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Online Visibility: Directories Directory visibility

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Online Visibility: Directories Directory visibility

While we often talk about search engine optimization or search engine marketing as the path to being visible online, thats not where it stops.

Why?

Because when students are at the early stages of their search for a higher education institution or program, often their initial investigations will lead them to a directory, such as GradSchools.com for graduate school programs, IIEPassport.org or StudyAbroad.com for study abroad programs, or UCEAdirectory.org for continuing education programs.

Why?

These directories provide a centralized location where students can browse a comprehensive list of programs and compare whats available. Students looking for a particular set of criteria want to see whats out there. As they go through this process, they'll visit specific websites to dig deeper and get more information, but in the beginning, the directory is often the place where they'll spend most of their time, getting basic information and possibly submitting some inquiries.

What you need to figure out is which directories are vital for reaching your target student audience. You need to know where the students you want are looking for your program or institution and what you need to do in order to be visible to those students.

What do you need to consider when picking a directory?

Relevancy

This is perhaps one of the more obvious criteria. If you have a graduate school program, you want to find the websites that students looking for graduate programs will be searching. If you type the phrase grad school into Google, youll find that several directories of graduate programs come up on the first page including GradSchools.com, Petersons, and GraduateGuide.com. All of these directories list graduate programs although Petersons, for example, lists many different types of higher education opportunities and thus is less targeted in its focus.

Google & Other Rankings (Traffic)

If you have several different relevant directories, how do you decide which one(s) might give you the best results? Here we return to many of the methods that we discuss in our articles on optimizing your own website.

Check out the directorys position on Google and their Alexa ranking to determine how much traffic the directory might be getting. Looking at GradSchools.com again, their Alexa ranking is 20,283 (at the time of writing this article), and they are first on Google for relevant terms including graduate school, graduate schools, grad school, and grad schools as well as being first for more specific terms like graduate school biology. These statistics when looked at together indicate the GradSchools.com website is receiving excellent traffic, meaning that listings in its directory and advertisers on its website are likely to be receiving good traffic as well.

If the directories you are considering publish traffic statistics, that would be another source for this information, although you need to be careful that youre comparing apples to apples. There are very important differences between the number of hits, visits, visitors, and unique visitors a website gets in a year. Be on the lookout for an article next month that covers these differences.

Quality of Traffic

Bad traffic is cheap. Its reasonably easy for a website to hugely inflate their traffic statistics by purchasing a large volume of clicks from low quality search engines. While the quality of a websites traffic can be difficult to determine from the outside, here are a few things to consider.

How is the website marketed? Does the site tell you? Look for information on the websites marketing strategies. For instance, IIEPassport.org is a directory of study abroad programs. The information that it provides to advertisers presents a clear picture of its marketing strategy, which includes offline outreach to a core group of study abroad advisors at a select group of schools. The sites efforts to garner traffic are very focused, which means that the visitors coming to the site are far more likely to enroll in a study abroad program than visitors at other websites. Other positive methods of getting quality traffic include reciprocal links with related websites, search engine marketing for relevant terms on quality search engines, providing directory content for use by other relevant websites, etc.

Another measure of quality of traffic is average number of clicks or amount of time each visitor spends when visiting the website. Return traffic is another good indicator. Visitors who are really looking for an academic program are likely to come back to the site multiple times and to click through the directory to many different pages as they seek to learn whats available. Finally, a website may publish their ratio of total traffic to advertiser or listing clicks. In doing so, they're telling you what percentage of the visitors to their site are actually making it to the programs or institutions listed in their directory, which is a much more useful number than their traffic volume alone.

Transparency

If the directory youre considering publishes traffic statistics, thats a good sign. Good directories should be able to provide their advertisers with some obvious and basic proof of the directorys value. Beyond just offering traffic information on the site as a whole, good directories will also offer you personalized reports of the traffic that is coming to you through your advertisements in their directory. These reports can be a good indicator of many of the issues that weve been discussing. If the website gets a million visitors a day but youre only getting one click per month from them, either its the wrong audience for your offerings, or your advertisement or listing isnt effective.

Reputation

The reputation of the directory in which your program or institution is listed can effect the returns you get from your listing or advertising. One of the big issues online is validity. People are suspicious of what they read and see online so having a good reputation built up is very important. This is particularly true with the rise of diploma mills and other such suspect providers of faulty education credentials. UCEAdirectory.org is a new directory that will launch in January 2006, which is a partnership between Educational Directories Unlimited and the well respected, trustworthy University Continuing Education Association (UCEA). This directory will provide a trusted and dependable resource for students looking for accredited continuing education programs. The reputation of UCEA and this directory will help the credibility and reputation of programs listed in its directory since students will know that the degree they get from those institutions will be what is promised.

Cost

While directories may list your program for free in order to provide a comprehensive directory, most of them have advertising or positional enhancements that will help bring increased visibility to your program.

When weighing whether to invest in such advertising, it is important to consider both the ROI and the cost of the alternatives. How else would you target those same students who are visiting the directory  open houses, direct mail, phone calls, optimizing your website? What is the cost of those alternative and their effectiveness in bringing you qualified prospects who convert to applicants? These days, the costs of direct mail are frequently becoming prohibitive in comparison to the targeted and far cheaper advertising that is available through online directories. And given the percentage of time that prospective students spend searching for a school online (75%), the obvious correlation is that those advertising dollars are probably better spent online. The ROI of advertising with a decent directory should be fairly easy to justify given the value of even one enrolled student, which a good directory should be able to provide enough qualified leads to ultimately convert into far more than one enrolled student.

Case Study: IIEPassport.org

In order to really sink our teeth into this concept of directory advertising, were going to look at the benefits of advertising a study abroad program on IIEPassport.org in more depth.

IIEPassport.org is managed through a partnership between the Institute of International Education (IIE) and Educational Directories Unlimited (EDU), bringing together online marketing expertise and long-standing leadership in the international education community. The directory offers comprehensive listings with an advanced search feature that allows students to search by location, field of study, language, duration, format, and more. Beyond the directory function, the website also offers valuable content that is developed in conjunction with IIEs worldwide offices to ensure the best possible information to aid prospective study abroad students in making informed decisions.

Why would a study abroad program want to advertise on IIEPassport?

Reputation  Because of the partnership between EDU and IIE, IIEPassport.org brings to prospective students and study abroad advisors the best possible information, both with their listing data and their informative content. The website is a trusted resource and with that comes trust and respect for those programs listed on IIEPassport.

Quality Traffic  IIEPassport builds relationships with study abroad advisors around the country and encourages those advisors to use IIEPassport as a resource for their students. In doing so, the website assures that informed students actively seeking study abroad programs compose the bulk of their traffic. Through building those relationships and seeking out schools who send a large percentage of their students abroad, IIEPassport is able to focus on providing resources and information for those students and advisors, who in turn are exactly the sort of audience who IIEPassport advertisers are trying to reach.

Transparency  IIEPassport provides detailed monthly traffic reports that allow advertisers to see the traffic that their ads are generating directly to their websites. They are able to see the composition and number of visitors as well as a variety of other helpful statistics.

Article by Kim Gradel

Mark Shay is the founder of EDU - a leading academic advertising provider, - part of Halyard Education Partners, a leader in student lead generation and enrollment management services.