About the project

Subject: Alice Lee Centre of Nursing Studies

Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine

NUS, Singapore

Challenge

  • ALCNS website’s dated design at that time did not reflect its Ambition to be a World Class Nursing university in Asia, – Website build did not allow for easy content updates; all the pages were hardcoded, which made indexing difficult,
  • Traffic to the website was mainly through Direct Search, with no further engagement. Hence, drop-offs were high, leading to low visibility of the rest of the Website

Insights

ALCNS realised that the website needed a revamp, given its performance relative to other higher education institutions. The university also understood that the website needed more relevant content for different audiences who would land on different parts of it. Hence, a potential nursing student would be interested in the various degree courses ALCNS could offer.

However, potential students may also want to know what the campus is like, what past students say about the school, and if the overall environment is ‘fun’. Various sections of the Website had external links. Hence, once the visitor clicks on the link, he or she will be ‘lost’ and unable to return to the previous page. This was one of the examples of broken user journeys that failed to account for user behaviours. Another data point that informed us what was required for the Revamp was the low unbranded keywords that ALCNS was accruing at that time. Branded keywords accounted for almost 70% of ALCNS’ keywords.

Strategy

Target Audience

  • Define the Key Target Audience first before embarking on the Page Designs,
  • With Target audiences defined, their Journeys could be mapped out
  • Keywords were planned, which then helped inform the Content Strategy and Plan
  • Content structures could then be mapped out as well

Content Strategy & Design

  • Content topics developed to meet search needs.
  • Developed several testimonies based on past students’ feedback.
  • Using analytics to identify page drop-offs, the pages were redesigned to guide visitors with optimized on-page elements better.

Solution

The main elements of our solution were designing and developing an action plan that was anchored on the following:

  • An SEO-ready website,
  • Content-led user engagement
  • Content that would abide by Best Practices

Results

  • Organic Search has grown to be the main source, with 62.97%.
  • Direct search remains healthy with 28.61% of traffic share.
  • BBB has been retained as ALCNS’ web development partner since.