Higher Ed SEO Benchmarks 2024

Establishing SEO Benchmarks for Higher Education

How do you know if your website is truly performing well? What does “good” organic traffic look like for a university or college? Using raw data collected from over 200 higher-ed websites, this report provides essential benchmarks for evaluating organic traffic, setting realistic search engine optimization (SEO) goals, and implementing the right strategies to drive results.

Higher Ed SEO Benchmarks 2024
Home Home / Higher Ed SEO Benchmarks 2024

Evaluating organic traffic performance and identifying organic KPIs has always been a challenge in higher education. The Higher Ed SEO Benchmarks 2024 report changes that, offering data-backed insights to help colleges and universities better evaluate and enhance the effectiveness of their SEO efforts.

Carnegie collected data from Google Search Console and Google Analytics 4 across higher education domains, analyzing it to identify traffic trends and insights at a granular level, specific to the higher education sector.

Here are just a few of the key data insights found in this year’s report:

  • Non-branded keywords garner many more impressions (87.09%) compared to branded keywords (12.91%).
  • Between July 2023 and June 2024, organic search brought in the most traffic to the higher ed websites in our dataset—generating 46% of total users—followed by direct traffic, paid search, and referral traffic.
  • Organic search traffic makes up an average of 53% of the engaged sessions across higher ed websites. These users boast the highest engagement rate at an average of 61%.

Download the Higher Ed SEO Benchmarks 2024 report now and start driving more organic traffic today!

Download the report.