SEO & GEO for universities and EdTech
Be the university AI recommends.
An online university does not compete for one keyword. It competes for hundreds of degrees and master's programmes, across several countries and languages, against search engines that now answer without anyone clicking. We work both sides at once: your catalogue ranking in Google, and AI naming you when someone asks what to study and where.
What changes when AI answers before Google does
People deciding where to study no longer open ten tabs. They ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini which university suits them, and the model comes back with three or four names. If yours is not there, there is no second chance: there was no list of results to appear further down.
The number behind it: around 60% of the sources AI cites are not in Google's top 10. Visibility in AI is not inherited from SEO, it is built. And AI Overviews now show on roughly half of searches, so they reach the people who do land on Google too.
The good news for a university is that it starts with an advantage. Models prefer to cite sources with authority, with original data and with content that genuinely answers. That is exactly what an academic institution can produce, and what almost none of its competitors are structuring properly.
How we do SEO for higher education, programme by programme
The problem with an academic site is not the writing. It is that hundreds of pages look alike: degrees, master's, short courses, campuses, study modes. Without a clear architecture those pages compete against each other and none of them wins.
First we order the catalogue. Which page exists for which search, which ones are redundant, which ones are missing. The criterion is not the university's org chart: it is how people search.
Then keyword research by country and language. A master's in digital marketing is not searched the same way in the United States, the United Kingdom or Mexico, and the volumes are nothing alike. That is what sets the priority in each market.
And then the content of each programme page, with what a prospective student needs in order to decide: syllabus, outcomes, entry requirements, accreditation, fees where they are published. A page that answers ranks, and it is also the page AI can cite.
SEO for universities that does not rely on paid alone
Most student recruitment runs on paid campaigns today. It works, but cost per lead rises every year, and the day the spend stops, so does the pipeline.
Organic does not replace campaigns: it makes them cheaper. When your programme pages rank and AI cites you, part of the demand arrives without being paid for, and your campaigns stop bidding against your own brand. That is what carries a weak intake quarter.
Several countries and languages, without duplicating the team
An online university rarely lives in a single market, and that is where the usual problems appear: the same programme page in two countries fighting over one search, languages declared wrong, versions that never link to each other.
We have worked with UNIR since 2022 and with TECH Universidad across more than 100 markets and eleven languages, so we know this from the inside. The fix lives in the architecture, not in translating faster: hreflang done properly, one language per version, and content localized where it actually matters.
Measuring whether AI recommends your university
What is not measured does not get fixed, and AI visibility does not show up in Analytics. We ask the models — ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude — the questions a prospective student would ask, in every language that matters to you, and we record whether you appear, which sources they cite you from, and who you are up against in that answer.
That tracking tells you the work is going well long before an enrolment does. It also shows what content is missing: when AI cites a third party to describe your own programme, that is a page you should own.
What we actually do for you
- Architecture for the degree, master's and course catalogue, with no pages competing against each other.
- Keyword research by country and language, with real volume per market.
- Programme pages that answer, and that AI can cite.
- Technical SEO for a large site: crawling, indexing, speed and migrations.
- Mention and citation tracking across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Claude.
- Supporting content written by people, specific to each market.
FAQ
- How long does SEO take to show results for a university?
- Technical and architecture changes show within weeks; new content takes months. It depends on the size of the site, the authority it already has and how competitive each programme is. On the first call we give you an order of magnitude based on your numbers, not a promise.
- Does this replace paid campaigns?
- No, it complements them. Organic and AI visibility reduce your dependence on bidding and bring the average acquisition cost down, but campaigns still have their place, especially around intake peaks.
- Does it work the same for degrees, master's and short courses?
- The method is the same, the priority is not. Master's programmes tend to have more specific, less contested searches, so they are often the way in. Degrees bring more volume and take longer.
- How do you handle a site that lives in several languages?
- With an international architecture: one version per language, reciprocal hreflang and content localized where the market asks for it. We cover it in full on the international SEO page.