Increase College Enrollments With Education Focused Web Design

Let us start this article off by asking a simple question: why does a business even need a website, to begin with? It is the most basic requirement for any organization to mark its presence online. The benefits that a website can provide to an organization are endless, and must be known to everybody. But, it’s surprisingly alarming that a lot of people aren’t fully aware of them or don’t even have a website for their business. Building a website must be the first thing that a business should do. And, this is true for organizations in every industry, be it educational or product drive. This is especially true for the higher education sector, where most of the TG consumes information online. Everyone, from small schools to big universities, are now making their presence known online with their websites. However, just having a website is not enough; there’s a dire need to update these websites to make them more engaging and informative. According to a survey, only 15% of students apply to a college on their first visit to a website. Generally, 54% of applicants visit the website at least five times before applying to any course. The plausible reason to this is because of the fact that people are now making more informed decisions than ever before. Parents and students now perform extensive research before making a choice. With so many colleges and universities around, it’s now vital for educational institutes to optimize their websites to get the attention of students. Here are a few things that an educational website can do to increase enrolment rate through their website. Get more Inbound links The intent to get your website optimized is to rank high in the relevant Google searches. But, it’s not that easy. To get found online, you need to have a strong SEO strategy. What adds value to your SEO rankings is getting a link back from other high-ranking websites. The more backlinks you’ll get for your website, the stronger will be your ranking on various search engines On-page SEO Placing the right keywords in your content is vital, so that when someone searches for them, your website shows up on the first page of Google results. What’s important is to choose these keywords properly, and to integrate them smartly in your content to improve the search results. First impression matters The design and layout of a website is something that indirectly plays an important role in attracting students towards a particular college. Students are increasingly tech-savvy now, and like seeing new and innovative designs. Designing a website to cater to the needs of both parents and students can be a tricky task. While design certainly matters for students, parents would prefer those institutions that have a simple and easy way to navigate the website. Having a proper structure, focusing on a consistent layout and using friendly colours is something that must be considered while designing the website. The best practice is to keep your website consistent throughout, and not to experiment much with the designs. Mobile friendly There has been a constant increase in usage of mobile devices for surfing the internet and gathering information. Therefore, it is pivotal for any institute to make their website mobile-friendly. As per studies, about 40% of people abandon a website if takes more than 3-6 seconds to load on their mobile devices. Quality Content How many times do you go to a website just because you read some quality information and exited the window without subscribing to that site? Quite often, I guess. This is very likely to happen with educational websites. Students are always looking for relevant information to read, and that provides an opening for universities to attract them towards their institutes. Keeping a website updated with fresh content, including proper sources and timely releasing content pieces is the minimum of what you can do to provide your website with a level of authority. Call-to-action This one aspect is what brings quality leads to any business. An effective CTA helps students to provide their information and gives a chance to universities when it comes to garnering a better understanding of the requirements of potential leads. These CTAs are best used when they’re linked to landing pages or forms on a website. Also keep in mind that on these landing pages and forms, there must be just the right amount of questions that should be asked, as too many questions might compel the consumer to quit the page and move forward. Social media links If your content is good and students find the website useful, then there’s a good chance that they’ll share the links to your website on their social media platforms. Therefore, it is important for educational institutes to have a link to social media platforms that provide ease to students and parents to share the information with others. This will yield visibility of your institute and increase the chances of lead generation. Integrating AI chatbots Artificially intelligent chatbots are something that can increase the conversion rate of an educational institute by a sizeable number. Firstly, because students are attracted towards such technologies and tend to interact more when encountering such technology. Secondly, because such artificially intelligent chatbots also map a proper journey/behaviour of an individual according to their journey on the website and questions asked, which gives institutes an additional and relevant information about a student to convert them into a successful business. A website is what decides the admission rate of a college. So, an educational institution must mark their presence online with an appealing website to increase their enrollment rate. We hope that this article has helped you understand what all things you must work on to improve your results. If you still wish to understand how exactly web design can help your business, then click here.