5 Ways to Fix Low School Website Traffic
The best school websites are phenomenal marketing tools and should be generating leads for educational institutions. Low traffic to your school website should be a matter of great concern. Generating legitimate and interested traffic to your school website is essential because it should translate to more inquiries and potentially more students enrolled in your programs.
How Can You Tell if Your School Website is Getting Low Traffic?
Various analytics tools exist to help you track your school website traffic. Google Analytics is one of the most popular, providing detailed insights into visitor numbers, page views, bounce rates, traffic sources, and user behavior. Regularly monitoring these metrics helps you understand trends and optimize your site for better performance.
If your website has been getting low traffic lately, these five reasons could be why.
1. Changed or Outdated Content
The nature of the content available for visitors on the best school websites often significantly improves the traffic they receive.
This is because search engines like Google are algorithm-driven. They analyze keywords, their placement, and content structure to determine relevance as search results.
You may lose rankings if you remove or alter key elements in your content—such as high-performing keywords, structured headings, or internal links.
Similarly, if the content on your website goes unchanged for a long period of time, algorithm updates may render it outdated, and your school will show up less frequently in search results.
To prevent this, we recommend you remain updated on current search engine optimization (SEO) practices and apply them when updating your school website content.
2. Technical Issues in Your School Website
User experience is essential to ranking school websites in search results. When visitors frequently experience slow speeds, broken links, and poor mobile-friendliness, they’re most likely to leave, sometimes even before a page finishes loading.
This contributes to high bounce rates that search engines quickly pick up on because they then rank your website lower in searches as a result.
Google Analytics Data from 2016 found that up to 53% of users abandon websites that take longer than 3 seconds to load. Eight years later, this number has increased, further highlighting the impact of technical issues on the traffic a school website receives.
Addressing the technical problems on your school website is essential to maintaining and increasing its traffic. We discuss some of these technical issues and ways to fix them in our post here.
3. Search Engine Algorithm Updates
When Google or any other search engine has an update to its algorithm, chances are high that it significantly impacts the traffic that even the best school websites receive.
This may feel out of your control, but there are things you can do to recover from these kinds of drops in engagement.
For instance, the March 2024 Core Update on Google focused on reducing spam content and improving the quality of the information brought up by search results. Websites that handle outdated and poor-quality content experienced significant drops in visitor traffic during this time.
The good news is that website owners who analyzed their sites could make changes to align with the new update.
Get ahead of algorithm changes by keeping your school website current whenever a Google algorithm update is announced. There’s usually something new every few months. Refresh your content each time, and check if other elements are functioning normally.
4. A Lack of Value in School Website Content
People will visit your school website for specific information about your institution. From the academic programs you offer to tuition fee information, all this is the valuable content your website provides.
If the content on your school website isn’t valuable, fewer people will engage with it, and less traffic will be the inevitable result. This is because more people will leave quickly, resulting in higher bounce rates, which indicates to search engines that your site isn’t helpful, so they’ll lower your rank in search results.
How do you make the content on your school website more valuable? The answer is to focus on quality. Valuable content is informative, helpful, and appealing in how users receive it. Ensure the information in your copy is concise and current and that the site is well-optimized and responsive.
5. Poor School Website Security
Have you ever clicked on a website and gotten the familiar warning that it is “Not Secure”? In most cases, users avoid the website altogether when they receive this notification, meaning it receives very little traffic.
This indicator of your website lacking security is often the result of the absence of an SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) Certificate, a file hosted in a website that protects sensitive details like user login information.
While having a website without an SSL Certificate is technically possible, having one on your school website is essential if you plan to collect users’ information in any way.
Search engines also prioritize secure websites in their search rankings, so ensuring your school website is safe to visit is critical. To fix this, you should have your website analyzed and possibly redesigned to make it more secure. Check out Gradelink’s school website redesign offerings and contact us to get started on making your school website more secure.
Conclusion
In most cases, the answer to why your school website is getting less traffic lies in something you have control over. Even in cases where the cause is outside your direct control, such as with search engine updates, it is still possible to stay ahead of these types of changes by constantly updating your website to keep or improve the traffic to it. Reach out to Gradelink for a free analysis of your school website here.