CASE STUDY:
A Cluttered University Website
Introduction
Without students an educational facility cannot educate. And a core method for attracting students is a university's website. If a website isn't doing a great job it can make or break a program.
This university, which we are legally unable to name, needed help restructuring their website to create a clear and concise, but still inspiring, user experience, as well as more emphasis on search engine optimization.
Members of our team helped by providing:
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Strategic planning
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Content audit
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SEO optimization
The Success Metrics
The website saw big increases in user metrics after our SEO and UX updates were implemented, including a 34% increase in new users and an 18% increase in pageviews.
The Client
While we cannot name our client, they are an award winning college at a big 10 university. They had a lot of cooks in the kitchen and this project helped them reign that in and create a cohesive website strategy.
Strategic Planning
Before we made any changes, we began with strategic planning. This lays the foundation for all work and keeps it in line with the organization's brand and the organization's goals.
During strategic planning we:
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Completed a website audit to establish where the current website was from a technical standpoint. This uncovered issues with broken links, duplicate content, missing metadata, and slow page load times.
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Conducted stakeholder interviews with the university staff and current students to find out more about how people are using the website, how students and staff perceive the university and how these groups want to see the university portrayed and the website organized.
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Researched competitor schools with similar programs and target student demographics to establish the university's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.
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Developed user personas and user journeys to create content pillars and a content hierarchy that resonated with prospective students.
Content Audit
Next, we completed an audit of all the current content on the university's website. At the time of the audit, the website had thousands of pages, many of which had been added by random department members without direction or a strategy. The goal of the audit was to identify the content that was of value and the content that could be removed from the site.
To determine what was of value, we created a scale that would grade pages on their levels of past user traffic, on-page inspiration, engagement metrics, educational materials geared toward prospective students, uniqueness compared to other pages, and whether it contributed to the greater brand narrative.
SEO Optimization
Once the strategic planning was complete and the content audit was approved, our developers got to work making technical updates to the site. The university team helped refresh the design and delete unwanted content and update the content that was deemed valuable. The next step that we brought in for was SEO optimization.
For this, we went through all of the valuable pages and optimized these pages. This included:
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Identifying target keywords
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Updated content to target these keywords and to hit relevant Google best practices
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Optimized image sizes and alt text
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Optimized meta data
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Implemented an internal linking strategy to help enhance the user experience
The Outcome
Since the design and content updates were made to the university's website, they have had fantastic website performance results, including:
+34%
New Users
+30%
Sessions
+18%