AI goes sideways
Take the California State University system. They announced their ambition to become the nation’s first AI-powered public university system. But after the headlines faded, faculty across the system were left with more questions than answers. Where was the strategy? Who was in charge? What’s the plan?
The disconnect between vision and infrastructure was glaring.
Elsewhere, institutions have already bolted AI tools onto outdated systems, without first doing the foundational work. The result? Predictive models that misidentify which students are at risk. Dashboards that contradict themselves. Chatbots that confuse students more than they support them.
This isn’t an AI failure. It’s a data hygiene failure.
You don’t need hype — You need hygiene
Before your institution invests another dollar in AI, ask these real questions:
Do we trust the accuracy of our enrollment, academic, and financial data?
Are we still manually wrangling CSVs each month just to build reports?
Do our systems speak the same language, or are they siloed and outdated?
Is our data governance robust enough to ensure privacy, security, and usefulness?
Have we invested in the unglamorous but essential work (e.g., integration pipelines, metadata management, and cross-functional alignment)?
If the answer is “not yet,” then congratulations — you’ve found your starting point. That’s your AI strategy.
Because institutions that are succeeding with AI, like Ivy Tech Community College, didn’t chase the trend. They built the infrastructure. They did the work. They cleaned up first.
What true AI readiness looks like (a not-so-subtle sales pitch)
Let’s be honest: there’s no shortage of vendors selling the AI dream right now. Slick demos, lofty promises, flashy outcomes. But most of them are missing the part that actually matters — a real, proven plan to get from vision to execution.
This is where Collegis is different. We don’t just sell transformation. We deliver it. Our approach is grounded in decades of experience, built for higher ed, and designed to scale.
Here’s how we help institutions clean up the mess and build a foundation that makes AI actually work:
Strategy + AI alignment: Tech that knows where it’s going
We don’t just implement tools. We align technology to your mission, operational goals, and student success strategy. And we help you implement AI ethically, with governance frameworks that prioritize transparency and accountability.
Analytics that drive action
We transform raw data into real insights. From integration and warehousing to dashboards and predictive models, we help institutions interpret what’s really happening — and act on it with confidence.
Smarter resource utilization
We help you reimagine how your institution operates. By identifying inefficiencies and eliminating redundancies, we create more agile, collaborative workflows that maximize impact across departments.
Boosted conversion and retention
Our solutions enable personalized student engagement, supporting the full lifecycle from inquiry to graduation. That means better conversion rates, stronger persistence, and improved outcomes.
AI wins when the infrastructure works
Clean data isn’t a project — it’s a prerequisite. It’s the thing that makes AI more than a buzzword. More than a dashboard. It’s what turns hype into help.
And when you get it right, the impact is transformational.
“The level of data mastery and internal talent at Collegis is some of the best-in-class we’ve seen in the EdTech market. When you pair that with Google Cloud’s cutting-edge AI innovation and application development, you get a partnership that can enable transformation not only at the institutional level but within the higher education category at large.”
— Brad Hoffman, Director, State & Local Government and Higher Education, Google
There are no shortcuts to smart AI
AI can only be as effective as the foundation it’s built on. Until your systems are aligned and your data is trustworthy, you’re not ready to scale innovation.
If you want AI to work for your institution — really work — it starts with getting your data house in order. Let’s build something that lasts. Something that works. Something that’s ready.
Curious what that looks like? Let’s talk. We’ll help you map out a real, achievable foundation for AI in higher ed.
You stuck with me to the end? I like you already! Let’s keep the momentum going. If your wheels are turning and you’re wondering where to start, our Napkin Sketch session might be the perfect next step. It’s a fast, collaborative way to map out your biggest data and tech challenges—no pressure, no sales pitch, just a conversation. Check it out!
Innovation Starts Here
Higher ed is evolving — don’t get left behind. Explore how Collegis can help your institution thrive.
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