Optimising SEO for global audiences: A guide for UK universities

Standing out to international students is critical for UK universities. A survey of 75 UK institutions by the British Universities’ International Liaison Association revealed that 9 out of 10 universities reported a decrease in international applications for the 2024/25 academic year due to various financial and geopolitical reasons.

This guide will provide actionable insights on how UK higher education institutions can optimise their SEO to attract and engage a global audience effectively.

Local SEO is essential for optimising your online presence to attract traffic from local searches. For instance, when someone searches for "dentist near me," effective local SEO strategies would focus on getting a practice listed on Google My Business and encouraging satisfied patients to leave positive reviews.

Global SEO requires a more comprehensive approach, considering different search engines, languages, and cultural contexts. By understanding and applying both strategies, you can expand your reach and connect with students locally and worldwide.

Not all international students use Google. In China, Baidu is the number one choice, while Yandex is the go-to in Russia. Understanding the search engine preferences in your target markets is crucial for effective SEO. Here's a breakdown of the leading search engines in global HE markets.

• Google: Dominates most key markets such as the USA, the Sub-Continent and Africa.
• Baidu: The most popular search engine in China, with over 75% market share. Baidu prioritises websites hosted within mainland China.
• Yandex: Often called the "Google of Russia," Yandex has a significant market share in Russia and other Eastern European countries. It places high importance on locally hosted websites and Russian language content.
• Naver: The top search engine in South Korea, with over 70% market share. It gives preference to locally hosted websites and Korean language content.
• Yahoo!: Popular in Japan, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. Yahoo! Japan is the most visited website in Japan.

Language and cultural norms can impact SEO dramatically, meaning keywords and content should be localised to naturally resonate with the target audience. For example, the terms "university" or "uni" may be used in the UK, while "college" is more common in the US. Promotion of your institutions packed "fresher week" in the UK might not resonate in India, where "orientation week" is the preferred term. Similarly, "scholarships" might be referred to as "bursaries" in some regions, reflecting local terminology and cultural nuances. If you get these subtle variations in language wrong, you could immediately put your content on the back foot.

Using a strategic, data-driven and measurable approach is a good idea if your institution wants to optimise content for specific countries or regions. Collaborate closely with your student recruitment team to analyse past enrolment data and use any market research findings to identify the regions most likely to yield prospective students. At Zengenti, we’ve partnered with higher education institutions to refine their strategies, often working alongside specialist agencies within these target markets to develop a tailored plan. We have found that these local specialists are key when attempting to target specific cities in certain countries. They can tell you where the best schools are and which regions and districts have a higher likelihood of producing students who will apply for specific courses at your institution.

Industry-standard tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, and Ahrefs should be used to conduct international keyword research. These tools help identify popular search terms in different regions.

As stated above, localising keywords is more than just translating them. It involves understanding local search intent and cultural nuances. For example, "university" might be preferred in the UK, while "college" is more common in the US.

Ahrefs is a useful tool for conducting international keyword research due to its extensive database and user-friendly interface. Here's a real life example of how you can use a tool like this to refine your keyword planning.

For this example, we're trying to boost clicks to a course page for a computer science degree and the target market is India. We've go three keyword terms in mind, but we want to see if those terms are what people are actually looking for and refine them if possible.

Using the Keywords explorer tool in Ahrefs, we can add in our terms and select India as the target country. The "seed" terms we're looking at are computer science degree uk, computing course and coding degree uk.

After entering your seed keywords, Ahrefs will provide a list of keyword suggestions along with valuable metrics such as search volume, keyword difficulty, and click-through rate. The tool will also show you the specific search terms people are using in relation to the "seed" terms we provided. In this case, our initial terms computer science degree uk, computing course and coding degree uk result in the parent topic of computer science in uk which is subtly different and using this in our content would most likely result in more high quality clicks.

Use the 'Site Explorer' feature to analyse competitor domains within your target market. By entering a competitor’s URL, you can explore the keywords they rank for, their search volumes, and how they’ve structured their content.

After following the previous steps you're ready to compile a refined list of keywords for your goal. It's a good idea to include a mix of broad, long-tail keywords and questions to maximise your results from search queries.

Hreflang tags are included in your page's HTML to indicate your content's language and regional targeting. For example, if you have an English version for the UK and a Spanish version for Spain, your hreflang tags might look like this:

These tags inform search engines which version of the page to serve based on the user's language and location.

Structure your URLs to reflect the language and region of your target audience. For example, use "/en-uk/" for English (UK) and "/zh-cn/" for Chinese (China). This helps search engines understand the content and improve its visibility in targeted regions.

Consider creating specific pages or even subdomains for localised versions of your website. This can help with targeting keywords and providing a better user experience for international visitors. For example, you could have a "uk.example.com" for your UK version and "in.example.com" for your India version. The University of Nottingham use this strategy when providing information on courses at their global campuses like this one in Malaysia.

With mobile usage becoming the dominant medium content in consumed, your website has to be mobile-friendly. A web optimisation tool like Insytful can give you a range of metrics to test your page's and content against to make sure you're not missing any opportunities.

Fast page load speeds might seem obvious, but this is a vital component in quality user experience and SEO.

• According to Google, as page load time increases from 1 second to 3 seconds, the probability of a user bouncing increases by 32%.
• At 5 seconds, the likelihood of bouncing increases by 90%.
• At 10 seconds, the probability of a bounce jumps to 123%.

Serving content via a CDN improves page load speeds in international markets by distributing content closer to the users through a network of servers located around the world. Get in touch if you would like to speak with us about a specific CDN package for your institution.

Building backlinks from trusted sites in your target markets can significantly boost your visibility and credibility when targeting international students. If local bloggers and news sites link to your content, it signals to search engines that your institution is a trusted and relevant choice for students looking to study in the UK.

Building these backlinks can be time consuming, but if you link this activity with working with a locally engaged student recruitment agent or team of native speaking writers, the net cost should be reduced.

Many of our university clients have a physical global presence through campuses in other countries and exchange programmes with other universities across the globe. For example, the University of Birmingham has a dedicated campus in Dubai, and the LSE offers study abroad options with many partner institutions. These connections naturally lead to relationships with educational bodies and groups in other regions, and these links need to be leveraged to generate backlinks.

There's no point in having a great strategy and spending hours creating useful content if you have no way of tracking your results. There are "free" tools you will most likely already have as part of your web setup, like Google Analytics, and other paid ones, like Ahrefs, that can help you keep track of progress.

• Google Analytics lets you monitor organic traffic by country and analyse user behaviour, helping you understand how well your content engages specific audiences.
• Google Search Console provides insights into which search queries drive traffic from different regions and helps you track your ranking performance by country.
• Ahrefs allows you to track global keyword rankings and backlinks, providing a "pro" level of understanding of your search visibility across various regions.

KPIs are important. Here are a few that we've found to make a difference.

• Organic traffic growth by region: Track how much of your site's traffic comes from each target country. For example, if you launched a localised version of your site for students in China, monitor the growth in traffic from Chinese search engines like Baidu.
• Conversion rates from targeted regions: It's not just about getting visitors to your site; it's about converting them. Set up your analytics to track conversion rates for specific regions. Examples of conversions could be form submissions for an online open day, course applications, or downloads of a digital prospectus.
• Engagement metrics: Engagement metrics like average session duration, bounce rate, and pages per session can provide insights into how well your content works with different audiences. For instance, if you find that visitors from Spain have a high bounce rate, consider optimising your content to be more relevant to that market or adjusting the language for better localisation.

SEMrush has a great guide on how to set up and monitor some of these KPIs.

At Zengenti, we've observed that many higher education institutions just don't have a comprehensive SEO strategy. While universities may have some elements of SEO in mind—such as optimising keywords or creating localised content—there is frequently a lack of an overarching strategy that ties all these efforts together. This can result in missed opportunities and a misallocation of valuable time in content creation activities.

An effective SEO strategy requires a holistic approach, aligning technical SEO, content creation, keyword research, and tracking to target local and international audiences. With a solid plan, institutions can avoid inconsistent messaging, increase search visibility in key markets, and maximise engagement from prospective students.

Get in touch if you would like to discuss your international SEO strategy or if you would like Insytful to scan your site for free.

Insytful

Google Keyword Planner

SEMrush

Ahrefs

Google PageSpeed Insights