SEO for Higher Ed Communicators: Marcel Digital Hosts Webinar for the University of Chicago

We recently had the pleasure of hosting a webinar for the University of Chicago titled “SEO for Higher Ed Communicators: Present and Future.” Led by our Director of SEO, Joe Stoffel, and CEO Ben Swartz, the session explored how content and marketing teams in higher education can take meaningful steps toward improving their search visibility - without needing a background in web development or SEO.

Helping Higher Ed Communicators Connect Through Search

Universities are producing world-class research and offering exceptional programs, but if no one can find that content online, the impact is limited. That’s where SEO comes in.

This webinar was designed specifically for communicators and content managers at higher education institutions - people managing everything from departmental pages to faculty bios and research spotlights. One goal was to demystify SEO and show how small, strategic changes can go a long way. However, even more importantly, we wanted to pull back the veil on AEO and help the university prepare their content and websites to be visible on large language models such as ChatGPT, Gemini, CoPilot, Perplexity, and more.

What We Covered

The 3 Pillars of SEO

We started with the basics:

• Technical: How fast, structured, and mobile-friendly is your site?
• Content: Is it relevant, useful, and optimized for the right keywords?
• Authority: Do other trusted sources link to it?

Technical SEO

You don’t need to be a developer to make a difference. We shared how communicators can tweak page titles, use alt text, improve internal linking, and lean on tools like Google Search Console to catch and fix SEO issues.

Content for Search

We walked through how to find the right keywords using tools like Semrush and Google Suggest, and showed how small tweaks to headlines can drastically improve performance in search.

Building Authority with Backlinks

The university already earns backlinks naturally, but we talked about ways to amplify that through outreach and strategic content promotion.

What AI Means for SEO and AEO

With AI-generated search results and answer engines like Google SGE reshaping how users access information, it's more important than ever to create content that’s clear, well-structured, and optimized for both traditional SEO and AEO. We explored how large language models (LLMs) are influencing search visibility and why leveraging schema markup is essential - not only to help AI understand your content, but also to future-proof it for direct answer delivery in AI-driven interfaces.

Quick Wins You Can Start Today

We closed it out with a simple checklist, like updating five key page titles, optimizing one piece of content, reviewing the mobile experience, and setting up tools if you haven’t already.

Why It Matters

For institutions like the University of Chicago, SEO isn’t just a nice-to-have - it’s a critical tool for making sure prospective students, researchers, and the public can easily find the information they’re looking for. When content is optimized and structured well, it doesn’t just rank better - it reaches the right people at the right time.

Want to Learn More?

If your team is interested in an SEO/AEO workshop, training session, or even learning more about our SEO services or AEO solutions - we’d love to connect.