Welcome to Halda Insights, our newsletter full of in-house research, marketing & admissions strategies, and AI nuggets. As always, our own research is in bold. Enjoy!

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Issue Preview:

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-Top reasons high schoolers don't go to college

-When to prep your website for lead generation (Right now!)

-Students land on higher ed websites...but do they come back?

-AI SEO: Optimizing your website content for AI interpretation

-A fun AI video tool for international student recruitment

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Why Don't High Schoolers Choose College? (They're Burnt Out)

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Top 3 reasons high schoolers don't continue directly to college...*

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"I need a break" (43%)

"I'm concerned about the costs of enrolling and need to save." (40%)

"I'm getting a job" (36%)

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If you’re tired after a rough run-up to Fall ‘24, you’re in good company. So, apparently, are the students.

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We know that student interest is slipping, that confidence in higher education has never been lower, that this seems a terribly expensive world in which to take on student debt. Yet, despite all these factors, the number one reason high schoolers don't move forward is they ‘need a break’.

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Whether they’ll find that serenity in the workforce is a conversation for later.

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The focus for today is how colleges can make school feel more approachable. First-gen students, especially, find the college experience daunting. It’s stressful and lonely being the first, and they don’t have the generational experience to guide them through that process. Answering their difficult questions as early as possible can get them into the enrollment funnel faster and make them feel more confident in their path.

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Also, college is supposed to be a challenge, but it’s supposed to be fun. Prominently display more authentic content about student life to remind today’s prospects that college involves a lot more than all-nighters and double-majoring. And for more undergrad recruitment insights like these, check out our full report with RNL!

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*Students could choose up to 3 reasons

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Access the full undergrad report here.

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Lead Gen Season is Here for Higher Ed

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Working with 150+ higher ed schools, we get superior data on when students are researching and converting on higher ed websites. Here's a little bit of what we've learned...

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• A significant number of students are inquiring year-round
• High-value prospects are inquiring later than ever
• There are predictable periods before each semester start where lead generation for that cohort is highest

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Here's the full blog if you want to check it out.

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The fact is, it's always a good time to be optimizing your website for lead generation, but our data indicates that lead gen spikes in August and then rises steadily until an April peak. That means the best time to optimize your website for capturing your web traffic is right now.

To start the conversation about how best to do that (we routinely boost inquiry generation by 3x-5x), book a chat with us!

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Gone in 60 Seconds (off your website)

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87% of prospects to a higher education website make one visit and never come back.

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For the second year in a row, our data from across over 150 higher ed websites indicates that your first impression is usually your only impression. Nearly 9 out of 10 students never come back after that first visit. And the average duration of those visits? 60 seconds.

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You have 60 seconds to make a meaningful connection. Students like to think they’re the conductors of a long and reasoned consideration process. They are not. They are prisoners of the moment, and if you don’t take advantage of that moment with gusto, then you usually lose them forever.

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So don’t ease them in. Throw your best content, your most important information, and your most compelling storytelling into those first 60 seconds.

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Our suggestion? Make your website more social, with personalized recommendations and interactions along with video content that speaks directly to them. If students don’t feel like the experience was made with them in mind, it’s a signal that they don’t belong at your school.

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Welcome to AI SEO

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At Halda, we’ve developed an AI-powered tool called Conversational Search that draws on your website content to organically answer questions posed on the website. For this to work, the AI has to be properly trained to find the right content and prioritize it effectively.

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Training Conversational Search reveals content gaps and inconsistencies that keep the AI from delivering correct answers, so the training process looks like a content audit. We score your website's performance and give suggestions to improve it. We call this tool–you guessed it–AI SEO.

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SEO is dead…long-live SEO. The new standard for SEO isn’t to kill it, it’s to make your content accessible for AI to read, interpret, and link to. Now that Gemini lives at the top of Google SERPs, people are consuming AI content before they ever scroll down (if they make it that far). AI SEO doesn’t just inform Conversational Search, it also measures Google’s ability to pull the correct answers into these search engine responses.

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That way you know what information your organic traffic is getting, no matter which AI-powered engine is delivering it. To meet with us about getting your own AI SEO helper, meet with Jon Grover, our VP of Product and pioneer of this innovation.

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Talk to join!

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Recruiting International Students? Hello, Accurate Lip Synching

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This new AI tool from ElevenLabs is absolute fire.

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It takes your videos and allows you to translate them to another language, with your voice and movements synced to to that new language. It's scalable personalization with global appeal.

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And it's especially useful considering that 53% of high schoolers expect personalized videos from admissions during the recruitment process. We thought it might be fun for you to tinker with as you creatively deliver personalization to your prospects.

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Thanks for checking in with Halda Insights! We hope you'll stay tuned for more data and AI nuggets!