Website Top 10 for August

Earlier this year, the PR office began reporting the most common college website landing pages each month. In August these URLs— they all with “www.sunyniagara.edu”—were the top landing pages:

1. /
2. /suny-niagara-banner-web/
3. [It really is blank, and PR is trying to understand why.]
4. /library/
5. /college-for-working-professionals/…
6. /oit/brightspace/
7. /academics/wolfpacked/
8. /onlinelearning/brightspacelearners/
9. /onlinelearning/brightspace-and-academic-help/
10. /nfci/savor/

At a glance, what seems obvious is that pages associated with student activity have supplanted pages associated with consideration of attending SUNY Niagara, which were more hit in July. This correlates to the college’s business cycle. It would be cause for concern if we didn’t see this right now.

Moving up the list, while the homepage, “/,” still sits at the top, only 50% of August visits to the site began there. This is both interesting and noteworthy.

Users increasingly seek online content with that the industry calls “long-tail search queries.” These are highly specific phrases, usually several words, that describe particular information. Contrast this with the old notion of visiting a website and then clicking through menus to find things. That kind of structure, which remains common—the college’s website still uses it—is slowly being made unnecessary because long-tail search queries can get users to what they want more quickly.

Web developers, recognizing that users like this, build search engine marketing campaigns that take advantage of it and boost their sites’ organic search ranking. The campaigns that the PR office runs typically include over 100 “long-tail keywords,” phrases that we believe will sync with users’ long-tail search queries.

The implication here is that homepages, which originally were intended to function as branded tables of contents, are not the prime real estate that they used to be. “Findability,” not visibility, now drives navigability.