Web Presence Optimization Toolkit

This two-part workbook presents a repeatable, manageable process for completing a gap analysis of a peer group’s websites. Use the tools to identify competitor institutions and programs and conduct the gap analysis.

The checklist below allows you and your staff to evaluate usability according to basic web design terms, enabling productive conversations with the web team.

You want to make sure that your page takes this shopping behavior into consideration with information about your program (and others). The examples in this tool span from quick-wins to complex so you can find a comparison tool that’s feasible.

This how-to guide offers three ways to collect useful information about the words, phrases, and key search terms used to research educational offerings, compare institutional programs, and navigate to your website.

The reading list in this tool serves as a starting point for understanding SEO and is also a reference library to consult when SEO algorithms (and therefore SEO strategies) shift and mature.

This tool offers five example e-mails, each of which presents a different type of enrichment content. The Forum believes recruitment officers can modify the messages below to highlight appropriate university news and industry-related content.

Follow these steps to identify the external entities, including blogs, social media groups, and professional organizations that are highly influential in the field you are selling an educational product.

This tool will walk through the process of developing productive relationships with four types of key influencer: bloggers, social media groups, discussion groups, and professional organizations.

This tool will both encourage faculty to contribute and improve the likelihood that those contributions are of high quality. First, it will outline contribution tiers that provide faculty with a spectrum of options and upfront estimates of the time commitment involved with each. The tool will then provide kick-starters, or contribution guidelines, that ensure consistency and quality for each type of contribution.

This tool includes templates for the following scenarios, with the aim of helping marketing staff gather content from the best possible contributors.

If asking subject matter experts to volunteer content for the website leaves you worried that you are not capturing all the material that is available, consider using Google Alerts to electronically track particularly prolific faculty members. The PAE Forum has compiled tips to help members craft more tailored Alerts that yield actionable information for meeting COE website development and other recruiting and branding objectives.

This tool offers guidelines for producing engaging video interviews and provides materials for you to distribute to the subjects of a video interview.

This tool will help you identify strategies for maximizing your presence on social media outlets and for matching content to the audiences associated with social channels.

There are three parts to this tool:

1. Questions and process that best-in-class marketing organizations use to identify prospects’ top tasks
2. A customizable list of the pieces of your website that need updating
3. A responsibility assignment table and advice for developing an ongoing update calendar

While some may invest in an in-depth marketing consulting engagement to identify the full range of attributes across prospective customer segments, others will find sufficient value in tailoring web content to a smaller set of generalizable student archetypes. This tool starts institutions on this work.

This tool reshapes how web content is displayed to increase the likelihood that relevant information and links are spotted by each student segment.

This tool contains a checklist of content that will better meets leads’ desires as they progress through the funnel. It also includes examples of effective communications at each stage in the funnel.

This tool introduces techniques and maps actions to key moments in the enrollment funnel.