Ideas, insights and inspirations.

Elliance, a higher education website design and SEO marketing agency, helps universities with redesign and SEO projects. Here is a glimpse of our recent work for UNC Charlotte which resulted in top rankings in North Carolina.

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There is an art and science to running a paid advertising campaign. With all online advertising platforms increasingly dependent on artificial intelligence and machine learning, gone are the days of manual adjustments and management.  As a digital marketing agency, we have adapted to the changes happening in the industry but the fundamentals of creating content that will resonate with our clients’ target audience remains the same.  Here are some best practices which we follow to run high performing, top converting paid media campaigns for all our clients: Creating Impactful Paid Landing Pages Each landing page that we create for a client is unique. Our purpose with each client’s landing page is to use distinct elements that showcase the individuality of the brand and highlight its best features. Along with using unique elements for each landing page, there are common features which consistently work well in attracting and engaging the right target audience. Here are some landing page elements which help … Continue reading

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving your website and creating fresh content to improve your website rankings on Google, Bing and other search engines. Search engine algorithms today use Artificial Intelligence (AI) to understand and interpret user queries and serve up search results. Google has introduced some famous algorithm updates like RankBrain, Bert and MUM which use AI principles to improve search functionality. With the introduction of ChatGPT, AI has gone mainstream and now everyone is talking about it. However, in the world of Search algorithms & SEO, AI has been playing a part for a much longer time. Here are some of the ways these AI principles are being used to serve up results that users are looking for: 1. Natural language processing (NLP) AI-powered NLP enables search engines to understand the context, intent, and semantics of search queries and website content. The Google Hummingbird update that launched in August 2013 represented a fundamental change in … Continue reading

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At Elliance, a Pittsburgh-based digital marketing agency, we create unique ad creative for paid campaigns for each of our higher education marketing clients. There are several factors that we take into consideration as we develop this ad creative. Keeping the client’s brand in mind, the target audience and the goal of the campaign helps us come up with a one-of-a-kind strategy for each client.  Here are some best practices that we follow to develop high-converting ad creative for every client campaign: Use authentic photography: As all paid marketing platforms have become more and more visual, using the right image is really important to creating the right ad.The use of client images of actual students helps us develop a more authentic look and feel for prospects. It gives a realistic feeling of being on-campus and brings out the individuality of the brand. Following are some examples of ad creative that we used for our higher education clients marketing campaigns:  Chatham University’s … Continue reading

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At Elliance, a Pittsburgh-based digital and paid marketing agency, we create unique landing pages for each of our higher education marketing clients as part of our paid digital campaigns. Along with distinctive elements for each landing page which give it an individual flavor, there are common features which consistently work very well in attracting and engaging prospective students. Here are some best practices that we follow when creating these higher education paid landing pages for our clients: Clear and Concise Argument Construction: The argument construction for each landing page depends on the client’s situation and target audience. We consider who we are trying to attract, such as undergraduate students, adult students, first generation students, or graduate students, etc. A one size fits all approach does not work.  Examples of landing pages from 3 of our clients which show how different audiences are addressed: Maker Culture at Capitol Technology University: The culture at Capitol Technology University is focused on providing a … Continue reading

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Featured Snippets are the highlighted results at the top of a Google Search Results page. Also known as position “zero”, they appear above the first organic result. Google displays these results when they determine that this format will help the user more easily discover what they’re looking for. Featured Snippets can show up as a list, a paragraph, a table and a video. At Elliance, a higher education SEO and digital marketing agency, we have been helping clients get top rankings for over 20 years. As we work to boost rankings for our higher education marketing clients, we aim our efforts to get strong featured snippet rankings for our clients. There have been some remarkable results that we’ve noticed in cases where we’ve achieved featured snippet rankings. Benefits of Ranking on Featured Snippet Results Higher clickthrough rates: Research shows that people click more on featured snippet results. According to Search Engine Watch featured snippets account for 35% of all clicks. FirstPageSage.com … Continue reading

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Whether we’re working on higher education website design projects or marketing campaigns for colleges and universities, SEO strategy is always central to our thinking. We always start by creating an SEO Keyword Lexicon that guides our content creation and optimization efforts. The Keyword Lexicon includes different types of keywords that a prospective student will use at different stages of their college search process. Here’s an infographic that illustrates the various stages in the search process and the type of keyword used at that stage. Awareness = Reputation Keywords: At the beginning of the college search process, people tend to use broader keywords looking to build awareness about possible options at that time. One way to start the search process is by using reputation keywords – using “top” and “best” keywords as you look for the most reputable solutions. For example, someone searching for MBA programs in Pennsylvania will start their search with keywords like ‘top MBA programs in Pennsylvania’, ‘MBA … Continue reading

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Recently Elliance worked with Highmark Insurance Group to launch their new website. As part of all our web design and development projects, whether for insurance or manufacturing companies or higher education institutions, one of the points of distinction that no one ever sees is the SEO work that gets baked into the structure and thinking of the website. Here are some ways SEO is essential to all our web projects: Sitemap optimization:  A sitemap is like a blueprint – it defines the structure of the website and provides a map of how the content will be laid out. When we start to think about a sitemap, we focus on the ways people will consume content on the website – how they will search for it and find it, and once they arrive, how they will interact with it. What’s important to note here is that visitors may not come in just through the homepage. Each page becomes a doorway that … Continue reading

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Facebook has been making a lot of changes to their news feed algorithm. In the past, there used to be a chronological listing of stories as they were shared by your network. However, as the membership on the social media network continued to grow (more than a billion members) and the content continued to explode, Facebook decided to make some changes. The goal, per Facebook, of News Feed is to “deliver the right content to the right people at the right time so they don’t miss the stories that are important to them.” To make this happen, Facebook currently considers thousands of factors to serve up stories from a publisher’s page in an individuals’ news feed. Some of these factors can be broken up into the following: Relevance factors Engagement factors Quality factors Profile factors Recency factors Relevance Factors: Is your audience interested in that topic? Has your audience engaged with that topic in the past? Have they hidden any content related … Continue reading

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Are you still debating whether blogging and content creation is beneficial for your business/higher education institution or not? Here are four reasons why blogging matters for inbound marketing strategy: Higher exposure and more ranking opportunities: Google algorithm updates in recent years have made fresh content on a website a crucial ranking signal. As a result, blogging on a regular basis allows us to add fresh content on a website. This results in better rankings which leads to higher traffic to the website. Also, as each page added to the website or blog is indexed by search engines, each blog post provides an opportunity to rank in search engine results. This provides more opportunities to get found by visitors on search engines. Content relevance = authority: The more content a website has on a specific topic the more authoritative they are deemed by search engines. Thus resulting in higher rankings for searches related to that topic. In order to build this … Continue reading

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