Client Need
National Neuroscience Curriculum Initiative (NNCI) is an online community of educators and researchers, across multiple institutions, that developed a comprehensive set of shared teaching resources that are available for a broad audience, for free. They came to us when they were having some issues with the search capabilities of their current website, which required search development. They were finding that a majority of their courses weren’t being accessed, found, or used to their greatest potential. This was a large hurdle for NNCI because they offer a large catalog of courses and sessions that can span from 30-90 minute sessions: class/group exercises to brief reviews, clinical commentaries, and video series that can be resources for classrooms as well as self study. They didn’t want anything to be overlooked.
Gliday Creative Plan
We found that the search function only found words in the course title, not the body or content from each course/session. So, we worked on search development to create a robust search functionality that not only searched course titles, but also individual keywords that are within the courses, video transcripts, course content, and meta keywords that each course wanted to highlight.
We also analyzed user flow and data with the aid of google analytics to strategize and streamline the course overview for better user experience, optimized the courses for generalized public search optimization, and overall speed and functionality.
The Results
After crafting the improved search functionality, streamlining and organizing the content, and optimizing each page for organic search, we’ve found that users are more engaged and spend more time on the website. return visitor numbers went up almost 45% in the first year and bounce rates for first time visitors went down to under 24%, which is below industry standard (30%-40% for educational resources).
It just proves that sometimes a website can have the content, but it just needs the proper search/navigational organization to achieve it’s ultimate goals.