BYU Independent Study

Below are my observations and recommendations for how BYU independent student can improve their online math courses SEO.

Observations:
Math Courses (general):
Most visitors visit the page on Monday. About 50% are going directly to the page (bookmarked). Of the top 10 keywords, “byu independent” has the lowest number of pages viewed and the lowest average time on the site. This could mean that the site isn’t what the user was expecting. “BYU online courses” has the most pages per visits, average time on site, and % new visits.

Math 110:
The top 3 keywords all have the word “byu” in them. This means that the people getting to this site are looking for byu courses offered by BYU instead of those just looking to take an online math course.

As to referring sites, most of the referring sites are BYU owned pages. However, a couple came from emails. This method of advertising could continue to be effective.

Stats 221:
Most of the keywords are once again containing “byu” in it. About 43% of traffic is direct. Most significant referring site is byu.edu, however, there are other sites such as facebook.com and email (mail.yahoo.com to be more specific) that have referred uses to the site

Recommendations:
It seems as though the majority of the traffic comes from users who are looking specifically for byu courses. It may be helpful to pay more for other keywords that will attract other users. I went to SpyFu.com to see what key words other online sites are using. I looked up “online courses” and found that those who bought online courses also bought: courses online, correspondence courses, online course, online degree, degree online and more. The thing to realize about these is that they are not specific to one school, so those searching don’t need know about the school, they just need to know that they want a course online. I would recommend buying some broader level keywords such as the ones above in order to expand the reach of who is actually being advertised to.

I would also recommend doing a little more advertising on sites ideal users use. For example, facebook came up in for each page as a referring site as well as mail.yahoo.com. It is very inexpensive to send emails out with a link to the site. Doing this also makes it easier for recipients of the email to forward it on to those they think may be interested.