Ready to take your higher education website to the next level? Here are 7 free tools that can help you do just that.
Your higher education institution has a good website. But, to stand out from other colleges and universities, it needs a great website.
A great college or university website makes it simple for visitors to learn about an institution, its staff and student body, and its course offerings. The site ultimately provides information to help visitors determine if the school matches their expectations.
You may be happy with your higher education institution’s website, but there is always room for improvement. In fact, many free tools are available to help you optimize your site. Here are seven that will help you push it to the top:
1. SEMrush Site Audit
Who says you need to invest significant time and resources to hire an SEO company to evaluate your website and identify areas for improvement? Thanks to the SEMrush Site Audit tool, you can quickly perform a comprehensive SEO audit.
Site Audit can help your higher education institution identify website issues and improve its Google rankings. It scans for technical and SEO mistakes and offers insights into your site’s health. Additionally, the tool lets you run periodic reports so you can assess your site’s performance now and in the future.
2. Google Mobile-Friendly Test
You may believe your institution’s website is mobile-friendly, but smartphone and tablet users could be encountering myriad issues when they visit your site that you never see. Thankfully, you can use the Google Mobile-Friendly Test to assess the mobile-friendliness of your site — and update it accordingly.
The Mobile-Friendly Test scores your site based on its ability to engage mobile users. Enter your site’s URL, and you’ll receive extensive insights into its mobile performance. Then, with these insights in hand, you can transform the mobile web experience to meet the expectations visitors have today.
3. Web Accessibility Evaluation Tool (WAVE)
Your higher education institution wants its website to be accessible to everyone. By using WAVE, you can analyze its site’s accessibility and ensure all visitors can enjoy the site going forward.
WAVE is a terrific tool to uncover ways to make your website accessible to visitors who are dealing with hearing, visual, or other impairments. The tool offers insights into missing alt text and poor visual contrast errors on your site, along with other mistakes that can hamper site accessibility. It also provides tips and recommendations, so you can implement long-lasting measures to optimize your site’s accessibility.
4. Google Trends
If you want to see what people are searching for online, Google Trends is a wonderful option. With Google Trends, you can find out what search terms are trending globally and produce timely, relevant website and social media content that hits the mark with your target audience.
Google Trends is simple to use, and it lets you see how your higher education site ranks in terms of Google searches. At the same time, Google Trends is updated in real-time, so it gives you a glimpse into what’s happening around the world, right now. Thus, Google Trends can help you identify website and social media topics to discuss, information to share with your target audience, and ways to boost your web traffic.
5. Wordtracker
Every higher education institution wants to incorporate the right keywords into its website, but they often struggle to do so effectively. By leveraging Wordtracker, your school can identify popular search phrases based on various keywords, so you can find ways to integrate pertinent keyword phrases into your site.
Wordtracker provides insights into keyword search volume, level of competition, and cost-per-click. It also offers results from Google, YouTube, Amazon, and other sources. In doing so, Wordtracker helps you identify related keywords and phrases, so you can produce the best site content possible.
6. BrokenLinkCheck
Broken website links are problematic, and they can make it difficult for your site to reach the top of search rankings. With BrokenLinkCheck, you can detect broken site links and correct them before they cause long-term issues.
You can use BrokenLinkCheck to scan your institution’s website pages anytime you choose. The tool validates external and internal URLs and flags any defective links. You can then use this information to remove any dead links across your site.
7. Copyscape
You want original web content, and Copyscape can help you achieve your goal. This tool lets you verify original text on your website to avoid duplicate content on different pages, as well as find out if anyone is scraping and reposting your content.
Copyscape can drive creativity, too. The tool helps you see if you use certain terms or phrases repeatedly across your content. As a result, it can help your higher education institution generate original content that resonates with your target audience.
Want to tune up your website? KWALL can help
These free tools can help you start to tune-up your higher education institution’s website. Yet, they can only do so much. If you want to optimize your site, you need to work with the SEO experts at KWALL.
KWALL has in-depth web design and development expertise, particularly when it comes to SEO for higher education institutions. We can help you develop and implement a custom strategy to improve your institution’s website, and we make sure you can track its performance and drive continuous improvement.
Discover how we can help you bolster your higher education institution’s website, so you can effectively engage with visitors from around the globe. For more information, contact KWALL today for a free site audit
