UNC Charlotte, Website Redesign & SEO – Higher Education Marketing Case Study

UNC Charlotte is North Carolina’s urban research university that transforms individuals, communities and industries through access to affordable education at undergraduate, graduate and professional levels.

They reached out to Elliance needing help with redesigning the academics section of their website and increasing visibility for their institution in North Carolina. 

Website Redesign Strategy: Academics & College Pages

We redesigned their top level academic pages with two goals: to give a full-throated articulation of their institutional might and to infuse keywords so UNC Charlotte would get ranked on Google page 1 across the state of North Carolina. We achieved both.

Here is a glimpse of the redesigned academics page:

UNC Charlotte is the fastest growing and third largest university in North Carolina. The Academics page became the place to show off the seven colleges, their strengths and offerings, which include 171 majors, 65 master’s degrees and 24 doctoral degrees. 

Each of the college pages was redesigned to showcase the strength of the college highlighting accreditation, degrees offered, location benefits, career growth potential, employment opportunities, and distinctions. All of which are potential factors that each student will consider in order to make a college decision. 

We also highlighted third party proof points to showcase the credibility of the institution. 

Here is a glimpse of the redesigned college pages:

Website SEO Strategy: Academics and College Pages 

Once these pages were redesigned our next task was to bake in SEO thinking in the page structure, copy and coding.

One of the main challenges the client wanted to address was to allow the college pages to rank for any programmatic keywords being searched for in North Carolina. Ultimately, the goal was to get more traffic to the academic section of the website.

Before the website pages were redesigned we did a keyword benchmark to see where these pages were ranking on Google search results. No surprise but we didn’t find them ranking in the top 10 pages on Google. 

Once the new academic and college pages went live, they received more than 100 page 1 rankings and more than 100 page 2 rankings. The organic traffic percentage to these pages grew to almost double the percentage of the organic traffic coming to the overall website.

Here are some screenshots of where the new college pages are ranking currently:

If you are seeking a higher education marketing agency, view our work with many colleges and universities and consider partnering with us.