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Online Programs Making Waves with Traditional Universities

PMG Blogger — Wed, 20 Apr 2011 18:13:09 +0000

USNews reported today that online universities might just be the “the rock that disturbs the placid waters of American higher education.” As top traditional universities like the University of Southern California continue to adopt online programs, it seems like pioneers like University of Phoenix and Kaplan University might have sparked a revolution in education.

With so much technology at our finger tips, I am surprised it has taken this long for other schools to adopt the model. We have video conferencing, collaboration software and smartphones that make it absurdly easy to take education outside of classrooms.

The flexibility afforded to students by online courses is appealing to a wide cross section of prospective students–not the least of which are those who have day jobs. More and more people are likely to pursue higher education as the recession continues, so institutions of all shapes and sizes should make it easy for people to do so. Online courses serve as a scalable model to make education accessible to the masses. Of course quality will vary, but the same can be said of traditional universities and colleges.

A New Year Brings New Regulations for the For-Profit Education Industry

PMG Blogger — Mon, 31 Jan 2011 18:14:46 +0000

Enrollment marketing campaigns will be under a microscope this year. With pending regulation and increased expectations, lead quality will be of the utmost importance. To ensure lead quality, your school’s brand must be a top priority. How your school is represented has always been a reflection on your school, but once the federal guidelines are in place, you will be responsible for any misrepresentations.

With this in mind, it is important that your enrollment programs consider how branding affects your entire marketing mix. Maintaining a consistent, strategic voice will amplify your marketing efforts and increase your enrollment success.

To make sure you are up to date on the new regulations, here are a few resources to peruse.

The Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities Files Suit against US Dept. of Education to Stop Unlawful Regulations, APSCU
Education Department to Delay Issuing ‘Gainful Employment’ Rules Opposed by For-Profit Schools, The Chronicle
GAO Bias Evident in Report on For-Profit College Industry, The Congress Blog
For-Profit Colleges Oppose Tighter Regulations in the U.S., The New York Times

PMG Whitepaper: The Merits of Remarketing

PMG Blogger — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 05:49:35 +0000

GearyPMG has just released another whitepaper that investigates the merits of remarketing for lead generators. Here is a brief synopsis of the whitepaper:

On average 3-4 percent of leads who complete a form convert into business. It is easy to spend marketing resources and budgets to inch this conversion rate up, but there is another option. What about the other 96-97 percent of users who complete a form but do not convert right away?

This portion of inbound leads takes the step to complete a form, but in most cases, marketers disregard this segment when they do not convert after the first contact. There is a lot of potential business from people who fill out these forms.

If marketers have remarketing technology and methodology in place, they can maintain a relationship and turn it into future business.

Download a complimentary copy of the whitepaper here.

Top 10 Google Updates of 2010

PMG Blogger — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 18:46:11 +0000

Google releases upwards of 300 updates a year, but 2010, seemed to keep marketers on their toes more than usual. There were several updates that had dramatic impacts on SEO and paid search marketing. The following is a list of our top 10 Google updates for the year. If you missed any of these, you might be moving a little slower than your competition in 2011.

December 2009–Introduction of real time search results
With this update, Google included live news in search results from sources like Twitter and FriendFeed; this also included the addition of news headlines and blog posts.

February 2010–Searches refined by location
This is the first update of the year that addressed localization. In addition to Google tailoring results based on a searcher’s query location, users could select specific cities for additional local refinement capabilities.

March 2010–Addition of public data into SERPs and microdata inclusion
Google started displaying microdata in results if rich snippets were used on a webpage. Using specifications in HTML5, this update enabled marketers to include information—like reviews and profiles—on their websites, so Google could use it when rendering SERPs.

April 2010–Announcement that site speed impacts rankings
Google noted that speed does not trump relevancy in its ranking algorithm, but this announcement showed how much it emphasizes sites that are built to render quickly.

May 2010–Long tail algorithm change aka “Mayday update”
Google explained this update as “an algorithmic change…looking for higher quality sites to surface for long tail queries.” With this change, pages that were keyword-optimized or matched to specific long tail keyword searches generally lost rankings if pages are not deemed “high quality.”

May 2010–Approval of the reasonable surfer patent
In May, Google was granted a patent that “stated that all links on a page do not have to carry (or pass) the same weight” (Search Engine Land). This event reinforced the value of high quality links that indicate the value of a page to Google’s algorithm. It also verified suspicions that link placement was an algorithmic factor and that contextually-irrelevant links are devalued.

June 2010–Caffeine update
Google Caffeine was a new indexing system that provided faster results, so newly published content appeared sooner in SERPs. With this change, Google signaled that they had significant changes planned, which came to fruition with Google Instant and Places (Google).

September 2010–Google Instant
Google Instant added a predictive element to Google’s search results and displayed approximately 7 or 8 results pages per query. The-search-as-you-go update made waves as it simultaneously multiplied the amount of results per query and guided searchers to content based on predictive analysis.

October 2010–Google Places
Google Places integrated “Places listings” with organic listings and moved the traditional Google Local map to the right column of search results. This meant that there was even less SEO real estate to work with as Places results displaced organic listings (Search Engine Land).

October 2010–Google Boost
Showing a preference for local listings, the Google Boost update allowed businesses to pay for an advantage in Google Places listings. Boost afforded marketers the chance to pay for emphasized local listings that display below traditional paid search results. This allowed additional opportunities for marketers to buy rankings and potentially force other relevant results down the page, requiring SEOs to pay more attention to optimizing for localized search results and optimizing the keywords that do not serve local search results.