Webinar Rewind: Rethinking Student Search

In a recent webinar, Liaison’s enrollment marketing leaders—Vice President of Sales Hayley Wolf, Senior Director of Digital Strategy Jess Lanning, and Associate Vice President of Enrollment Marketing Mollie Ballaro—explained how student search has fundamentally changed and what institutions must do to keep pace.

During The New Search Strategy: Finding Students and Being Found, which you can now watch on demand, the conversation focused on six core areas: lead sources, the limits of traditional recruitment, the evolution of outbound marketing, the rise of inbound and SEO, the power of an integrated strategy, and real-world results from campus partners.

The session began with a live poll asking attendees: What source is your biggest driver of student leads?

The results were decisive: About half of respondents said their website is their primary driver of leads, with list purchases and paid advertising trailing behind.

As Wolf noted, “If 50% of your leads are coming through your website, it probably means it's time to start thinking differently. We can't just rely on that student raising their hand and getting to you organically.”

This insight framed the rest of the discussion: If the websites are doing the heaviest lifting, institutions must get much more intentional about how students find them and how they’re guided once they arrive.

Ballaro underscored that traditional, list-driven recruitment is no longer enough. Several headwinds are reshaping the market:

• Demographic shifts and “birth dearth” | Modest declines in high school graduates in many regions, with only a handful of states experiencing real growth.
• Heightened competition | More institutions, more modalities (online, certificates, workforce pathways), and more sophisticated marketing.
• List erosion | Shrinking and lower-quality purchased name lists as students opt out of data sharing and regulations tighten.
• Evolving student expectations | Students expect personalized, authentic, and immediate communication, not generic mass emails.

“Students no longer want generic outreach,” Ballaro explained. “They want institutions to understand who they are, what they care about, and, of course, what outcomes they're looking for.”

The takeaway? Recruitment must now be relationship-based and experience-driven, not transactional.

Outbound efforts, especially list-based search initiatives, are still necessary, but they must be smarter and more precise.

Lanning described how modern outbound strategy leans on:

• Predictive analytics to identify which behaviors correlate with enrollment and to prioritize the right prospects.
• AI-driven modeling to determine messaging, cadence, and send times based on real data, not guesswork.
• Behavior-based segmentation to move beyond simple merge fields into truly variable experiences.
• Optimization across channels to use data from email, ads, and site behavior in aggregate rather than in silos.

Instead of simply buying more names and sending more email, she stressed a mindset shift: “The crux of outbound is to do better as opposed to more.”

In other words, precision over volume is becoming the defining characteristic of effective outbound search.

If outbound is “searching for students,” inbound is about being found when students are searching for you.

The primary components of inbound include:

• SEO (Search Engine Optimization) to improve visibility in non-paid search results so that program and degree pages rank when students search on Google and other engines.
• GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) to position the institution so it appears and is referenced correctly in AI-generated answers from tools like ChatGPT.
• Paid search and paid social to capture demand and support organic efforts with targeted ads.
• Programmatic and other digital media to ensure visibility where prospective students already spend time online.

Lanning noted that what used to be called “stealth apps”–applicants who never appeared as inquiries—are often just the product of strong organic and search traffic, not mystery behavior. The work now is to understand, grow, and better convert that inbound audience.

Ballaro cited the example of a client who saw AI-driven traffic grow from roughly 60 to 100 monthly visits to about 150, with ChatGPT serving as a meaningful referral source. Engagement times also increased, from 12 to 42 seconds. The school’s AI visibility score improved as well.

A core message of the webinar was that inbound and outbound cannot live in separate silos.

When outbound acts alone:

• It struggles to deliver true one-to-one experiences.
• It runs into increasing friction from spam filters and opt-in rules.

When inbound acts alone:

• It can miss earlier-stage prospects who aren’t yet actively searching.
• It risks leaving gaps where competitors use direct outreach, mail, or counselor-driven contact.

The solution is an integrated strategy in which:

• Outbound insights (who responds to which messages, when, and how) inform inbound content and targeting.
• Inbound behavior data (search terms, page paths, referral sources) feeds back into list strategy, segmentation, and messaging.
• First-party data is reused everywhere possible (audience building, retargeting, modeling).

Done well, an integrated approach ensures students both discover the institution and are proactively nurtured through the funnel.

To ground the strategy in real outcomes, Ballaro shared several case studies, including those focused on:

SEO & GEO Growth

• One Liaison client averaged 43% year-over-year increases in organic traffic to top degree program pages.
• They saw their highest month of organic traffic ever, followed by year-over-year organic growth in every month of the calendar year.
• Organic users who reached the application page increased by nearly 18%, and engagement rates rose by over 18%.

Full Digital Services & Paid Media

• Another institution produced nearly 1,000 paid social leads over 24 months.
• In just eight months, digital leads and form submissions converted to 15.4% applications, contributing to enrollment gains for both freshmen and transfer cohorts.

Together, aligned inbound and outbound strategies deliver more qualified leads, higher engagement, more applications, and ultimately stronger enrollment results. As a result, the future of enrollment success is not an either–or choice between outbound search and inbound discovery. Institutions that win will be those that reach students and are found by them at the right moments, with relevant, personalized, and well-coordinated experiences from first touch through enrollment.

To hear to the entire conversation, watch The New Search Strategy: Finding Students and Being Found.