What is the purpose of your graduate school website?

Do you (admissions/marketing) use it simply for its face presence on the internet?  Is it purely informational content?  Do you use it as a lead generation source?

Regardless of the answer, your graduate school website should still exist to serve the visitor and school to its fullest potential.

All too often, a visitor will click on a paid keyword link for “This University psychology graduate programs” and land on the school’s general homepage.  Or, a visitor will follow an admissions link on a school directory and end up (once again) at the homepage.

From a marketing perspective, the idea is to deliver the most relevant information to the prospective student as early in the search process as possible.  If a prospective student is just browsing psychology programs through search engine results, your school is probably missing out on a lot of potential leads by not delivering the correct content to them at the start of their website visit.  A targeted landing page is also a potential aid in decreasing FAQ call volume about specific programs.

Figure out the purpose of your website.  Direct your paid traffic to the most relevant and targeted pages possible.  If they search by school name > direct them to the homepage.  If they are looking for a specific program > lead them to the program’s page.  If you’re advertising a specific graduate subject on a directory > link to the subject curriculum or applicable page.

You may be able to look at your website stats and see that people are staying on your site for seemingly long periods of time and mistake that for engagement.  Are they on the right pages for the right amount of time?  Do they need to hunt and click through 4 or 5 pages before finding the content they originally intended to consume?