3 best practices for your college website

In my conversations with our university partners, I often refer to the .edu as the “front door” of the institution. We know that students are often interacting with your institution first via your website—and making important first impressions about your school as they navigate your webpages. Nearly 90% of surveyed prospective undergrads said a well-designed website will improve their opinion of a school. And in a similar survey of graduate students and adult learners, 94% of respondents said they visited the websites of each school they are considering. Eighty-four percent of surveyed grad and adult learners said a poorly designed website will negatively impact their opinion of a school.

But many enrollment and marketing leaders have told me that their websites could do a better job at attracting prospects and converting them to enrollments. If your .edu has room for improvement, here are three things you can do now to maximize the enrollment impact of your website.

1. Prioritize answering key questions on enrollment-critical pages

Not all pages on your .edu are created equal. My team at EAB often classifies the most important webpages as those that are “enrollment-critical,” or the pages that students most rely on to determine whether they want to apply to your institution. Regardless of student or credential type, there are a few pages that are always enrollment-critical: the admissions, academics, financial aid, and student life pages. For the sake of brevity, let’s focus on admissions and financial aid:

Admissions: Prospective students come to your admissions page seeking answers to questions like: Can I get in? How do I apply? What are the deadlines, costs, and support materials needed? Because the application and admissions processes can be overwhelming for students and families, include both an email and phone number for your admissions counselors. Admissions pages are also common access points to your website, so include links to other enrollment-critical pages, such as your academics and financial aid pages. For graduate programs, the admissions page is a great place to highlight the caliber of your programs and faculty, and any relevant awards your programs have received.

Financial Aid: Paying for college continues to be the top concern for first-time, full-time undergrads and graduate students and adult learners—that’s why it’s essential that students can easily access, understand, and apply for financial aid on your website. Financial aid info can be especially overwhelming, so ensure the information is grouped intuitively with a clear call to action to the complete the FAFSA. The financial aid section should also include resources and opportunities to connect with your financial aid office—knowing there is a team of experts to help navigate paying for college is priceless.

2. Ensure you’re using SEO strategies properly

Search engine optimization (SEO) is one of the most important ways you can get your website in front of students and their families. SEO involves so much more than just incorporating keywords throughout your program pages. From the page URL to hidden fields (H-Tags! Alt text!), every page element can and should be optimized to meet the needs of users and the search engines crawling your site. I often recommend schools start with an SEO audit to identify opportunities to increase search engine visibility, drive organic traffic, improve competitive share of voice, and inform on-page content strategy.

Let’s focus on two key page elements when it comes to SEO: page titles and meta descriptions.

Page titles: Page titles tell users and search engines what your page is about and therefore have a big impact on search rankings and students clicking through. Page titles should accurately describe the page’s content, be distinct from other page titles on your site, and be no more than 60-70 characters in length (If your page title is too long or deemed less relevant, Google may only show a portion of the text in the search result). You also want to make sure that priority keywords are frontloaded in the page title to helping with search rankings.

Meta descriptions: Meta descriptions help search engines understand the content on your webpage, which helps lead users to click to your site Each page should have a unique description that uses active voice and incorporates target keywords or phrases. If you don’t add your own meta descriptions, Google will do it for you.

3 Essential SEO Practices for Graduate and Adult-Serving Programs

3. Double down on the right content

I’ve been helping university partners with their on-page content strategy for nearly a decade, and I can confidently say that the content on your website has never been more important. Today’s students are often “stealth,” meaning they are exploring your website and making enrollment decisions based on the content they find there, without ever raising their hand as a lead. And the content on your website is showing up across the internet, from ChatGPT responses to third-party college search sites.

For these reasons, it’s important that the content on your enrollment-critical pages is clear, concise, and reflects your school’s unique identity. Your pages should also flow naturally so that users can easily scan and navigate to the information that’s most important to them. Make sure your pages are designed to turn interest into action through experiential storytelling (via student testimonials, for example) and clear calls to action, like “apply today,” “request info,” or “find out more.” And finally, avoid website “bloat.”  When auditing university websites, I come across duplicative content, which can create a negative user experience and hurt search rankings.

A full website redesign can be expensive, time-consuming, and overwhelming for many teams. But a complete website overhaul is often not necessary. Following the recommendations above, with a careful eye towards your website content and search engine optimization tactics, can make a major impact on your website’s ability to generate enrollments.