Top Priorities for Your Website
- Make your inquiry form easy to find. Ultimately, you want to convert your prospective student traffic into inquiries. This means your inquiry form should be front and center on all pages. The best way to do this is to incorporate it into your navigation.
- Focus on relevant, engaging content. What do prospective students want to know? What will get them interested in your programs? Videos, student stories, and outcomes information are all great for engagement. Integrate this content into your pages. You goal is to keep students on your site and convert them into inquiries.
- Optimize your pages for search. Students go to the search engine first, so use keyword research to ensure your content shows up in the results. For example, if someone searches “best XXX program in the US,” will your page with information about XXX program make that list?
- Create landing pages. Having good landing pages helps you direct traffic consistently from all of your other communications. Units serve many different audiences, so having landing pages dedicated to your prospective undergraduate students not only helps you but also your users.
- Avoid redundancy. Always take advantage of linking to other sources of information instead of duplicating that information, especially when it comes to admissions. Our dates, policies, and processes change, so if you duplicate this information on your site, it’s likely to be out of date very quickly. Simply link to it instead.
The Admissions Web Ecosystem
We have two websites within the Admissions web ecosystem:
- Admissions Website. This is the primary hub of our web ecosystem. It provides critical information for prospective students, including topics such as the application process, campus life, majors, cost, and much more. We encourage you to link to our information whenever possible.
- Admissions Blog. Our blog offers a space to expand on information relevant to prospective students, such as how to find the perfect major or things to do it Champaign-Urbana. It also includes narrative, long-form student stories that provide a more intimate picture of campus life. Many of the posts on our blog are created using keyword research to maximize organic traffic, and we direct traffic to posts through other communications.
How to Measure Success
The success of your website as it relates to undergraduate student recruitment and yield can be measured by monitoring the traffic and behavior.
This starts with driving traffic to your site through communications and organic search. Once users are on your site, you want to keep them engaged and ultimately get them to fill out your inquiry form or sign up for an event, such as a virtual or in-person meeting.
If you’re able to increase traffic from all sources via SEO, maintain any traffic boosts, and increase action conversions (sign-ups and event registration) on the site, you’ll likely have a successful website on your hands.
The two ways to monitor these metrics are through your website’s analytics and through our CRM.