1. 15 Ways To Reduce Your Higher Ed Website Bounce Rates Slide 1 15 Ways To Reduce Your Higher Ed Website Bounce Rates

2. 15 Ways To Reduce Your Higher Ed Website Bounce Rates Slide 2 1. Produce High Quality Content 2. Offer Content Based on Vision Segmentation 3. Make it Clear Whats in it for your Visitor 4. Be Trustworthy and Professional 5. Correct poor Page Design 6. Make Pages Visually Engaging 7. Dont Interrupt the Users Experience 8. Design Information around Page Priorities 9. Go responsive web design or create a parallel mobile website 10. Improve Page Load Times for high bouce pages 11. Check Browser Performance for high bounce pages 12. Open External links in new Windows 13. Create Unique Titles and Meta Descriptions for each Page 14. Have a helpful, funny 404 message 15. A/B test your Page Overview Source: Higher Education Marketing - 15 Ways To Reduce Your Higher Ed Website Bounce Rates 3. 15 Ways To Reduce Your Higher Ed Website Bounce Rates Slide 3 Nothing beats interesting, relevant, current, visually stimulating content. Keep you content up to date. Make sure it is at the right reading level. Split up your content into digestible chunks that people can scan and then dig into. 1. Produce High Quality Content Source: Higher Education Marketing - 15 Ways To Reduce Your Higher Ed Website Bounce Rates 4. 15 Ways To Reduce Your Higher Ed Website Bounce Rates Slide 4 Break down you audience into their respective segments and provide the content each wants. Study the keywords visitors use to find you with. Some bounce higher than others. Find out why. Analyze your internal site search to identify what people are most often looking for on your site. Consider your visitors points of entry to reveal what they are looking for and give it to them. 2. Offer Content Based on Visitor Segmentation Source: Higher Education Marketing - 15 Ways To Reduce Your Higher Ed Website Bounce Rates 5. 15 Ways To Reduce Your Higher Ed Website Bounce Rates Slide 5 Make your messaging really obvious, be clear what you do and what you offer. The features of your programs are great but visitors are more interested in the benefits. Convey value. Make related content accessible. Proximity of the link will determine the click-through. Make your website sticky. 3. Make it Clear Whats in it for your Visitor Source: Higher Education Marketing - 15 Ways To Reduce Your Higher Ed Website Bounce Rates 6. 15 Ways To Reduce Your Higher Ed Website Bounce Rates Slide 6 4. Be Trustworthy and Professional Trust is required for a visitor to engage with you and enter your recruitment funnel. Earn it. Always keep your contact info front and centre. It is amazing how many dont. Source: Higher Education Marketing - 15 Ways To Reduce Your Higher Ed Website Bounce Rates 7. 15 Ways To Reduce Your Higher Ed Website Bounce Rates Slide 7 5. Correct Poor Page Design This is a pretty obvious recommendation but dont take it for granted. Many pages flow out of you general design, get tweaked, get repurposed, get lost and lose their ability to engage or convert. Source: Higher Education Marketing - 15 Ways To Reduce Your Higher Ed Website Bounce Rates 8. 15 Ways To Reduce Your Higher Ed Website Bounce Rates Slide 8 6. Make Pages Visually Engaging Visual engagement is the first hook that draws visitors into your content. Use eye-tracking, check In-page Analytics etc. to understand a student's first reaction to your pages Be predictable in your design, using consistent placement and formatting so that the visitor quickly learns where to find things. Whitespace is a good thing, use it often. Source: Higher Education Marketing - 15 Ways To Reduce Your Higher Ed Website Bounce Rates 9. 15 Ways To Reduce Your Higher Ed Website Bounce Rates Slide 9 7. Dont Interrupt the Users Experience Develop intuitive navigation so the student can see their way into your content. Take people where they want to go. Manage multimedia very carefully some is good at engaging, some makes people bounce. Many institutions use a lot of internal advertising. Be careful of its placement and page priority as it can be just as off-putting as a telemarketing on a Sunday afternoon. Source: Higher Education Marketing - 15 Ways To Reduce Your Higher Ed Website Bounce Rates 10. 15 Ways To Reduce Your Higher Ed Website Bounce Rates Slide 10 8. Design Information around Page Priorities Are your target conversion or content points clearly presented on your page? Can students immediately get a sense of what they should expect to find or are expected to do while on the page? Respect visitor intent by making sure the page you are presenting to visitors aligns closely with the content promised from the source link. Make conversion events (ie calls to action, forms, key related links) very clear. Place them above the fold. Source: Higher Education Marketing - 15 Ways To Reduce Your Higher Ed Website Bounce Rates 11. 15 Ways To Reduce Your Higher Ed Website Bounce Rates Slide 11 9. Go Responsive Web Design Go responsive web design or create a parallel mobile website People searching for information about your college on a mobile device need to see a page that is sized to the format of their device. Full web pages served to a smart phone will almost always bounce. Successful student engagement through mobile pages has different rules than for traditional desktop pages. Take a minimalist approach and then learn through experimentation what will work best for your institutions offerings. Source: Higher Education Marketing - 15 Ways To Reduce Your Higher Ed Website Bounce Rates 12. 15 Ways To Reduce Your Higher Ed Website Bounce Rates Slide 12 10. Improve Page Land Times for high bounce pages Optimize content, images, multimedia etc to minimize your page load times. Source: Higher Education Marketing - 15 Ways To Reduce Your Higher Ed Website Bounce Rates 13. 15 Ways To Reduce Your Higher Ed Website Bounce Rates Slide 13 11. Check Browser Performance for high bounce pages Its always possible that something in your code is not working for one specific browser, and the page is not loading in that browser. This is a sure fire way to cause visitors to bounce. Source: Higher Education Marketing - 15 Ways To Reduce Your Higher Ed Website Bounce Rates 14. 15 Ways To Reduce Your Higher Ed Website Bounce Rates Slide 14 12. Open External links in new Windows A good example here would be in a university's student ambassador blog. That link they embed in their story will lead the visitor away, often with no way to return if a new window is not opened for the outside link. Source: Higher Education Marketing - 15 Ways To Reduce Your Higher Ed Website Bounce Rates 15. 15 Ways To Reduce Your Higher Ed Website Bounce Rates Slide 15 13. Create Unique Titles and Meta Description for each Page Create Unique Titles and Meta Descriptions for each Page To learn more about the importance of Mata Descriptions for SEO and some best practices read this. Source: Higher Education Marketing - 15 Ways To Reduce Your Higher Ed Website Bounce Rates 16. 15 Ways To Reduce Your Higher Ed Website Bounce Rates Slide 16 14. Have a helpful, funny 404 message If someone tries to enter your site and gets a 404 page not found message you must have a engaging response if you hope to keep the student on you site. It is also a great place to have a little fun and show some personality. See what Indiana University did. Source: Higher Education Marketing - 15 Ways To Reduce Your Higher Ed Website Bounce Rates 17. 15 Ways To Reduce Your Higher Ed Website Bounce Rates Slide 17 18. 15 Ways To Reduce Your Higher Ed Website Bounce Rates Slide 18 15. A/B Test your Pages To really drill down at the page level and determine what is causing your bounce problems and what will fix them, you need: to start working with the A/B testing module called Experiments in Google Analytics. This is particularly useful for landing pages but remember that: in fact, every one of the pages on your website is a landing page, regardless if it is a visitor being brought to that page from a long-tail Google search or a deep link from a referring site. Source: Higher Education Marketing - 15 Ways To Reduce Your Higher Ed Website Bounce Rates 19. 15 Ways To Reduce Your Higher Ed Website Bounce Rates Slide 19 Visit our Website: Higher Education Marketing FOLLOW US ON FACEBOOK FOLLOW US ON LINKEDIN FOLLOW US ON TWITTER FOLLOW US ON PINTEREST FOLLOW US ON GOOGLE+ Questions? 1.514.312.3968 info@higher-education-marketing.com