College scholarships: the missed opportunity of university website content

There are two major things that prospective students are searching for during their college search: a college and money to pay for it. Every college and university out there knows they have to focus their content on prospective students searching for college admission, specific programs and degrees, and the campus life opportunities that come with life at a college or university; this is the status quo of higher ed websites, and it works well. If an institution wants to stand out in the search results for prospective students’ web inquiries, then they have to think creatively and outside of the standard box.

Most institutions offer scholarships, grants and loans; each of which are thoroughly advertised on their websites in the admissions/prospective students’ pages. This is a good start, getting the content out there in the first place, but taking it the next step can potentially deliver a huge boost in new student inquiries.

Drive students to your scholarship pages through links in targeted academic content. Let students know while they are browsing the College of Education that there is a scholarship available through a link in the sidebar. This will help funnel traffic to your scholarship page and increase your conversion rate as well as passing the PageRank from your academic site to your admissions site and vice-versa, all while building a more definitive keyword presence for your site (a good link for our example page may read “Scholarship for teacher education majors.”) This method takes little to no resources or time, and can be a quick addition to any institutional website.

If you have the resources to go the extra mile, I suggest building additional content in your admissions site about opportunities for scholarship and other methods to pay for college. Prospective students are searching for this content, and right now the private sector is the main cafeteria for what they crave. Even a mid-sized college could challenge giants like FastWeb.com in the search results if they offered keyword rich content that uniquely addressed scholarship programs for each major, ethnic group and income level that the school provides for. Your students will thank you for the resources, and this increase in quality targeted content will bolster web traffic for years to come. Your school probably has all the content written already in the form of flyers, posters and guides placed on the Student Services and Financial Aid department walls.

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