Do You Have a Higher Education Website Optimization Strategy?

This white paper was created for enrollment leaders to use with the primary owners of the school’s website. Engage with the web-based version by continuing to scroll, or download the PDF here.

Our interactive white paper includes three core sections for you to explore in the suggested order below:

1. Benefits and challenges of an enrollment-optimized college website
2. Self-tests to evaluate your site features and performance
3. Metrics and industry benchmarks to measure your site’s success

On the left, you can navigate to the various sections on this page. When you are ready, move on to the self-tests and the additional performance standards by advancing to the next section through the links at the bottom of this page.

A tool for fostering partnership

Even though college websites play a crucial role in attracting and converting prospective students, they are rarely under the enrollment team’s direct control, typically being owned by a school’s marketing and communications division.

This resource was designed to help enrollment leaders collaborate more effectively with marketing leaders, with an eye to ensuring that the school’s website is doing all it can to support student recruitment while also serving the larger strategic and marketing goals of the institution.

Why the .edu matters for enrollment

Self-service search

One of the most consequential current trends in recruitment marketing is college-bound students’ growing reliance on self-service information channels for learning about schools. From third-party college-ranking websites to student influencers on social networks, the rapidly evolving digital-media landscape is presenting students with an ever-expanding range of information sources for colleges and universities they’re considering.

Growing centrality of the .edu

Successful recruitment marketing depends on effective engagement of students through the self-service information channels they increasingly favor.

A clear first order of business in this regard is the school’s website. There is no information source that students rely on more when researching potential schools. And few other aspects of your interactions with them do more to shape their impressions of you—for better or worse, depending on how compelling an online experience you are providing for them.

“It seriously makes me not want to apply when a school doesn’t care enough about something that is a main source of information for most applicants.”

Sample student comment from Reddit

Why getting the .edu right is so hard

Higher ed’s particular challenge

There are good reasons why so many college websites underperform. In fact, if any industry could be forgiven for lagging on advances in website design, a strong argument could be made for higher education topping the list.

Complexity squared

The main reason for this underperformance is the extraordinary complexity of colleges and universities.

All schools comprise several distinct and equally important communities—faculty, nonacademic staff, current students, prospective students, etc.—each with its own particular needs.

When you layer on top of this the inherent complexity of websites, which consist of many interdependent parts and rely on many different individuals for their smooth functioning, the overall picture quickly becomes daunting. Further complicating matters is the high-stakes nature of website development; decisions made during the planning and design phase can lock in the defining features of a website for years.

Barriers to higher education website optimization strategy

Close coordination between marketing and enrollment is key

An imperative to act

Given the complexity of the typical .edu, there’s not much enrollment leaders can do by themselves to impact its performance. This would be true even if they typically “owned” college websites, which they do not. That said, given the high stakes for recruitment outcomes, inaction is not an option.

A crucial partnership

One answer to this conundrum lies in building effective partnerships with those best positioned to shape the school’s website at its inception and inflect its performance over the long term.

At most schools, this is the executive in charge of institutional marketing—an individual who is uniquely positioned to coordinate the many interested parties who shape a school’s web presence and to ensure that the school’s brand gives coherence to those efforts.

Insofar as healthy enrollment is a core strategic aim of institutional marketing, enrollment leaders should be given special prominence in that group of interested parties.

Focus on enrollment-active pages

Enrollment’s website purview

Enrollment leaders can and should exert a high degree of influence on portions of the site that most directly impact enrollment outcomes—what might be termed “enrollment-active” pages.

As described below, pages in this category include admissions-related pages as well as ones that describe the school’s academic offerings. Note that these pages typically constitute a small subset of the much larger universe of pages that make up a school’s website.

“Enrollment-active” pages are ones that cover topics of greatest interest to prospective students and their parents, including:

Focus on high-traffic pages

Some categories of enrollment-active pages, e.g., ones dealing with academics, contain more pages than you can realistically give close attention to. Within these categories, focus on the highest-traffic pages (e.g., those for your most popular majors or disciplines).

A question of initiative

There are several different ways that enrollment leaders can influence the performance of these pages, from owning them outright to working in close, ongoing partnership with their owners.

Whatever the ownership structure, the enrollment team should take a proactive role in defining a vision for these pages, proposing specific plans for them, exercising editorial oversight over them, troubleshooting their technical performance, and measuring their effectiveness.

How should you proceed?

Are you effectively engaging key audiences?

Complete 10 self-tests to determine if you have an enrollment-optimized site and are meeting performance standards.