Elearning industry web traffic – key data and facts
- The elearning industry is extremely competitive, with over 10,000 websites (conservative estimate) that focus on elearning / distance learning.
- One third of web traffic on elearning related website homepages comes from search engines.
- The Bounce rate (percentage of people entering a website without actually performing any action) calculated on traffic coming from search engines is 60% lower than the Bounce Rate calculated on other traffic sources (e.g. banners, social media etc…)
What becomes clear in analyzing these 3 facts is that in order get qualified traffic elearning industry related website managers must focus on achieving a high position within Search Engines.
On SEO & content
The aim of SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is to reach the optimal combination of content and code on a website in order to achieve a better position in Search Engines such as Google, Bing and Yahoo. With regards to content, the most important elements to focus on are the keywords in the text, the formatting of these keywords, the presence of backlinks and their position. (Obviously a page full of keywords is not effective: search engines strongly penalize web content that is not reader friendly, so a good balance between keyword density and readability is extremely important.) The aim of using keywords is to populate your content with words that your potential customers might search for on the internet.
Unfortunately the presence of keywords inside the text is not enough. In fact formatting also plays a role, which means that Google will give more importance to headers, bolded and italic text. In the elearning industry you might also ask, is it better to use “e-learning” or “elearning”? The meaning is obviously the same, but to search engines there’s a big difference.
E-Learning vs eLearning
To analyse the two terms we used Google Trends, a Google tool that allows you to evaluate how many times a specific word gets searched on the web and to compare results with other keywords. With this tool we observed that the word “elearning” was searched an average of 100 times per month, while “e-learning” only 30 times per month. As a result, a learning industry vendor looking for new customers ought to lean towards using the word “elearning” on a website in order to be shown in a higher position in these kinds of web searches.
Below you’ll find a graph showing the trends for these 2 keywords
As you can see in the graph, since 2008 the number of searches for the word “elearning” has experienced a steady growth, whilst “e-learning” searches have been decreasing.
The conclusion from this?
If you are interested in attracting people from the elearning industry to your website the best weapon is still your (killer) content, but using the word “elearning” instead of “e-learning” will definitely improve your website traffic!
[banner-bottom-eng]