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
-
Outbound links for SEO
A colleague of mine is arguing that having the right outbound links on your website is important for SEO. It seems to me that it would help Google and other SEs to categorize your site, but it wouldn't be a significant ranking factor in itself as anyone could do that. This is being used as an argument to keep links on our site linking to theirs. I've not done any experiments with it, however, and the site in question is ranking fairly well currently. I just don't think that's the main ranking factor as they have fairly good backlinks as well. Anyone have direct experience with this sort of argument? Thanks, Tom
Link Building | | TomBristol0 -
Blog commenting for SEO - Useful practice?
With most blog comments being no-follow, I was just wondering whether blog commenting for an SEO campaign these days was actually a worthwhile practice. Would love to get some insight on this.
Link Building | | Gavo0 -
How Many SEO Clients Do You Have?
Hello Mozzers, I'm wondering how many clients or SEO customers you all oversee? Do you execute on your own? Do you collaborate on every client or is one person responsible for their own. Thanks
Link Building | | TheOceanAgency1 -
Negative SEO
I have a client who is being spammed really bad with links. Using porn keywords and keyword with porn in anchor text with the site URL. Anyone had experience with this?
Link Building | | ToddFosterSEO0 -
PR directories good for seo?
Hi I would like to publish article with backlink to gambling related website in PR directories - page rank 3 and more. Each articles wil be unique -no duplicate. Is it googe for seo? Thanks.
Link Building | | centrum0 -
Links built by previous SEO company are mostly 'dead' - will this affect me?
Hi, This is my first post/question in the forum - so apologies if this topic has already been covered - or if the question seems daft! Here's the issue: I have started working on two websites, and have been doing a lot of on-site work, increasing valuable content, etc... I'm now slowly moving onto more off-site stuff and have noticed that a lot of the backlinks to both websites (built by SEO companies before I got here) are 'dead' and simply return 404 errors (yet they still show up in site explorer). I'll be honest, the links aren't great; the SEO companies have taken the word 'relevant' and completely re-defined it in their books! Will these links - from sites that aren't relevant... but are dead - have any impact on my SEO efforts from now on? Or should I treat these sites as a kind of 'clean slate' and work on building the brand naturally through social media and user experience, etc? Also - I'm re-structuring the internal pages of the site... would it be worth re-directing the old URLs (with all the dead in-bound links - that may have suffered a -50 penalty) to the new ones, or just start fresh with the new pages? Any advice, tips or stories to share (relevant ones, of course!) will be greatly appreciated! Thanks, Nick
Link Building | | Danapollo1 -
Should we fire our SEO Vendor?
Dear SeoMozers, We are working on ranking towards some hyper competitive keywords (each query has millions of searches a month) and working with an external SEO Vendor. We were not satisfied with the progress, therefore we asked them to send a revised SEO Plan. Here's what they proposed: 1. On Page Optimization (standard techniques) Off Page Optimization 1. Directory Submissions (100) 2. Article Marketing (Two unique 300 word articles to be submitted to 300 directories) 3. Press Release (Two Press Releases to 100 PR Sites) 4. Classified Ads Submissions 5. Business Listings 6. Link Reinforcement (Create wheel to circulate traffic) 7. Blog Submissions, Commenting, Forum Posting 8. Web 2.0 Link Building (Squidoo Lens, Hub Page, Link Wheel etc) 9. One Way Links (Not Specified how many) Our concern is that this sounds like low quality link building. We've given them 19 top keywords to achieve rankings for and will be paying $20-25K to achieve Top 3-5 rankings for the targeted terms. Do you think this strategy would work or should we change the SEO Vendor?
Link Building | | globaleyeglasses1 -
Blackhat SEO firm had more success than whitehat me
I’ve been link building for a small online store. Before I took over their SEO, they hired a company who got them lots of spammy links over a 12 month contract. The spammy links didn't seem to improve or hurt rankings on their main keywords but general search traffic has almost doubled. Now I’m doing whitehat SEO for them and getting links through emailing bloggers and giving them reasons to link to us. Over 2 months (amongst over things) I’ve obtained links from around 35 websites, mostly PR 3 – 4 with a few up to PR 7. On my own website, a couple of links like this would produce a noticeable effect in the rankings, but I can’t seem to budge the ranks for this website. I’m concerned that they might just want to go back to their old SEO firm for more spam links. Am I doing the right thing? Am I getting links quick enough and how can I argue the case for whitehat if they’re getting more noticeable results from blackhat?
Link Building | | davidtube0