AI's Impact on Search and Higher Ed

Speaker 1  0:00  
Picture this: a digital experience so personal, prospective students feel like they're already on your campus. That's what StudentBridge delivers, helping you attract, engage and enroll students like never before. Get started at studentbridge.com, and start filling seats.

Speaker 2  0:18  
You're listening to filling seats. The state of enrollment marketing in Higher ed, hosted by StudentBridge. In this podcast, you'll learn what's working to grow, shape and sustain enrollment at colleges and universities directly from fellow enrollment marketers, thought leaders and Ed Tech innovators.

Host  0:37  
Hi. I'm Jonathan Clues, CEO and founder here at StudentBridge would like to welcome you to today's episode of Filling Seats, Episode 51 and with us today, we've got our great guest, Paula French. She's the Director of a firm at Search Influence. It's a higher education digital marketing agency. Thanks for joining us today, Paula,

Paula French  0:57  
Thank you, Jonathan, thanks for having me.

Host  1:00  
Now. As you can see, I'm not calling from the studio today. We're doing this video recording and podcast from my home, because we're having an incremental weather weather. You're down in New Orleans, and you've had the first snow in a long time as well.

Paula French  1:12  
Yep, it sure is. It's by far the most snow we've ever had in this area, my whole entire life. And it's really the first snow we've had for more than just like, a teeny tiny bit in 15 years. So it's a super exciting day for everybody. 

Host  1:27  
We are going to make this podcast fast and informative, so you can get out there and do some snow angels and make some snow men. Um, thank you very much. Tell us about yourself, please, Paul. Um, tell us a bit about Search Influence and your background, especially as it relates to higher ed please,

Paula French  1:41  
You bet. So I'm the Director at Search Influence. We're a search engine optimization focused digital marketing agency, so that's what makes this a little different than other digital marketing agencies that you'll talk to. And in my role, I help universities find the right blend of SEO and digital marketing to drive enrollment. So some of the wonderful clients that we have the pleasure of helping or helped in the past include Tulane School of Professional Advancement, Tufts University College and NC State's continuing and Lifelong Education Division. A little bit more about Search Influence. We are a 20 year old digital agency, and we were really founded with a deep focus on search engine optimization, and that really remains the core of the value that we deliver today for our clients.

Host  2:30  
Our topic today is the AI's AI's impact on search and higher ed. Let's just dive right in. Tell us the importance just to look forget AI, just for now. Let's just go back to dinosaurs. Tell us a little bit about the importance of SEO as part of a marketing strategy, and just how it's changed over the years. Because I've seen the firm's been around 20 years. I think you've been there 15, so you've got a long, long experienced background in that. Tell us a little bit about it, please.

Paula French  2:55  
Yeah. So you know, we've been doing SEO since it was essentially starting to replace Yellow Pages and Yellow Pages websites, which is just crazy. It used to be so much easier than it is today. It's a lot, lot more challenging and a lot harder. As Google has said, so many algorithm updates over the years. But you know, through all of those algorithm updates, there is there are things that have remained the same, which is offering a great experience to people who come to your website and giving them the information that they're looking for. And those two things are really the foundation of any great marketing strategy. And so when you do these things as as part of SEO, you're using good data, good information that we can get from our tools to know what people actually want to read about, what are the things that they're searching for, and then you can answer that information on your website. And then when they come to your site, no matter where they come from, from search, from email, from advertising, from traditional ads, you're giving them the information, ultimately, that they're looking for that's going to help them convert or not convert

Host  4:02  
got it makes a lot of sense. 20 years ago, Google's kind of around of Yahoo search, AOL search. I mean, there's been an evolution of search for a very long time, right?

Paula French  4:12  
Yeah, for sure, yeah. And our work has always been pretty focused on Google. But there, there are all these nuances that have come up over the years. You know, we're testing out this thing or testing out that thing, but luckily Google, you know, I'll say luckily, Google has been the core of so much over the years, and other search engines tend to kind of follow in the footsteps of what Google does. So like, even though we're focused on optimizing for Google, Bing results would follow did when you were making optimizations that would help you on Google and so forth and so on and so even with the new AI generated search results, even if it's you know, if it's an AI engine or a chat bot like chatGPT, there's some similarities in what's happening, and there's some similarities in the brands that they trust and similarities and the types of information that they show and where they're getting the words that they ultimately put on your computer screen? 

Host  5:08  
Yes, absolutely. Institutions, universities, colleges, have big stories to tell, big sites that can be indexed, a lot of changing, dynamic content, but let's talk about an audience, the students. How are they interacting with search engines today? Has that changed?

Paula French  5:27  
So what we see in the data now is that 70% of learners are starting their search on search engines. And so this is there's not great data yet about students specifically and their search behavior. We have seen some data, however, that says that about 30% of people prefer to do a search on social media over search engines, and we're seeing about 33% of people, so a third of people are also searching on AI. That doesn't mean that they prefer AI searches over search engines, but just that they are also using it, and the trust is growing. Yeah, yeah, totally. And, and they are different, you know, search search engines, what you go there to search for is different than what you're going to go to chatGPT for, but the you know, the more people get used to searching in that kind of environment, and the more AI is just like, pushed in front of you and all of these platforms, like it's getting pushed on you in Tiktok, it's getting pushed on you in Instagram search from metas, AI, it's getting pushed on you in Google because it's showing up at the top of the search results. The more people are going to the more people get used to seeing these results, the more they trust it, the more they're going to seek out the information to be fed to them in that way, which is going to make it more likely, you know, and more of a necessity that universities need to adopt to that way of searching. 

Host  6:56  
Now, it's interesting that we talk about Google being the de facto search engines. So it became a verb, right? You Googled this, heading on to Google this chatGPT clearly being the, probably the brand leader for AI and like for consumer based AI then. But of course you go, you got co pilot being forced onto all our computers right now. You've got Gemini through Google. You've got everyone using different things. So like you say, they're just it's just becoming more mainstream as everyone has an AI something, even my phone, actually, my Android phone, did an update last week where now if I click a message, it says, John may help me write this message. It's built into my into my mail on Gmail, so can't turn a corner without some kind of AI assistant doing something. 

Paula French  7:45  
Yep, that's for sure. I mean, it really is everywhere. And, you know, two of the hot things that we're talking about this year a lot with our clients are AI search and social search. And there, there's really, actually a lot of crossover between the two of those things, like I was saying before, with the, you know, it really getting pushed into the user's experience when they're on these apps. 

Host  8:04  
And of course, one of the one of the things we talk about is continual changing of user experience, user behavior. So how are you seeing AI changing the and specifically, maybe students. I mean, the search is a long period that they're looking for different things, especially during the recruitment I mean, their college selection process, we call student recruitment, the same thing, different side of the fence. But how are they kind of embracing and using it? Are they looking for what courses they looking for the kind of schools they should go to? Are they asking, hey, the kind of person I am, what kind of school suits me? Is AI there yet? How do you feel the huge experience is changing? 

Paula French  8:42  
I think that it is changing, obviously. And my belief is that for some of these big purchases, the more traditional avenues, like Google, are still incredibly important, because you, let's say, with a university, for example, it may there may or may not be a parent involved, right? Continuing Education, maybe not so much a parent. But that is going to be a different demographic than somebody going straight from undergrad. But I think that with for big purchase decisions, search and social, you know, with some AI in there are still really the core to that. And there's going to be a different search happening, or a different, you know, different information consumed at different stages of the funnel. And so you really have to be present in all of the places for all of the things. And you might have somebody older still searching on Google. You have to be present there you have somebody younger searching on Tiktok or searching on Instagram, and so your same content that you have on your site needs to be present there as well. And think that's what was really, what was really an aha moment for me was really thinking through like, Why? Why? Do these younger generations prefer searching on Tiktok and Instagram compared to Google, and understanding that they're seeing genuine opinions from individuals, or, you know, you at least hope that they're genuine opinions, but more likely to be genuine opinions, whereas they're used to seeing a lot of like big brands ranking on search results, and you're getting, you know, top 10. That's top 10 that. And the younger generations understand that a lot of that information is driven by PR companies. It's driven by advertisers. It's driven by the people who pay the most money to be on those lists. And so when they go to social media, they can get those, those genuine opinions, which I think is just like, really, just a huge thing for for millennials as well as Gen Z. 

Host  10:47  
I'll ask questions. They're gonna sound opinionated, but I genuinely mean them as as not insinuated an opinion, more like inquiry, search on social. You've already mentioned. It's a large purchase, large emotional purchases, hundreds of 1000s of dollars, buying decisions for that, in my opinion, I'm not seeing the data showing those buying decisions happening on social at all. They are very much. So you've got to have you got so I follow the Dagmar philosophy of marketing, awareness, comprehension, conviction and action, comprehensions moving from social to EDU, that's, that's, that still some comprehensions, that understanding, what about and that's, that's the that's the peer, that's the peer voice versus the brand voice, authentic. We both can be authentic in one way or another. Um searches, typically hashtag driven on social? Are people typing in longer formats? I mean, is it hashtag college life? I mean, how are people searching on social?

Paula French  11:49  
They're going to search on social in the same way that they have on Google. So they're going to search more, either long, like longer question based things, or they're going to search like a more commercial sort of keyword, like best project management certificates, best online such and such, and so it's really, really interesting to go and do the searches for those kinds of keywords that you would typically care about on on search engines, and look to see what's coming up on social media. Because that is, I think, the that's kind of the difference is the fact that those kinds of searches are are moving there, or are also happening there. You know, they might do the search in both places to really see the kind of information that they're getting served up. Or you have, you know, decision influencer doing a search in one place versus the decision maker doing a search in another, and you bring up a really great point about getting like user generated content, or, you know, from influencers or from other students who are posting about their experiences, versus the school. And I think what we see less of is possibly the school thinking about their social media as they think about their website. So giving them, you know, giving learners video content that tells them the same things you would tell them on a program page, and so that's a really great opportunity, is to say, like, Okay, if I was going to tell you all about this course or all about this program on my website, how can I reformat that content into a great, engaging video that I'm posting on social media, and then I'm really meeting my students, where they are and where they want to engage in, the kind of content they want to engage with.

Host  13:30  
So good. All right, so my opinion wasn't out of date. It was a it was a viewpoint. I've been involved in the web for 25 years. I've enjoyed being a web communicator and measuring behavior and observing behavior and looking at the data, obviously, like great tools out there to help you understand search referral behavior on searches like Google. Are those tools all available to you in social media? Do they have to use their own ones? I mean, obviously current issues with TikTok in the USA? I mean, are they do? They do? They freely give you the data for their user base,

Paula French  14:05  
not it depends on what you're really thinking of, I mean, in terms of, like, the demographics who are engaging with your content and all of that that's available. What is interesting is to look and see in Google Analytics, you can see how many people are actually coming back to your website. But that isn't, it isn't really the end all be all, because the fact, if they're, if you're engaging with them on social media, and they're not actually coming to your website, that can still be or is really still a great thing, because they're going to have, you know, they're creating that connection with you. This is a little bit off of this, the social mark, but I think it's worth mentioning back on the AI on AI, is that there are ways to see the traffic that you're getting from Ai AI bots and AI search engines in Google Analytics. But it's not it doesn't automatically happen. There are some things you have to set up to look at that information in a separate. Way, and so I expect we'll be doing a blog post or something about that soon. But that's not, it's not something like I said, Yeah, exactly got

Host  15:09  
it. So let's talk about some implications life. There's always, I love the saying that that all new text, great until every marketer gets hold of it and they ruin it, because you have a little market advantage for a while, then everyone's doing it, and then you've got to do you've got first movers that can take advantage, then everyone's just keeping up with the Joneses. Like, how do we keep up? So what are the implications for higher ed institutions here? 

Paula French  15:32  
Yeah, so those who really relied on search engine traffic prior need to evaluate how this is impacting their traffic and their organic inquiries. So like, Are there leads from search engines down? They are likely already losing visits to their site from Google search as a result of this change. And so what I do people to really understand is it's not they're not the only one. So if they're looking at their organic search traffic year over year, and it's down. That's true across universities, and that's true across industries as well. And we, you know, we're, we're seeing it, and so we hope that people will see the value in being present for these, you know, zero click searches, where you're just present in the AI overview, and they're not actually clicking to your website, because it in order to be there in in AI overview, you have to already rank, rank well on Google anyway. And so SEO is necessary to get into those results. You have to understand how Google thinks to the best you can. You have to understand how Google grades websites in order to be present in there. And so if you're not doing any SEO at all, you're really not gonna you know, you're not capitalizing on this trend, and you're not taking the steps to you know, as I've said before, meet your learner where they are and you know where they're engaged, where they're consuming content in a new and different way.

Speaker 1  16:54  
Your next great student is one personalized video experience away StudentBridge helps schools create meaningful digital moments that convert curiosity into action. Schedule your consultation at studentbridge.com and start filling seats.

Host  17:09  
Let's back up on then. So you brought up something I want to double down on. So you have to be ranked well to come up in those chat AI generated kind of language responses, right? They're longer. They cite many they've got little links where they cite the piece from. Does that if you, if I use it as a search, you sit now in the old days, you then have a click to your website and track that traffic, referral from search AI now just gives you a good little kind of Roundup, and that user goes on their merry way. Do Is there any tools right now to say that you've appeared in that AI search or

Paula French  17:54  
Okay, so there are, there are keyword ranking tracker tools, okay, there are multiple out there that can tell you if there's an AI overview present, I believe that, and if it's not there yet, it will be to show whether or not you were included in that AI result and shown as a as a source to get the numbers right, the numbers of how often you appeared Google Search Console, if it doesn't tell you that yet, it probably will soon to let you know, like, what impressions you're getting, I would focus. I think I would, where I would really focus is getting into the top five results for the keywords that you really care about, and then whether an AI overview shows or not, you're going to be in a better position to either get the traffic or at least get the impression from the person who's just, you know, reading that result. 

Host  18:51  
Got it. So we're talking about, you know, what, organic through rage. We talk about how that AI is definitely affected. You're saying, expect to drop a significant maybe drop with AIO views true?

Paula French  19:03  
yes, yes, that's accurate. So when an AI overview is present, the click through rates on organic search results drop significantly. So a seer interactive study indicated that when and when there was no AI overview present, the click through rate for organic listings, if you will, was about 3% just below 3% when an AI overview is present, that click through rate decreases to about point eight, 4% so organic listings were getting 3% of the clicks, now they're getting point eight, 4% of the clicks. That's a pretty, pretty big drop off. Not all searches show an AI overview, though. So informational searches, like longer searches, longer tail searches, question based searches, trying to find general information, those are more likely to show an AI overview, whereas commercial results, so like this is. Information might be like, Why pursue an MBA, whereas the commercial search would be something more like, best online, best online MBAs, those are less likely to show a result. If you went and did it today, you may did that search, you may see an AI overview, because Google is continuing to change this. But though that is a nuance there that think it's really important for everyone to understand.

Host  20:23  
I guess Google's gonna be worried, in one way, they could cannibalize their own business in one I mean, you know, just that, they had to keep up the AI race. How's this paid search? What's happening on there? I mean, at some point there's a real estate issue. If everyone's fighting for top billing, you've got, you know, we're used to seeing sponsored sponsors at the top, then some organic, maybe some sponsors down the side, but AI just takes up what? Where's where's paid going?

Paula French  20:49  
Well, Google's never going to let paid, you know, lose their real estate, and because that is where you know, the majority of Google's revenue comes from. And so paid search is still incredibly valuable. And if not, I mean, I would hate to say it even possibly more valuable than it ever has been because of the fact that you can, I mean, as always, you can control the searches that you come up for, but Google is going to always make sure that those paid results are prominent, and they have to also be setting their advertisers. They're climbing their clients. Advertisers are client or Google's clients, and Google wants to, to some extent, make those advertisers happy, and so if people don't continue to get business from paid search, they're not going to keep running on it, and then Google's not going to make their money. 

Host  21:37  
That's right. All right. Let's move on to the keywords triggering AI overviews. Are you seeing a pattern here? Is that data coming through? What? Where's, where's the keywords that we can actually look at using?

Paula French  21:49  
Yeah. So this is, you know what I was saying before, about, like, informational versus those commercial based searches. There's, there really is a big difference there. And so when, when somebody's searching for a question, there's more likely to be an AI overview, and so those are the places where universities are going to lose some of the traffic that they're used to getting. So your blog posts are not going to quite maybe get as much traffic or longer form things like that, whereas your program pages and your degree pages, the types of keywords that those pages will rank for, those keywords are less likely to show an AI overview, which means your traffic is more likely to be maintained. And so you would essentially want to double down on your optimizations for those commercial driven pages and commercial driven searches so that you can earn more traffic instead of, you know, losing your traffic in that area.

Host  22:44  
Understood, understood. So. So any key thoughts as you're like advising higher ed clients of how to index? I mean, you're talking SEO inside the page. To get a good organic ranking. Are they able to change any of those keywords?

Paula French  23:02  
I wouldn't say this necessarly. Well, it depends on how you're looking at it, you because the way we've always talked about keywords is you want to be thinking, you know, top middle and bottom of the funnel. There are different ways that people are searching, like I was just talking about, and we've always encouraged our clients that you need a mix of that, and you want to show up at the top, middle and bottom of the funnel. Well, you might think, Okay, well, if I'm less likely to rank or less likely to get traffic from an informational search, then why would I want to show up there? Well, you still need to have that content on your site, because that content reinforces the fact that you do get to show up for those commercial driven searches, so you don't get to stop doing blog posts. And you ultimately, I mean, when somebody does come to your site through a commercial driven search, those blog posts can help convert them. And so they are super duper, you know, more valuable still, even. And, you know, I think when you're when you're talking about keyword research and keyword focus, you do need to understand the keywords that people are searching for your products and services, your degrees and programs, but when it comes to topics for like, for your blog posts, you really want to be thinking about keywords every cycle that your content planning and so you are doing keyword Research pretty continually so that you can be capturing, on capturing trends, and assuring that you are so that your content matches the way that people are searching today.

Host  24:30  
Right, so,  what does this mean to higher ed you're saying optimize for, for AI, first search engine result pages. I mean, that's, that's a that's something that's not going to go away, right? AI is going to get more and more. 

Paula French  24:43  
The other advice would be to write your content in a way that makes it really easy for Google to pull it into that AI overview. So it's it's simple language, natural language processing, NLP, and so you need to be thinking about the waythat you would just conversationally be speaking about this information. Whereas a lot of website content is written very formally, it's long, it's not direct. It needs to be much more clear, much simpler than the way that most people are writing their website content. And so if you can write your information in more clear, you know, broken down bits of content that the that the AI models can pull out, that makes it easier. And in addition to that, writing in a Q and A format, that also makes it a lot easier for the for the AI searches to be pulled out of there as well.

Host  25:34  
yeah, to return an exact like an answer to a similar question, do is AI a good way to help write code for AI. I mean, obviously, you know, we talk about how AI's helped. Does AI recognize the kind of style it likes to search?

Paula French  25:54  
I can't speak to that per se. I mean, we do leverage some AI tools to help direct some SEO content, but it's more about helping us capture all of the semantic differences in the way that people are searching, and that has been a really, really helpful tool for us as a way to really broaden that keyword research, like I was talking about before, so that you're not so focused specifically on one keyword and You're thinking about the universe of way, ways that people might be searching, which is just going to get more and more and more and more spread out, with people using AI search and voice search, because they're all searching about things, you know, just in a different way, using different words.

Host  26:36  
We've all watched the movies from the future. I mean, the Jackson flying cars, 10 years ago by now, there's going to be a time when we don't have search engines there, where we just ask and say, Hey, give me that and and Nancy or Barbara or Frank that the AI your AI companion comes up with something with this might be 5, 10, 15 years away, but how do how to fire let's start wrapping this up for our listeners and viewers. How do I give you some top three ways higher ed institutions need to adapt to now?

Paula French  27:12  
Number one is, I think everyone needs to pay more attention to search engine optimization. You know, we did a study a couple of years ago that showed that only 50% of schools actually have an SEO strategy. So if they haven't been paying attention to SEO, this is really the time to start paying attention, because of the fact that there has been such a shift in people's search behavior. And if the sooner you can start producing content in the way that the large language, large language models can process it, the more likely you're going to be able to show up in all of these places that people are now searching. The second would be to start thinking about SEO when you're creating your social media content, so reproducing content that you have on your site for social media. And the third would be to, you know, continue to keep an eye out on the trends and don't be afraid to try things. I think that sometimes they universities might look for more like proven models to follow, but this is a really great time to be testing and doing different things and see what it can get you.

Host  28:22  
Voice Search, Alexa, Amazon kind of just audio device in the house. Never seem to really take off for this kind of thing. Been around for a while. I actually get quite frustrated with my Alexa, good mom, my English accent, maybe, but, but how you've seen Voice Search coming along. Just write, reading web pages, doing the same thing. 

Paula French  28:47  
So,  yeah, I think that people are more likely to do a voice search when they're looking for this kind of information on their phone, as opposed to through their home devices. And so what we see with Voice Search is that people use longer search phrases, which is very similar to the way that people are searching when they're go to chatGPT, they're using longer search phrases. They're asking questions or using more more natural speech. And so everything that everybody's done up until this point in their SEO, thinking about voice search, thinking about this kind of thing, is perfect. It's really, really a perfect foundation for chatgpt and perplexity, et cetera, et cetera. 

Host  29:30  
So what does the future hold? What next?

Paula French  29:35  
What next? Probably more searches on social and more people trusting those AI search results, and then people are going to just get more and more used to them. So it's really going to be interesting to see what happens to website traffic from Google searches over time, and the way that people are thinking about their metric. Metrics for marketing. I mean this really, if, if we're, if everybody's getting used to people just, you know, engaging with you and not coming to your website, what does that mean for the marketing metrics that you're used to tracking? You know, you're reporting to your president, you're reporting to your dean. All of these certain these metrics are the last five years saying these are the most important things, and now they're being so so impacted and so disrupted. What story are you going to be telling next? And so I think a really big thing for the future is resetting our KPIs and thinking about what marketing success looks like differently into the future. And ultimately, of course, it's getting students in the door, but that's not everybody knows how to measure that. And so if you can figure out how to measure that full funnel, that will make a really big difference, and ultimately, you'll be able to show your impact as a marketer much more easily when you show that. Okay, well, perhaps our traffic is down, but our inquiries are up, our students are up. Look at this program that we piloted this different approach with, and we're actually seeing an increase in students, despite the fact that we got less traffic to the site for its, you know, set of pages. 

Host  31:10  
Yeah, it's coming a different way. Well, thanks very much, Paula, obviously, AI, I mean, we could say is changing the game. I think it's been here for a while. The game's changed, some of it already, of course, with no no one wants to be blockbuster, you need to embrace the change or risk falling behind. We just right institutions that can adapt quickly, which is a challenge for institutions will stay ahead. We don't keep that. We need to keep the conversation going about, hey, I how AI can be a catalyst for growth. I think that again, don't be scared of it. Work away to benefit from it, leverage it. It's not going away. We had quite a good discussion on it today with the team. Paula, thank you for your time. I think it's been a great half hour. I'd love you to get out there and send us some snow pictures. Enjoy the time with your family. For everyone else, thank you for tuning in today or listening and watching for more great content, please visit www.studentbridge.com where we've got a lot of podcasts and webinars and other resources. And of course, we're completely in touch with Paula if you get a hold of us for that as well. So until then, until the next episode. Thank you very much, and be safe. 

Paula French  32:17  
Thanks, Jonathan. Have a great day. Thanks.

Speaker 1  32:19  
This is the Filling Seats, podcast hosted by StudentBridge, where we help enrollment teams achieve more by fusing authentic storytelling with industry leading technology and personalized digital experiences to connect with this episode's guests. Check out the show notes. If you enjoyed the episode, leave a rating and review and don't forget to subscribe. For more information about StudentBridge and this podcast, go to studentbridge.com forward, slash podcasts.