From Traffic to Trust: Why Obsessing Over Conversion Is a Higher Ed Marketing Content Failure

Refining Your Content Strategy to Build Trust

While working in content marketing at a previous company, I once had an executive tell me, “Nici, there’s no value to the work you do.” She wasn’t being mean or confrontational; she just didn’t understand the value of content. She saw few direct conversions from content articles and decided, “This isn’t bringing in revenue.” 

Even though my team and I were driving over a million incremental visits to the websites each year, she didn’t see the value because we weren’t getting tons of direct conversions.

Content marketing efforts in higher education are more than conversion tactics. Obsessing over directly attributable leads from articles, infographics, videos, and student profiles isn’t a winning strategy; focusing on creating meaningful, informative content is.

Building Trust to Generate Leads

Even if we take the approach of “leads above all else,” we still need a foundation of trust. Prospective students are more savvy than ever after years of exposure to digital marketing and artificial intelligence (AI). They’re unlikely to fill out a lead form if they don’t trust the information in front of them. If they feel something is overly salesy and they’re early in the funnel, they won’t fill out your form.

This is also where the marketing funnel comes in. Content is great for full-funnel marketing. Will every article read or video viewed turn into a lead? No. But for early funnel users, you’ve planted the seed. They’ve now seen your brand when perhaps they wouldn’t have without that early funnel content. They now know you have a degree that’s relevant to them, even if they’re not ready to start an application right away.

Trust-building content is largely what falls into Google’s E-E-A-T framework for search: experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. For institutions of higher education, this type of content includes faculty profiles, alumni testimonials, student experience pieces, and faculty research and publications.

Similarly, Google has now begun talking about commodity versus noncommodity content. This doesn’t veer away from E-E-A-T, but rather supports it. Noncommodity content is the stories that are unique to your institution. Lily Ray, an SEO expert, describes this content as something that can’t be automated or easily created by AI. These are your institution’s stories, your brand; they’re what make you trustworthy and reliable to both people and AI.

Quality Content Means LLM Citations

Prospective students might not even land on your content — it’s not just that they don’t read it, but that they don’t see it on your website at all. Why? Large language models (LLMs). Prospective students are relying more and more on content delivered to them through LLMs like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and Perplexity instead of clicking through to websites. An UPCEA report notes that more than half of prospective students use AI-powered search tools on a daily or weekly basis, including to research programs and institutions. This is one of the many reasons why you need to publish trust-building content. Confused yet?

Prospective students might not see your institution’s content on your website, but they might see it in the LLM’s response to their questions (these are called LLM citations). Simply put, LLMs need content to create their answers. 

LLMs pull information from the web using much of the groundwork laid by search engines. As Britney Muller, AI consultant, notes: “Search engines do the crawling, indexing, and retrieval. LLMs lean on them heavily to surface real-time info (because on their own, they can’t).”

So even in the LLM-first era, high-quality, authoritative content is essential. Google directly confirms this: “The underpinnings of what Google has long advised carries across to these new experiences [AI Overviews and AI Mode]. Focus on your visitors and provide them with unique, satisfying content.”

For LLMs, quality content also means fresh content. Various reports, including one from Ahrefs, note that LLMs prefer to reference more recently published or updated content. If you have a great piece of content from a year ago, but it’s not being cited, try refreshing it. Consider adding a faculty or student quote if it doesn’t already have one. 

Better Quality Leads From Content

As noted earlier, trust-building content is valuable for both humans and AI. Content focused on building trust and positioning the organization as an authoritative source and expert helps that organization show up in traditional search and LLM conversations. This, in turn, can help drive higher-quality leads. Students who are informed and engaged with your highest-value content, even if only through an LLM initially, will become better leads later. 

A trend we’re seeing is lower website traffic overall, but steady lead volume and improved lead-to-application rates. Content can help stabilize traffic while also driving LLM citations and higher-quality leads. 

Get Started With Quality Content

If you aren’t already building this type of content for your program or school, now’s the time! Use your school’s unique stories to shape LLM responses and drive better qualified leads. Be patient and know that you might not see immediate results, but keep sharing your story and brand, so you aren’t left out of the conversations happening in these spaces. 

If you need support, Archer Education is happy to help. We build full-funnel content for dozens of universities and colleges. We’d love to help you, too, because this work definitely does have value.