by Jim Seavey, Massachusetts Maritime Academy Director of Sports Information & ComplianceBelow, Seavey offers some tips and advice on making your website more relevant and enhancing traffic flow to your site. He presented his viewpoints during the San Antonio Convention's Table Topics session.
For a school with less than 1,000 students, Massachusetts Maritime had over 170,000 unique visitors, over 920,000 pages accessed and 8.1 million hits in the first year of its new website.Download: Driving Traffic to Your Website (PDF)Institutional websites have quickly become the “window to the world” for each of our respective athletic departments and conferences. More often than not, data that is conveyed through athletic websites provides an important first impression to numerous audiences, whether it be media, prospective and current student-athletes, alumni, fans, parents, internal and external constituents and others.
The adage of “the more information, the better” applies somewhat to the explosion in athletic websites over the past 10 years, but it is the quality of that information or content is what will keep people coming back to it. Here are a few suggestions on how to drive traffic to your
website and to keep that traffic coming back and growing:
*KEEP THINGS FRESH
The quickest way to make sure that someone DOESN’T come back to your website is
to maintain stale information—news, notes, highlights, video, quotes or any other updates that you can provide on a constant basis will help establish and maintain a credible and loyal audience.
*USE OTHER MEANS TO COMMUNICATEYour audience isn’t going to know if you have new information on your website if you don’t let them know about it. Take advantage of today’s technology to get the word out, and you’ll undoubtedly be pleased with the results.
For example, use your campus e-mail system to alert internal constituents on breaking athletic news, notes and upcoming events, or use other established athletic websites as an external resource to help deliver your message and your product. Another example: College Fanz (
collegefanz.com) has become a great site that can help drive traffic to your institutional site, and there are others that may be sport-specific (Inside Lacrosse, D3Football, etc.) that can serve that purpose as well.
*USE SOCIAL MEDIA NETWORKS TO YOUR ADVANTAGEThe impact that Twitter, Facebook, You Tube, MySpace, Blogger.com and other social media networks/websites has had on college athletics in the last year alone has been staggering. Many schools have used these sites or tools quite effectively in getting their messages out as quickly as possible—some schools even use Twitter, for example, as if it were another version of “Live Stats”.
The danger, though, is relying on these sites in place of your own, and with the costs involved in maintaining athletic websites, I’m relatively certain that the decision-makers on your campus would like people going to your site rather than Twitter or Facebook to find out what’s going on in your department. I use Twitter and Facebook as tools to direct people to my athletic website, and I end every posting on both with a simple instruction of “go to www.mmabucs.com for more details”.
The results have been phenomenal—for a school with less than 1,000 students, Massachusetts Maritime had over 170,000 unique visitors, over 920,000 pages accessed and 8.1 million hits in the first year of its new website.
*A PICTURE IS WORTH A THOUSAND WORDS…Or in this case, maybe a 1,000 visitors. Image has become everything in the modern world of sports information, and the more images that you have on display, the better.
Action photos, head shots and other images not only enhance the quality of your site, they are also very helpful to the primary constituent of any sports information office—the media. If a newspaper is on deadline and would like to use a photo that you have on your site, you have made it very convenient for them, a fact that will not get lost in a relationship you have with them.
*TIMELINESS AND CREDIBILITY GO HAND IN HANDIf your audience knows that they are going to get things from you in a timely manner, and your presentation is both informative and valuable, you have gained instant credibility for your department and for your institution. Your campus decision-makers will recognize this
IMMEDIATELY.
One caution, though—do not sacrifice getting your message out to the media for getting your
message out FIRST. Remember, the sports information office has the primary duty to serve your FELLOW SID’S and the MEDIA first, so take care of them before you worry about whether or not Mom and Dad saw the box score 10 minutes after the game.
The sports information profession has adapted and changed to the times greatly over the past 20-plus years. Our profession has gone from a “read the score in the paper the next morning” business to one that provides a pitchby-pitch account of a baseball or softball game. And undoubtedly, as Bob Dylan once sang, “The times, they are a-changin” every day, so keep up with them. Your website is your institution’s window and newspaper—do all that you can to drive up the circulation on a daily basis.