This is our second of five check-ins on if we’re making progress on our web team goals.
1. Reduce the total number of pages on the Lane website by 5% (from 5550 to 5273)
Still met, but up a little from last check-in. We’re now at 5072.
2. Reduce the number of pages with more than 15,000 characters by 10% (from 249 to 224)
Unfortunately, this is unchanged, and we’re still at 232. This is a very hard goal to meet, as many of these pages are either preserved for archival purposes or simply contain a lot of content.
3. Reduce the average character count of our pages by 10% (from 4650 to 4185)
We crept up a little bit, from 4412 to 4466.
4. Improve the average age of our pages (the average late updated date) by 4 months (from 16 months to 12 months)
Unfortunately, still no progress on this goal. The only plus side is that our pages haven’t gotten any older. Please help us out by editing your pages!
Traffic Goals
We also had two traffic goals:
- Increase session counts for www.lanecc.edu during the period 6/14/17-6/14/18 compared to the previous year by 5%, from 3,228,904 to 3,390,349
- Decrease the bounce rate for www.lanecc.edu during the period 6/14/17-6/14/18 compared to the previous year by 5%, from 37.05% to 35.19%
Since these are annual goals, they’re a little harder to compare against. But we can compare similar time periods. For the first four months, 6/14-10/14, comparing 2016 to 2017, our session counts have decreased by 3.66%, and our bounce rate has increased by 3%. Last check-in I was optimistic, as our session counts had increased a little, but that appears to have been confined to summer.
That graph shows the story. Our numbers were pretty close until Fall, when our session traffic fell as students returned. Previously, we’ve observed that school year traffic changes closely follow enrollment trends, and this year was no exception.
We’ve taken a more proactive stance with these two goals, since they’re critical for the overall health of the college. We’ve been collaborating with the Business Department to work with Lunar Logic to improve our content and structure for Search Engine Optimization (SEO). While we’re not seeing results yet, SEO is a marathon, and it’ll likely take months before the impact of our work is fully felt.
But we need your help with this goal as well! Think about the keywords your page targets, and make sure your content contains those words. And whenever possible, please make sure your page includes some sort of target or goal you’re trying to get your visitors to do. If you’d like help researching keywords, or would like to learn how you rank on Google for various keywords, just ask! We’re happy to show you a couple of reports that we think could help you with your content a lot.