Using your Catalog to Improve Community Visibility

Higher education institutions, particularly community colleges, can benefit tremendously from improved visibility within the surrounding community. With the growing availability of virtual degree paths, today’s students have an unprecedented number of options for where they complete coursework. When it comes to local institutions, many students turn to search engines such as Google or Bing to find course offerings, and colleges that have traditionally served their local community have more competition than ever — along with more opportunities. Optimizing your digital catalog for outreach and visibility can pay dividends.

Make Your Digital Presence Consistent

Many academic software platforms have limited customization options, resulting in publications that look nearly identical across different institutions. Clean Catalog Software has unlimited customization options, allowing your team to choose the layout, formatting, and site design of your catalog. Implementing your institution’s branding, color scheme, graphics, and photos on your catalog site is not only more visually appealing, but it strengthens your institution’s brand recognition. Having consistent branding across your digital publications is a great way to make your institution easily recognizable and more visible online.

Check out a few of the great-looking catalogs we've implemented for clients:

• Full Sail University
• Culinary Institute of America
• Georgetown College
• Sofia University
• Northwest Shoals Community College

Catalogs have often been treated only as official documents, but treating them as marketing tools as well can help you put your best foot forward with potential students. Read our blog post for more.

Improve Accessibility

Making sure that your digital catalog and publications are widely accessible is crucial for online visibility. Your catalog sites should not only be mobile-friendly, but feature a responsive site design that adjusts to fit all screen sizes. This ensures that your catalog never becomes distorted or difficult to navigate, no matter whether someone is using a cell phone, computer, or tablet. For those in the community without Internet access, Clean Catalog’s PDF generation tool makes it easy to print catalogs on demand. This tool makes it easier to distribute your catalog offline, while ensuring that it stays consistent with what is published online.

Maximize Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

On average, roughly 42% of the visitors to your course catalog will come from a search engine.

Ensuring that your catalog is search-friendly can make it much easier for people to find what they're looking for. Learn more about how we can SEO optimize your course catalog.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the most important aspect of improving your institution’s visibility. With so many prospective students using search engines to find relevant course offerings, it’s important for your institution to be listed high in search results. Optimizing your catalog sites with quick load speeds, responsive site designs, and HTTPS security is a great place to start. Clean Catalog software is optimized for search engines and ensures your catalog site adheres to SEO best practices. This enables your course and degree offerings to be easily found online, ultimately driving more traffic to your catalog site.

If you’d like to learn more about how Clean Catalog Software can improve your institution’s visibility online and within your community, feel free to reach out to us.