Abstract:

The profound changes in the higher education global environment had a significant impact over Romanian universities and so, internationalization gained a lot of importance on the political agenda as one of the strategic goals included in the 2014-2020 overall higher education strategy.

In this context, the article aims to analyze the internationalization process from a marketing perspective, by investigating the use of website communication by Romanian public universities in order to promote their educational offer and to increase the number of inbound international students.

The research methodology involved an in-depth analysis of 49 public universities’ online strategies, by embedding their websites accessibility, design and interactivity, organization of content, SEO (Search Engine Optimization) results, as well as their specific content strategy in presenting their educational offer based on a list of specific terms considered relevant by prospective students in search of study abroad programs.

In the next stage of the study, the results were further analyzed against the ones obtained from applying the same evaluation on the websites of the top 10 universities ranked in the Webometrics Ranking of World Universities, in order to obtain a comparative image.