Before parents and students set foot on your campus for a tour, you can bet they’re searching for reviews of your college online. You may have an archive of wonderful case studies, interviews or testimonials from recent grads and current students on your website, but do you know what the sad truth is? Parents and students don’t always trust them!

After surfing admissions site after admissions site and flipping through countless viewbooks, most of the marketing messages from each college begin to sound the same. So what are students and parents doing? They’re hitting up Google to find college reviews from each school on their list.

What can you do as a higher ed marketing professional? Here are 4 steps for building a strategy around reviews of your college on other sites:

1. Do the research first. Search for college reviews on popular college search sites to see what people are saying about your school. You might even want to check your school’s Google Places page by seeing what external review sites are automatically being aggregated.

2. Sync up with your alumni office. If your admissions and marketing departments don’t communicate with your alumni office, you’re missing out on tons of excellent collaborative opportunities. Suggest that in your next alumni newsletter you include a recommendation and a link to leave a school review on one of the third-party sites you’ve discovered.

3. Don’t be shy! Write a review yourself when you can. In some cases you don’t necessarily have to be a student or an alum to write a school review. For instance, StudentAdvisor accepts reviews from school faculty and staff members in addition to students and grads.

4. Seeing stale reviews? Make it a yearly effort. A lot can change at a college in just a few years. If you notice that there haven’t been any new reviews of your college on third-party sites in over a year or so, it’s time to encourage your community to write some fresh ones.

Just like scouring restaurant reviews to find out if the new restaurant in town is any good — your prospective students are yearning for that coveted inside scoop. So be aware and prepare a strategy for your campus.

Learn more about monitoring (and encouraging) reviews. Read “College Reviews on Third-Party Sites: Are You Paying Attention?”

Read more about our authors.  Sam Coren is the Content Manager for StudentAdvisor.com, a Washington Post education site for college reviews and free resources on all things college.