When ChatGPT made its public debut in November 2022 there were a lot of concerns about how artificial intelligence tools may alter higher education: Would it change the way students learn? Would it cause a spike in academic dishonesty? How could instructors and learners alike harness its power rather than resist it?
There’s no question AI has reshaped education. At Everspring, we’re diving into its impact on prospective students, so you can better understand their decision-making process, meet them where they are, and optimize AI throughout their entire educational journey, from consideration through graduation.
Is Your SEO Strategy Stuck in 2020?
It’s no longer a question of if your audience is using AI, it’s a matter of what they’re using it for. Nearly half of Gen Z knowledge workers are using it as their go-to source of information¹, and 88 percent of them are using it for help with overwhelming tasks.² (Choosing a grad school? Yeah, that’s an overwhelming task.) The tools your prospects use to search have rapidly changed—and so have their searches. Chances are, your existing strategy hasn’t kept up.
Search engines once regurgitated results based on a series of disparate nouns and descriptors typed by a human. Now, AI is your first audience. Upon receiving a complex query, it aggregates information and tailors it to the specific search at hand, allowing prospects to identify schools and programs that match a sophisticated set of requirements.
In an instant, AI tools like Chat GPT, Claude, Gemini (formerly Bard), Google SGE, and more, can analyze program flexibility, admissions requirements, career outcomes, cost, and program delivery all while simultaneously comparing it to competitor criteria.
Think Conversations, Not Keywords
What does this mean for you? Your content needs to be optimized to give students what they’re looking for, with details and differentiators phrased in an AI-friendly way to make your program stand out. AI requires clear, structured data to make accurate recommendations. AI can only work with the information it has, and we’ve all seen what happens when it gets it wrong.
3 Key Strategies to Optimize for AI-Driven Search
Fortunately, just as we all had to learn to play the SEO game, there are ways to manipulate your content to ensure that AI tools pick up on what it needs to work effectively. We’ve broken it down into three key strategies:
- Restructure your content architecture. Use a schema markup to identify program attributes, requirements, and outcomes. Think of this as your cheat sheet to ensure that AI systems accurately understand and recommend your programs.
- Align your paid and organic search. Make sure your paid keywords work in concert with your organic content, not against one another. Focus your paid spend on high-intent queries where you’re not ranking organically.
- Optimize for conversational search. Learn to speak the language of AI and update your content to answer natural language questions. A comprehensive program comparison page that addresses complex FAQs can help enormously.
Embrace AI for Enrollment Growth
We know what we’re talking about, AI doesn’t—until we teach it. Just as AI evolves at warp speeds, we’re constantly learning, iterating, and sharing to help graduate programs like yours stand out in a crowded field.
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