The Brunel University marketing team needed support with a website content refresh.
The higher education sector is becoming highly competitive and universities are having to think of themselves as brands to gain a sure foothold in the market. Brunel has a great reputation among ambitious and creative young adults but the content wasn't speaking to them; in some cases the language was impenetrable.
We used SEO tools and eye-tracking to understand how best to design pages and create an effective hierarchy of information. Microcopy was rewritten to be punchy and clickable, content was made accessible and relevant, and each subject area became a microsite in itself to avoid directing users away from the information they needed.
I worked primarily on pages related to Psychology and the Business School. After my improvements were made, organic traffic for Psychology was up by 81% year on year, page views were up 64% and the bounce rate was down to 5%. For the Business School, organic traffic was up by 79% year on year, page views were up 75% and the bounce rate was down to 23%.
From this:
To this: Inspirational imagery and language, headers and boxed content catch the eye with a plain-speaking tone of voice and useful links within site.
Within the Psychology site, facilities were mentioned but were not detailed on their own page.
Accreditation from the BPS is an important feature of the Brunel Psychology BSc and MSc conversion course but there wasn't an explanation of what this meant for prospective students.
