As everyone across our Communications and Marketing teams is very aware, we are now well underway with a student recruitment web optimisation project. This slightly belated post is to introduce that work to a broader audience and set context for future posts. Going forward, myself and others in the team will share updates on what we’ve done, what we’ve learned, and the outcomes we’re achieving as we work to transform our prospective student digital experience.
Project origins
About a year ago, the University decided to invest in long-term improvements to our website. The site is widely recognised as our single most critical asset for student marketing and recruitment. But to keep pace with evolving technical contexts and user behaviors, such as the rise of AI and changing web search habits, we needed to invest in improving and future-proofing the site. We set out a plan to improve our search engine visibility (SEO), refine our user experience (UX), and make conversion journeys smoother across our core recruitment pages.
Building capacity
Because our existing teams were already working at full capacity, since early summer we’ve been onboarding new staff to deliver this work. A web content team lead, three web content producers, a platforms specialist, and a front-end developer have all joined between June and August. These new posts, combined with existing staffing in Marketing and Communications, bring together expertise and workload capacity in content design, SEO, and technical development in a way that we’ve never before been able to deploy in a targeted effort to improve the digital experience for prospective students.
Setting priorities
With all these new people joining and extra capacity to do new work, we needed a clear way to ensure we were spending our energy where it delivers the most value. We’ve built a website maturity assessment framework and measured current site performance against that to give us clear context for our decision-making. We’ve also established a structured prioritisation process and project governance through a new Student Recruitment Web Coordination Group. We’ve built a backlog of prioritised projects to work through, starting with relatively quick-win foundational fixes before moving on to bigger and more complex changes.
First projects
Over the past three months or so, we’ve tackled a variety of projects that have helped new team members learn the ropes of the CMS, the university context, and all our other platforms. These have included:
- Completing a round of factual checks and updates to 300+ web pages, plus planning changes for a phase two round of optimisations to go beyond just ensuring factual accuracy
- Using our quality assurance platform to identify and eradicate spelling errors, broken links, faulty heading structure, oversized images, and more across all our pages for prospective students
- Implementing automated reporting of error page views so we can spot and fix them quickly
- Commissioning and reviewing search keyword research from our agency partner
- Implementing an exit survey for prospective students on the site so we can gather intel on task success rates and areas for improvement
- Developing plans for a KPI dashboard to enable us to track site performance
- Building mechanisms within the CMS to enable us to provide more flexible metadata within our pages, as used by search engines and AI platforms
- Commissioning accessibility testing of our pages with a panel of real users using a variety of assistive technologies
- Planning how we’ll extend the use of our website personalisation platform to deliver more targeted experiences to site users
- Doing competitor homepage research and drafting a new version of the University homepage (watch this space…!)
Join us at our monthly reviews
Lots of people around the whole organisation work on the website and student recruitment, and we’re keen to keep anyone with an interest in this work informed and involved.
Starting on Friday 6 November from 1.30-2.30pm, and every first Friday of the month after that, we’re going to host a student recruitment web optimisation project review on Zoom. Any member of staff at York with an interest in what we’re doing is warmly invited to come along. We’ll also record the sessions and share afterwards for anyone who couldn’t make it.
Each review session will be an informal show-and-tell where we’ll talk through:
- The work we’ve delivered over the past month
- Any results we’ve seen so far
- What’s coming up next
- Any questions or ideas from attendees
If you would like to join us, please sign up for the monthly reviews so we can add you to the invitation and distribution list.
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