Website (esteem.nd.edu)

Search Engine Optimization in a Niche Market

Opportunity

ESTEEM is a one-year Master of Science program offered by The University of Notre Dame, designed to join science, engineering, and mathematics disciplines to provide students with the skills required to translate science and/or engineering inventions into commercial ventures.

After the first year of the program, ESTEEM's academic leadership recognized the need to enhance their recruitment strategy to uphold their goal of increasing applications 300% for the 2011/2012 school year.

Our Solution

To create more growth and momentum for the program moving forward, a strategic marketing plan was created with an end goal of enhancing the role the website plays in the broader marketing strategy and establishing measurable outcomes for future marketing efforts.
The previous ESTEEM website.
The University of Notre Dame ESTEEM Program and ddm marketing & communications collaborated to launch a site redesign on AgencyND’s CMS system, Conductor.

New site improvements included:

The current ESTEEM website.

• Search engine optimization strategies to improve organic rankings of desired keywords


• Development and curation of a blog to facilitate ongoing content development


• Integration of social media into the site structure and their overall online presence

Results

The final product was launched in January 2011.

Non-paid search traffic improved 50% with a 13% increase in time spent on site and a 14% increase in new visitors generated from Notre Dame’s desired key terms.

Analytics was enabled to track visitor interactions with application information compared to successful completed applications as well as to identify areas for improvement of content and navigation on the website.