I was recently talking to my friend, Wassan (@aljamiat on twitter).  Wassan helps colleges recruit international students, specifically from Middle Eastern countries.  As we sipped our coffees and discussed various social media techniques and strategies, our conversation turned to SEO and how it relates to international recruiting.

I was amazed at a very simple piece of information that Wassan shared with me, both because of its simplicity and because of its profound impact for a college seeking to recruit students from non-English speaking countries.  Call it the non-English SEO effect.

Say for example Miami University is actively trying to recruit students from countries where Arabic is the native language.  If you go to to Google and type in “Miami University” you will get 21,700,000 results.  Most of this content will be sports related and the vast majority of it will be people with no connection to the University talking about any thing at all.  The NOISE level with a search like this is extremely high.

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If however, a FULL FARE paying student from say, UAE or Saudi Arabia happens to Google search for Miami University in Arabic…you get only 161 results!  This is 0.0007% of the volume of search results vs. the English Search.

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The logic is simple… In the USA, “Miami University” is common conversation.  In the Middle East, clearly it is not.

APPLICATION:

If you are serious about recruiting students in non-English speaking countries, you may want to spruce up your International web pages with native language text.  From a social media perspective, how about Facebook fan pages in different languages?  Perhaps Blogs or Tweets as well…  The SEO results could be amazing!!

(Special thanks to Wassan with Al-Jamiat Magazine)

Related posts:

1. Turning Your Staff into Blog Celebrities
2. Student Blogs in Higher Education. To Blog or not to Blog…
3. Starting a Social Media Campaign

Al-Jamiat International Language recruiting Strategy