Counting Stars: Student Reviews, Structured Markup and an Enrollment Edge
Monday, Oct 22 8:30 - 9:15
Presented by Seth MerandaYour academic program content is the most valuable recruitment content on your site. As prospective students turn to search engines as their primary college discovery tool, it’s imperative your institution stands out. Last year, Concordia University, Nebraska, did what no other college or university has done: by utilizing student reviews, we published star rankings crafted with a pinch of structured markup. This strategy lead to enhanced search results on Google that showcased our star rankings which stood out amongst the busy crowd. As the only institution with star rankings in our search results, we’ve seen a 81% increase in search traffic to academic content plus an out-of-this-world 555% increase in recruitment funnel-related conversions. This has lead to the one of the largest historical recruitment classes on our campus, directly contributing to revenue.
At this session, you’ll learn how the Concordia Nebraska team developed and implemented the strategy and the lessons they learned along the way. After attending this session, you’ll have a blueprint for how to craft this on your campus along with hard data to present to your leadership on the impact your academic content strategy has on enrollments and revenue.
About
Seth Meranda
Director of Marketing and CommunicationSeth Meranda leads a talented marketing staff developing and expanding Concordia University’s brand development, communication strategies and outreach efforts. Meranda's marketing team designs and develops recruitment and fundraising communications plans with a focuses on digital content strategies to support institutional goals. Prior to joining Concordia, Meranda worked as the User Experience Architect at UNL, overseeing design and development on the world’s largest higher ed website framework. In addition to his work at Concordia, Meranda is an associate consultant for Ruffalo Noel Levitz, a higher ed enrollment management consulting firm. Through this role, Meranda has worked with dozens of institutions across the county on digital recruitment strategies to bolster enrollment goals. Meranda has been a part of the higher ed web community for over a decade, often presenting at regional and national conferences. He is a former HighEdWeb board member.