The Role of Long-Form Content in Your #highered SEO Content Strategy

Why use long-form content in higher education?

I have presented several times recently – including at the Higher Ed Content Conference – about the importance of long-form content in your higher ed content strategy.

Several research studies indicate that long-form content is a must for effective content strategy, but how does this apply to higher education websites and what are the best ways to use it?

Share your brand stories

Do you know what makes your institution special?

We all know that colleges and universities teach students. Hopefully the students have wonderful experiences during their time at the institution, and hopefully the students will go on to do amazing things after they leave. The experiences that those students have while attending and what the students do afterwards is, in many ways, your brand.

Your culture and your brand is not what you say it is, but rather what the students experience and share. So much of this happens naturally. As higher ed marketers, a big part of our job is listening. We listen to those experiences and we help shape the narrative around it. By listening to these stories, we can understand what is authentic about our brand and re-tell these stories in a sincere way.

Why is brand important to long-form stories and content marketing?

When you have a good understanding of your brand and your institutional stories, it becomes much easier to develop a strategy for telling the stories and deliberately doing so in a way that helps you achieve your goals, such as improved SEO. This gives you multiple benefits for doing something you should be doing anyway — highlighting your brand stories.

What does long-form content for higher ed look like?

Redefine news.

Your site likely already has a news section. You may have a blog. You may have a magazine. You may not need to change anything that is already working well for you. However, are there opportunities to supplement the news stories/press releases with additional brand stories?

One option is to expand the current news section and more broadly define news. Another strong option is to add a new section focused on articles and other content. You can include short articles (500-800 words), as well as long-form articles (2,500+ words).

Highlight your students.

You know those long feature articles and interviews with celebrities in newspapers and magazines?

Your students would make an equally interesting feature (much more interesting in some cases).

Hold a Casting Call for students. Talk with students.

Find out what they are doing. Find about why they chose your school and what their experience has been like.

• Are they doing an internship?
• Did they have an interesting path in getting where they are today?
• Are they working on a project in class that is noteworthy?

Even talking about their average day may reveal some things that are anything but average.

You should easily be able to write many short articles (500-800 words) about these student-focused topics. You will likely also be able to uncover some very interesting topics for a long-form article (2,500+ words).

Highlight your alumni.

Does your school graduate winners, movers, and shakers? Of course it does!

The alumni success stories are often much easier to identify than interesting current student stories. Writing an article about how a graduate went on to do interesting things is an easy win. You aren’t promising that all students will go on to do the same, but you are highlighting that some have and are giving hope to others.

Be honest in the process and show the struggles along with the success.

Giving the alumni an opportunity to talk about their path to where they are will be helpful in sharing your institution’s brand attributes and will also help the alumni to build their personal brand (that was launched, in part, by what they were able to achieve at your school).

You should easily be able to write many short articles (500-800 words) about these alumni-focused topics. You will likely also be able to uncover some very interesting stories for a long-form article (2,500+ words). Think articles, interviews, words of advice, etc. At Higher Ed Experts, that’s exactly what the Higher Ed Marketing Memos are about: showcasing the wins and the voices of the alums of our certificate programs.

Highlight your programs.

You and your faculty may know about your programs, what majors do, and what the options are for graduates. That doesn’t mean that prospective students do.

Think beyond the program page blurb and go deeper. Show your institution as a true authority on the topic. If you offer the major, you should be able to speak at length on the topic —or at least interview faculty who can.

You can let the faculty contribute posts to explore an interesting angle on a topic.

• What is the future of the field?
• Where are the growth opportunities?
• Why should anyone care about it? What are common misconceptions?

You should be able to write a short overview article (500-800 words), as well as long-form articles (2,500+ words) that take a deep dive into the topic. Don’t forget about including student, alumni, and faculty stories within the major/field.

What about SEO?

Keywords are important still. People do search for topics in very specific ways using exact phrases.

However, it is now important to build semantic relationships between pages and topics than it is to focus on a single keyword. Use keywords, but also allow other phrases to occur naturally in the article.

This will be rewarded by Google and will allow you to tell a better story.