Creating A Scholarship For SEO
-
My client is a Law Firm just outside of Tampa, and I am trying to get her keyword phrase: "Tampa Car Accident Attorney" in the top 3. One of the strategies I want to use is to create a scholarship for "Tampa Area Students and how a car accident impacted their life" or "Tampa Area Students and how they think they can decrease car accidents." (that's still be worked on). Once the scholarship is created, I want to put it on our Tampa Car Accident Attorney page, and get other companies to link to that page.
My question is what links should we go after? Because that will tailor it to who we give the scholarship to. We could give it to a University of South Florida student, and get one .edu link. We could do the same thing for the University of Tampa, or Stetson Law School, but we'd only be getting one link from each of them.
If we set it up for high schoolers, we can get more links from the community and schools, but I'm not sure high school .edu links matter all that much. Is 10 high school .edu links as important as 1 college .edu link? I don't know. If anyone has had an experience with this or any insights, I'd greatly appreciate it.
Thanks!
-
lol.... Something like that might get fantastic action if it is on one of the big newspaper sites.
-
I'm surprised as well.
I was thinking that creating PR release about how "I can't give away $25K" might get the fire started.
-
TheDude: Thanks for sharing this information. Sorry that this has not worked as expected.
I am surprised that the spectacular prize has not produced a spectacular impact. Really puzzling when free money isn't like throwing gasoline on a fire.
Good luck.
-
EGOL, I had the same mindset when creating our scholarship program (see: http://www.jwsuretybonds.com/scholarship/). I figured the $25,000 prize and allowing anyone going to an accredited U.S. school would take care of it self.
We still decided to play it safe and have an internal resource reach out to universities and scholarship sites to get the seed started. We started this in the beginning of the year and here is what we've found...
- Sometimes a spectacular prize is something perceive as too good to be true. This goes for the universities and students alike.
- Universities WILL link to you, but you need to search out the ones that do.
- Universities are AWFUL at letting their students know about scholarship resources. If you want a lot of entries, it appears www.fastweb.com is by far the best resource. We now get about 1,000 hits a day from FastWeb (just got listed 2 weeks ago) and are only now beginning to see entries pick up.
I'd like to do this every year, but in order to justify it we need more qualified entries and **a lot more buzz. **
In our experience, the spectacular prize did not care of things like you and I presumed. Our internal resource is still working hard to spread the word.
-
You can get links from many colleges and universities, but the process is time consuming. Make sure that you (or your client) is administering the scholarship, and not another organization. Most schools will have an "External Awards" page and you can get links. Typically the administrators in the Financial Services/Awards are the ones who can get results, but I have found that they need to be approached individually, and the content of the emails tailored to them and their school.
Additionally, if your award is geared toward a certain segment of the student population, look at faculty or department sites as well as clubs or organizations for awards pages or blogs as well.
-
Most universities are going to list the scholarship on a page of their website that contains information about the scholarship and other related scholarships. They might say that the scholarship is funded by a specific company but if you think that you are getting a link out of it that is being presumptuous. They are probably NOT going to link to you. Look at their scholarship pages. My bet is they are NOT linking out.
So, if you want the scholarship to get big buzz it better be a really big prize and your website needs to be the exclusive source of the full details about who is qualified to receive it, how to apply, and if it is awarded on the basis of competition or merit, how the winner of the scholarship will be determined.
How much should the prize be? Before I answer, I will say that you should be in this for helping people more than for SEO. I'd start at $5,000 or more. With a new prize awarded each year. You can get a bit buzz with a scholarship of that size. You will get zero buzz with a $500 scholarship.
-
I haven't done it yet, because I still don't know how best to approach it. Here are the options that I know of in my area (Tampa, Florida). If I go through one of the universities in the area, they will setup the scholarship for us free. So, there's no time, money or effort expended other than stroking a check. However, they only want the scholarship to go to one of their students (makes sense). So we will only get one link out of that, even if it is an .edu link.
On the other hand, if we do it for say "aspiring women professionals," then we can get market it to all the various women's clubs in the area, youth groups, churches, etc. So before we pull the trigger, I am trying to decide is it better to get 1 .edu link or a bunch of other links. I was hoping someone had some experience or studies on this I could look at, but so far I have not got anything conclusive.
-
Awesome post! I'm also thinking of launching a scholarship program for business management and marketing students. Not sure how to approach colleges and universities. Were you able to get any .EDU links from yours?
-
It sounds like you are prepared to spend a ton of money on engineering and promotion. I would instead put all of that money into making the prize a spectacular amount. Not $500, not $5000... but spectacular. The promotion will take care of itself. Consider opening the contest to a very broad geographic area - line the northern hemisphere. Get permission to publish the essays. Now you have what you need.
Substance will defeat SEO.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
So many spam links that I haven't created are reflected in my domain
Around 500+ spam links got reflected in my domain. I actually haven't created them. Also, the links are not opening. These links affected my spam score. How can I remove them and reduce my spam score?
Link Building | | OrangeDigital160 -
Do links like this really help for SEO?
I was doing research with Moz's Link Explorer and one of our competitors had almost 50 links coming from sites like this. Mostly nofollow but we all know that today the nofollow can still help. My question is this: Will links like these help in any shape or matter. The reason I am asking is because Link Explorer is finding them, so I am sure Google will find them as well. Examples of sites: http://www.microlinkinc.com, http://www.cmolink.com The sites that I found via analyzing had DA 35-40 I don't want to share all urls but you get the point. Basically these sites are free keyword analyzing sites, once you put in a keyword they will bring up to 20 sites that rank for that keyword. And my research suggests that these pages stay and are crawl-able since Moz has crawled them. For example Moz says: date first seen 09/12/2018 so almost 6 months has passed but that result that was searched I am assuming has stayed. Would it make sense to search on such sites keywords that you know you are ranking for and then your site would be listed below and stay there for Google to crawl and another nofollow link in our link basket. Is my thinking correct or is it waste of time. Frankly it would take 2sec to run a search for each keyword. Any feedback and thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Davit
Link Building | | Davit19850 -
What are the SEO implications of high quality backlinks from US-based websites to UK-based websites?
Hi everyone, quick question I hope someone could help me with: We're representing a client based in the UK. As part of their overall strategy we've been linkbuilding. At the moment, about 80/90% of the links we've gained come from UK-based sites, with 10/20% coming from US-based websites. The US based websites are very good (think New York Times and genuine, relevant blogs with good readerships). An external search analyst/consultant has contacted the client to say that the US links will be harming the site, because the links are from websites in the US and not the UK. We believe that if 80/90% of the links were from the US this could indeed cause harm as it could indicate to search engines that our client is in the US when it's not (which might compromise their chance of ranking in .co.uk versions of search engines) however because it's only 10/20%, and because the linking sites are very good, we believe that they will getting all of the benefits of the positive metrics without any meaningful negatives. We just wanted to get a few opinions on this to see if people think that we're mistaken, and would be glad to hear any opinions contrary to our own.
Link Building | | GoUp0 -
If create backlinks on perticular Keyword then its benifitial for keywords ranking improvement?
Created many backlinks on a different- different particular keywords so, i want to know that keywords ranking improve this type of activites or not?
Link Building | | surabhi60 -
How to safeguard against negative SEO for new sites?
Hi Mozers!! I have a question. The ugly tools for blog commenting etc are still out there, my question is what if your competitor notices you that you are new to the business and they start building 20,000+ backlinks to your new site, and they too with one exact match anchor text that you are targeting. I know we can disavow tool, but I guess that would be too late? What are your thoughts? What will be the solution the above case scenario?
Link Building | | TheSEOGuy10 -
Content toggle, tabs ad accordion for seo text
Hello there, I have two questions. 1. I want to ad seo text in content toggles, tabs and accordions. does Google robots view as seo text , eg, H1 text as it would be written direct on the page? 2. About Pinguin and link building. I am seeing up an onlineprintshop, where any industry can become a client. Lets say a medical company will be our client for prints. If they link back to our onlineprint page does Goole evaluates the link as a link from a related industry. Thanks for your kind answer. Kind Regards Mike 8bMCt
Link Building | | niceguyseo0 -
Will online PR with optimized anchor-text hurt my SEO efforts?
With Google's recent phishing expedition and increased focus on natural link profiles etc where does this leave PR distribution with optimized anchor-text? Using the pai for PR distribution services has always been a great way to build backlinks but I just wonder whether these will be considered over-optimised in future?
Link Building | | jamesq0 -
How to focus SEO efforts on a single country?
I hope this one isn't too obvious a question to ask, as I'm sure it's been asked before. However - I'm considering a new site which would be focussed entirely on a UK market. US and other world traffic would be effectively useless. Using social media and standard linkbuilding techniques, how do I focus my efforts on the UK market? Getting links from .co.uk, I guess - what else? Or is it just "SEO generally and some of it'll be for the UK"?
Link Building | | Cairmen0