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January 9, 2016 at 6:27 am #993655Up::0
Hi all, I’ve just built and published my first website studyonlinesydney.com and I’ve gone through the tedious process of adding SEO’s. Considering online education is a very competitive industry in Australia, I was wondering if there were any other tips to drive traffic to my website. Any opinions on the website would be appreciated as well
Regards
January 10, 2016 at 11:48 pm #1192874Up::0Hi Jim,
Congratulations on launching your website
I am a Marketing Consultant and one of my past clients was an online education provider. We did quite well with Adwords and Facebook Advertising. We launched pretty aggressive campaigns (which do require a lot of $$) but definitely saw enrolments rise.
Also, seeing as it often takes customers a while to make a big decision like enrolling in a diploma or bachelor, I would suggest you set up a remarketing campaign. If you are not familiar with remarketing, this page explains it all https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2454000?hl=en-AU
Lastly, we got a lot of organic Facebook leads through Facebook Groups for the students. Students used the groups to ask each other for advice and help from the support team. However engagement in the group can be seen by friends of the students, and the exposure increases exponentially.
Hope that helps
Mel
January 12, 2016 at 10:23 am #1192875Up::0Hi Jim,
The problem with forums is that folk can offer good advice without the time to kick over the rocks to find the problems underneath.Melanie offered good advice for when there is a website on which to implement remarketing.
You are not ready for this option.You have a three page site on which you are trying to sell edu programs as diverse as TAFE diplomas that may not currently exist to post grad uni courses across various disciplines.
You won’t be able to attract many generic SE referrals with what you have published so far.
1. Attracting Customer Enquiries
Attracting potential customers to a website via search engine referrals first requires that you publish information of relevance to them.Once on the site, you need to encourage them to implement the desired action.
With respect, you are not offering relevant info to potential clients and I’m sceptical about your site’s ability to encourage them to convert from visitor to enquiries.
It seems your post-grad courses can cost $30,000.
Do I understand that this whole edu program is very new and that some of the courses are not even set up yet? You may want to drop these from your website content until they are ready?
Another aspect of targeting is the location of potential clients.
Your website, studyonlinesydney.com infers you are only targeting Sydney based prospects. If so, you need to build that search engine targeting into your site.
2. Converting Visitors into Enquiries
After ensuring you provide the necessary info about your services that visitors want, you then need to encourage them to trust you.This is all very subjective, but to me you have huge problems. In its current form, your site and your employer’s look very dodgy.
Here are some of the trust “red lights” as I saw them that you may want to rectify…
a. Who are you?
You use one website but your email and business title is from another organisation. Why?What is your address? All you show is an online form on Contact Us.
You have no LinkedIn presence. Why?
Your Facebook page was only activated in Jan 2016. You have no relevant web history.
I can’t find any reference to you on your employer’s website. Why?
Are you employed by Ducere or are you involved in an affiliate marketing program?
This little black duck is not going to consider forking out $30k to any organisation with so little substantive info available on the web.b. Who is this Ducere organisation whose email address you use?
The web tells me:- Ducere was established in 2011.
Its founder’s background was in:
- Human resources – Origin Human Resources 2004 -2010
- Entrepreneur – Mat Jacobson PTY LTD 1998-2004
This is not conducive to an edu site asking for $30,000 in course fees.
Why all the reliance on “names” on the website?
- Everywhere I look on the parent site and in its videos I am assaulted with large volumes of pictures and names of politicians and high profile people. IMHO, no organisation is that good within 3 years of being established! It looks like obfuscation?
- The videos are very carefully selected snippets of “names” talking about integrity but they don’t say they have anything to do with Ducere. Where is the accuracy and relevance?
- Another student video talks about being taught marketing by these political “names”. I’ve got more knowledge about marketing in my little finger than all these esteemed world leaders have in their combined heads.
“Red flag” – Everything about Ducere looks too good to be true. In which case…
That gives you a long list of “trust” issues to consider.
What I want to know most is the nature of your relationship with Ducere. Are you an employee or are you an affiliate marketer?
I hope this business is legit and is successful.
PS. I’m not the only one who is sceptical. Have you seen this article?
Regs,
JohnWJanuary 12, 2016 at 11:23 am #1192876Up::0Ducere-Jim, post: 226624, member: 72922 wrote:I’ve gone through the tedious process of adding SEO’s.I’m confused. What do you mean by this?
January 12, 2016 at 2:13 pm #1192877January 13, 2016 at 5:23 am #1192878Up::0What exactly do you mean you’ve added SEO’s?
SEO = Search Engine Optimistion and it’s not something you can ADD to your website like sticking a magnet on a fridge…
Seems like a bit of a warning sign that perhaps your knowledge of web/seo has some fundamental gaps.
January 13, 2016 at 7:45 am #1192879Up::0Melanie183, post: 226687, member: 74387 wrote:Hi Jim,Congratulations on launching your website
I am a Marketing Consultant and one of my past clients was an online education provider. We did quite well with Adwords and Facebook Advertising. We launched pretty aggressive campaigns (which do require a lot of $$) but definitely saw enrolments rise.
Also, seeing as it often takes customers a while to make a big decision like enrolling in a diploma or bachelor, I would suggest you set up a remarketing campaign. If you are not familiar with remarketing, this page explains it all https://support.google.com/adwords/answer/2454000?hl=en-AU
Lastly, we got a lot of organic Facebook leads through Facebook Groups for the students. Students used the groups to ask each other for advice and help from the support team. However engagement in the group can be seen by friends of the students, and the exposure increases exponentially.
Hope that helps
Mel
Hi Melanie,
Thanks for the reply. It’s definitely a challenge, especially in the education field.
I’ve started a couple Facebook campaigns, such as promoting a post and promoting a page and the response has been pretty good. I do like the ability to target your audience.
I’ll definitely go through the link you provided
January 13, 2016 at 8:03 am #1192880Up::0JohnW, post: 226823, member: 6375 wrote:Hi Jim,
The problem with forums is that folk can offer good advice without the time to kick over the rocks to find the problems underneath.Melanie offered good advice for when there is a website on which to implement remarketing.
You are not ready for this option.You have a three page site on which you are trying to sell edu programs as diverse as TAFE diplomas that may not currently exist to post grad uni courses across various disciplines.
You won’t be able to attract many generic SE referrals with what you have published so far.
1. Attracting Customer Enquiries
Attracting potential customers to a website via search engine referrals first requires that you publish information of relevance to them.Once on the site, you need to encourage them to implement the desired action.
With respect, you are not offering relevant info to potential clients and I’m sceptical about your site’s ability to encourage them to convert from visitor to enquiries.
It seems your post-grad courses can cost $30,000.
Do I understand that this whole edu program is very new and that some of the courses are not even set up yet? You may want to drop these from your website content until they are ready?
Another aspect of targeting is the location of potential clients.
Your website, studyonlinesydney.com infers you are only targeting Sydney based prospects. If so, you need to build that search engine targeting into your site.
2. Converting Visitors into Enquiries
After ensuring you provide the necessary info about your services that visitors want, you then need to encourage them to trust you.This is all very subjective, but to me you have huge problems. In its current form, your site and your employer’s look very dodgy.
Here are some of the trust “red lights” as I saw them that you may want to rectify…
a. Who are you?
You use one website but your email and business title is from another organisation. Why?What is your address? All you show is an online form on Contact Us.
You have no LinkedIn presence. Why?
Your Facebook page was only activated in Jan 2016. You have no relevant web history.
I can’t find any reference to you on your employer’s website. Why?
Are you employed by Ducere or are you involved in an affiliate marketing program?
This little black duck is not going to consider forking out $30k to any organisation with so little substantive info available on the web.b. Who is this Ducere organisation whose email address you use?
The web tells me:- Ducere was established in 2011.
Its founder’s background was in:
- Human resources – Origin Human Resources 2004 -2010
- Entrepreneur – Mat Jacobson PTY LTD 1998-2004
This is not conducive to an edu site asking for $30,000 in course fees.
Why all the reliance on “names” on the website?
- Everywhere I look on the parent site and in its videos I am assaulted with large volumes of pictures and names of politicians and high profile people. IMHO, no organisation is that good within 3 years of being established! It looks like obfuscation?
- The videos are very carefully selected snippets of “names” talking about integrity but they don’t say they have anything to do with Ducere. Where is the accuracy and relevance?
- Another student video talks about being taught marketing by these political “names”. I’ve got more knowledge about marketing in my little finger than all these esteemed world leaders have in their combined heads.
“Red flag” – Everything about Ducere looks too good to be true. In which case…
That gives you a long list of “trust” issues to consider.
What I want to know most is the nature of your relationship with Ducere. Are you an employee or are you an affiliate marketer?
I hope this business is legit and is successful.
PS. I’m not the only one who is sceptical. Have you seen this article?
Regs,
JohnWHi John,
Thanks for the detailed post.
I’ll try and address as many questions as I can.
First, I am a Business Development Manager employed with Ducere. My home page states I am a BDM both in the about us section and in the footer. If anything I’m trying to be as transparent as possible.
My site is purely for generating leads. I’m based in Sydney hence the reason I only want to focus on Sydney. There is no affiliated companies or businesses with my site, the domain was purely chosen to weed out people from outside of Sydney.
All courses listed are on offer, and it’s pretty clear in the Diploma brochure which can be downloaded that the courses are delivered in partnership with TAFE. Considering TAFE is a govt institution I would think that the courses and qualifications (provided by TAFE) are very trustworthy.
In regards to Ducere itself, not only is the company legitimate, the chancellor of Education is Julia Gillard. You would appreciate that an ex-prime minister would not be so foolish to be involved with a dodgy institution. I find it a compliment that you would think its to good to be true but yes Ducere does have an exclusive global faculty of over 250 people.
The bachelors and MBA courses are delivered in Partnership with the University of Canberra, one of Austealias most esteemed universities.
Please bare in mind that we don’t offer hundreds of courses, we focus on Business courses and truly believe we have premium business courses.
I have no intention, or have the time to deal with hundreds of enquirers. My site objectives were never for that.
In closing, this is the first site I ever created so I can only learn along the way.
Cheers
January 13, 2016 at 8:06 am #1192881Up::0John Romaine, post: 226836, member: 39536 wrote:I’m confused. What do you mean by this?Hi John,
Im a web design novice, I didn’t even know what an SEO was until creating my site with Wix. So I had to research what an SEO was, how to best title pages, use keywords etc. So basically it was a tedious process for a novice like me
Cheers
January 13, 2016 at 8:10 am #1192882Up::0Stuart B, post: 226873, member: 10757 wrote:What exactly do you mean you’ve added SEO’s?SEO = Search Engine Optimistion and it’s not something you can ADD to your website like sticking a magnet on a fridge…
Seems like a bit of a warning sign that perhaps your knowledge of web/seo has some fundamental gaps.
Hi Stuart,
I’m a novice, maybe there are more appropriate terms however in the Wix website creator I guess they’ve formatted it in a way where you can add SEO’s in an easy manner. Researching what terms to best use and using appropriate Text was the challenging bit.
Cheers
January 13, 2016 at 8:52 am #1192883Up::0Hi Jim,
I gather that this is going to be delivered as a ‘prestige’ service, with the big names that are involved. Perhaps you might ask yourself if the web design reflects what you’re attempting to communicate? To my (untrained) eye, it looks exactly like it is, a site built by someone who isn’t across modern design. Don’t mean to offend, if I were to build my site, it would come out looking like an amateur job also. The stock images feel very generic and your course ‘call to action’ links are virtually buried in the rest of the text. Driving traffic to your site with Adwords might be a waste of your money if your sales conversion rate is low due to a website that doesn’t adhere to proven design elements that work.
Also, your site doesn’t seem to be responsive, so the huge chunk of traffic that come to you via their mobile device may not be able to see all the content properly.
While video engagement is the ‘big thing’ these days, yours doesn’t really tell me anything, and it feels like it’s there just for the sake of having a video.
There are businesses that specialise in designing high-conversion sites, and I do some work for a guy who is in this very business. I won’t add the link to his site, as I’m not sure on the rules here, but PM me if you want the details. I think he charges about $3k, which is for the design only, and you would then pay someone to code it for you.
While I think it’s OK for new small business owners to start out with a generic looking site until they build some revenue, in this case, your company seems to be started by a family of billionaires (per an article in the Australian), so I’m wondering why you’re even doing the page yourself, and not engaging the services of experts in the field. We all have our strengths, but it’s often a challenge to let things go and accept that we don’t have the skills to do everything
January 13, 2016 at 9:51 am #1192884Up::0Hi Jay
The site seems to work like a treat on my mobile,
Thanks for the offer, I don’t have any need to be building a website generating thousands of views each week.
I’m definitely no web design expert so not my strength there, happy to help you enrol in a premium Business Course though
Cheers
January 15, 2016 at 12:52 am #1192885Up::0Congrats on building your first website. It looks really nice, so well done.
The second part of actually driving traffic is always the most difficult bit. SEO is something that needs to be built up over many years, so keep persevering on it and you will see outcomes.
March 15, 2016 at 2:45 pm #1192886Up::0Jim,
I usually tell clients SEO is where their money should be best invested over PPC campaigns. If education is too competitive, focus on a more specific niche, and if you can’t do that then you may have to rely on pay per click campaigns indefinitely to gain enrollments.You can run an AdWords campaign to give you a head start, but I’d typically recommend that you get some SEO done on the website prior.
March 16, 2016 at 6:59 am #1192887Up::0Why would your default advice be to focus on SEO over PPC?
Doing PPC first is a great way to identify the search terms which generate the most conversions and then enable you to target the best terms when you start your SEO strategy.
Or is this just a bias because you provide SEO services?
Either way I’m not sure that’s the best advice for this member, or smb’s as a whole. -
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