CASE STUDY:
Decluttering a Higher Education Website
OVERVIEW
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.
Working with their existing website, our team was able to help improve this university's user experience and rankings in search engines by providing fresh strategic planning, a full content and SEO audit, and content and SEO optimization.
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 page views.
THE CLIENT AND THEIR CHALLENGE
This university, which we are legally unable to name, 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.
The challenge they needed help with was restructuring their website to create a clear and concise, but still inspiring, user experience, as well as more emphasis on search engine optimization.
Prior to seeking help the website was being used for all of the colleges needs, from prospecting, to getting information to current students, to a resource for staff members. While in theory this sounds good, the broad use case muddled the user experience and made it very difficult for everyone to find what they were looking for. Moreover, search engines were not sure what the website was communicating. As a result, the college's search rankings suffered.
THE SOLUTIONS
Strategic planning.
Strategic planning lays the foundation for all work and keeps it in line with the organization's brand and the organization's goals.
Before we made any changes, we began with strategic planning. Our strategic planning process included the following.
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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.
Our content audits are designed to determine how much current content a website has, the value of the content, what content to keep, and often, what content is missing.
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.
SEO optimization helps ensure businesses and organizations rank for search queries that are relevant to their prospects and compete effectively against their competitors.
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 RESULTS
Since the UX design, content updates and SEO optimizations were made to the university's website, they have had fantastic website performance results, including:
+34% new website users
+30% website visits
+18% pages viewed
CONCLUSION
Even though we are often told the more content you have the better, this is only true if the content fits your brand narrative, is relevant to the type of users you want to attract and does not create a confusing user experience.
By organizing their content, following a new strategy and optimizing for SEO, this university was able to create a more fluid website that now helps their users find the information they are looking for efficiently and one that has greatly increased in ranking position for relevant search engine queries.