That’s a Wrap

Hard as it is to believe, first-year students are moving on to campus today. In the blink of an eye, summer is drawing to a close.  The day following graduation, I came up with my summer in higher ed list. Today, I’m looking at how I made out and what the new academic year may hold.

Summer has been a time to recharge and refocus at a personal level. Perhaps most importantly, it has also been a time to reinforce the importance of measurement, assessing why we’re doing what we are doing and asking if it’s the best use of our resources.  Of the five directions I started with when the summer began, this focus brought all of those together. We can’t simply build new things without understanding why they’re important and how we’re going to define success. We can’t improve our existing content and structure without first using data to define where the issues are. And no development is possible without constantly learning and growing instead of becoming entrenched in the mindset of “we have always done it this way.”

It was a series of events this week that made this clear to me.  I was having a casual conversation with someone who was explaining that they needed to put more content on their web page. As we talked about why, it became pretty clear that the reason was simply because they felt they had to.  I suggested we look at a heatmap of the page.  As we looked at the heatmap, it was easy to see what content wasn’t engaging (because it didn’t fit or compliment the goal of the page). The content that was most often engaged with was at the bottom of the page.  I took that data and started making recommendations on how to trim, how to optimize, how to meet their objectives.  The changes to the pages has already resulted in reducing the bounce rate by 35 percentage points.  I can’t understate the importance of using data to make decisions.

But it’s admittedly more quiet in the summer which lends itself to these conversations. How can I keep this moving forward as things get more chaotic? As part of our department retreat this summer, we had to read Essentialism by Greg McKeown. Actually, I don’t think it matters what book or blog you read about the topic, any is a great reminder that to do impactful things, we have to be able to say no to the things that take time away from our highest priorities. That’s hard. I’m not sure how well I will do when things are back in full swing. But I’ll try.  I will make sure I apply the same commitment to measurement and assessment to myself as I do to whatever I am working on.

So let’s get this academic year started.

 

Getting Started with Screaming Frog

One of the items on my summer in higher ed list was making sure we’re positioning ourselves for constant improvement. As was the case when I looked at using heatmaps, I’ve added a new item to my toolbox.  I became a huge fan of Screaming Frog when we launched our last redesign to help easily pinpoint trouble spots like broken links, problematic redirects and poor response times. But this summer, I’ve started to use the tool much more strategically to help with both optimizing our content from a search perspective, but more importantly, optimizing our content from a usability perspective.

I’ll be honest; if you haven’t used the tool, I found it to be a bit tricky to navigate around initially. Fortunately, a quick Google search gave a ton of guidance to get started. I also found it a little overwhelming because of the number of things that could be done with the tool. Here are a few of the features I decided to take advantage this summer to started:

• Problems with alt tags
  I know I’m not alone when I say one of the challenges we face with distributed content management is getting our editors to remember to place alt tags on their images.  Fortunately, I now have a tool to easily identify where these images live and can either add the appropriate alt tag or (more ideally) work with our content providers to show how to correct the mistake.  (P.S. you can also generate a report that shows any images with lengthy alt text)
  
• Finding pages that are light on content
  As we focus our content efforts on telling relevant stories that reflect who we are, we wanted to make sure that we cleaned up any pages that lacked good quality content. We now have the capability to easily identify pages worth taking a closer look at.  While the image below looks at some entries in our site calendar, it shows how simple it is to spot potential issues:
  
• Problems with Meta Data
  Perhaps it’s unique to me, but I always struggled with efficient ways to make sure our meta titles and descriptions for our pages met the current search engine specifications.  Most of the tools I found either asked for an individual URL or a handful at a time.  Once my site is crawled now I can see if any pages are missing titles and descriptions, use duplicate information, use too many characters or pixels or use too few characters or pixels.

Now that my initial work is wrapping up, I have integrated our crawls with our Google Analytics data to see if  I can identify improvements that can be made to pages with issues like a high bounce rate.  I’ve also integrated our Google Search data to look for particular areas of success, as well as spot trends or challenges.

I have discovered that I haven’t even scratched the surface of the capabilities to set up filters for my crawl data.  But I do think that’s been the key for me with this project. When I find a new tool, I tend to get so consumed with every possibility that it’s difficult to focus and find the features that answer my questions.  This has been a slow and steady process with solid, quantifiable results.

As I get more comfortable digging into Screaming Frog and incorporate more features into my routine, I am reminded that no matter how sophisticated the toolbox becomes, at the end of the day, it’s still about taking the time to review these findings and decide the best approach to take.  There’s no perfect formula to improving search and user experience: you have to provide quality, relevant and timely information to your audience. A tool can get you closer, but you ultimately need to be in the driver’s seat.