Optimizing an education website in the highly competitive arena of distance learning.

Going to the head of the class.

A little background.

The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNC-G), founded over a century ago, is one of 16 public institutions in the University of North Carolina system.

UNC-G’s roots are firmly planted in traditional education, yet it recognized early on that distance education was taking hold and becoming an increasingly popular alternative.
After developing a distance learning program, called iCampus, the school created two websites (www.uncgicampus.com and www.calldcl.com )

The challenge: a mediocre report card.

The more that competition for distance learning students heats up – and it’s getting hotter every day – the more pressure there is on administrators to achieve the kind of visibility that results in increased enrollments.

As part of an ongoing effort to keep their school in a leadership position, administrators at the Division of Continual Learning at UNC-G decided in early 2005 to take a good hard look at how well their two websites were performing. They studied site traffic, search engine rankings and user satisfaction – and were none too happy with what they found.

And that’s when they contacted VisionPoint Marketing.

Our assessment: the sites had to work harder.
Our initial task was to execute a search engine optimization (SEO) program. We set about determining the exact keywords and phrases that would drive the highest volume of qualified prospects to the sites.

Almost immediately, we saw that the first issue that needed to be addressed was the navigation of the sites; it simply didn’t lend itself to effective search engine optimization.

Improvement needed.

As we shared our concerns with school administrators, more issues began to come to light. For example, university-mandated requirements for the sites regarding compliance and accessibility would soon go into effect and the current sites wouldn’t meet them.

Was a re-architecture in order?

• A web interface could be created that did meet compliance and accessibility mandates.
• The sites could be made simpler to use, so that students could easily access information about the courses, degrees, certificates and programs offered.
• The architecture could promote the fluid exchange of information between the visitor and the iCampus and calldcl sites.
• The navigation could be dramatically improved, to enhance the user experience, via changes such as replacing the image navigation buttons with text buttons and anchoring the navigation rather than letting it float randomly from page to page.
• An optimal search engine ranking could be achieved.

Yes, a re-architecture was in order. Definitely.

Creating goals.

Working with the Division of Continual Learning, we set out certain requirements for the re-architecture of the sites, including:

• Ensure that the UNC-G home site search ranking was not compromised by creating duplicated content on the iCampus site.

• Leverage the power of the UNC-G home site by keeping the iCampus and calldcl sites within its framework.

• Retain the content management tool that professors and administrators used to update course information.

• Maintain the look and feel of the prior sites in keeping with the university template and form.

Assignment completed.

The sites were re-architected and the new navigation and site infrastructure were applied. Existing pages were supplemented with enhanced content for search engine optimization. And new optimized code was applied to over 150 pages in the sites to incorporate strong search engine positioning while meeting the new compliance standards.

The results: extremely high marks.

Prior to optimization, the two websites achieved a visibility index of 7.2 percent. Within four weeks of the first phase of optimization, visibility more than tripled to 23.5 percent. After four months, visibility had continued to climb and reached 32.9 percent, an outstanding result for business-to-consumer organic search optimization.

What’s more, rankings of the two sites on the designated keywords across the major search engines (Google and others) skyrocketed:

• From 30 first place rankings to 206 in less than two months
• From 124 top 10 rankings to 1037 in less than two months
• Numerous “most important” keywords ranking as #1 and #2 on Google

The university also noted a significant increase in site traffic and inquiries.

Finally, the Division of Continual Learning has demonstrated leadership within the academic community by marketing their programs more effectively, using the latest tools of the Internet while maintaining the highest standards, and complying with university goals for online activities.

As results go, these are definitely in the summa cum laude range.

Visibility is a composite index that looks at the position of every keyword on every major search engine. If you ranked in first place on every keyword on every search engine, your visibility would be 100%.

For business-to-consumer sites in a competitive field, a visibility score of 30% indicates phenomenal success in search engine optimization and is very hard to achieve.