Echo Delta’s SVP of Strategy, Jarrett Smith, dives into the pervasive issue of ‘blah blah content’ on college and university websites. He discusses:
- The two main types of ineffective content
- The signs, symptoms, and dead-give aways that indicate you have blah blah content
- Practical solutions to create student-centric, usable, and memorable content for your .edu.
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Transcript
Jarrett Smith:
You’re listening to the Higher Ed Marketing Lab. I’m your host, Jarrett Smith.
Welcome to the Higher Ed Marketing Lab. I’m Jarrett Smith, SVP of Strategy at Echo Delta, and I’m glad you’re here.
Rather than our usual format where I interview a smart thinker from higher ed or the broader world of marketing, today I’m going to be flying solo and tackling a topic that is near and dear to my heart, which is blah-blah content on a college or university website. So, my hope is that if you’re struggling with content on your site, you feel like it’s boring, it’s too dense, or it just isn’t serving your visitors well, then this podcast is for you. So, let’s dive in.
Now, I’m sure we all have sort of an intuitive sense of what we mean when I say blah-blah content on your university website, but let me define it because I have a particular perspective on this and I want to make sure where I’m coming from.
When I say blah-blah content, they’re really two things that I think we’re talking about. The first kind of blah-blah content, and maybe it’s the kind that came to mind for you, is content that lacks creative punch. It’s the sort of generic stuff that every school says and it just washes over students. So you can think of things like, “Experience our vibrant student life,” or, “Your professors will know your name.” It’s the verbal wallpaper of higher ed. And we all recognize that it’s pretty generic, it’s pretty uninspiring. Pretty much everybody is saying the same sort of thing. And so when it comes to that kind of blah-blah content, absolutely we should do better, we should be more creative, and we should try and sort of banish that from our website.
But there is a second type of blah-blah content that I think is every bit as common, but I would argue is a lot more problematic, and it’s the content on your website that is so institutionally centric, so just relentlessly focused on pursuing the institution’s agenda that it completely loses track of what its intended audience actually wants and needs from the website. It’s content that suffers from a… I would describe it as like an institutional narcissism. It assumes that the people visiting your website are there to read whatever it is that you might have to say about your institution, and it doesn’t really respect the fact that people view your website primarily as a tool to get things done. They don’t typically arrive there to lazily browse through pages and cozy up to your brand for an hour or two.
This kind of content, I think, is way worse than just being bland because I think it actively makes it harder for visitors to accomplish the things that prompted them to visit your website in the first place. Like if there was a Hippocratic Oath for this content, it would fail because it is actively doing harm.
Now, I know firsthand that this kind of institutionally centric content exists, and you might as well, because, well, we see it everywhere on higher ed websites. And I know at our agency, Echo Delta, we do a lot of website redesigns, and we see this stuff all the time. It’s really the second kind of blah-blah content, the stuff that I think is really problematic, that we’re going to be focusing on first and foremost today.
Now, if you’re not sure how much of this kind of content you might have on your website, I’m going to quickly help you diagnose what you’ve got. And to do that, I’m going to give you sort of a greatest hits list of things to look for based on my experience.
So the first thing, we’ll start with something kind of basic. I want you to go through your website and just look for walls of text, so lengthy paragraphs of uninterrupted copy on your web pages. And if you’re not sure where to look, I would start, actually, by going to your about section. This is sort of a frequent offender when it comes to walls of text. Go to your about section either for your institution or if you are a larger institution that has a significant web presence for your individual colleges or academic units, you can go there, too. You’re going to typically see very similar things, lengthy paragraphs outlining mission statements, institutional history, irrelevant greetings from the dean or from the president. Those are all classic places where you’re going to find those walls of text.
Now, after that, I would go check out your admissions and cost and aid section, or maybe even some of the program pages, especially for health-science-related programs, like nursing or surgical tech or something like that. You’re going to look for a couple of things. Number one, in those sections, I want you to look for content that assumes that the reader is already quite familiar with the org structure, processes, acronyms, and just overall jargon of higher ed. The dead giveaway here would be any language that you would never in a million years think to say to an actual student who is face-to-face with you in real life. And you wouldn’t say it because it’s not natural and it’s so plainly institutional, like you just couldn’t imagine actually talking this way to someone. If you find that kind of content, that is the kind of blah-blah content that I’m talking about.
In the same vein, I want you to go through and look for content that’s exhaustively thorough and accurate, even though the average prospective student or even maybe the adults in their life really aren’t going to understand this or even know what to do with it.
A good example, I was once engaged with a school that was asking if they should maybe publish their articulation agreements so that prospective transfer students could read them and understand how their credits might transfer to the institution. Now, the answer to this question is, no, you should not publish this on your website if the primary audience that you’re trying to reach is prospective students.
If you’re trying to reach counselors or somebody else who knows what an articulation agreement is and knows what to do with it, that’s fine. But if you’re hoping that you’re going to put this in front of transfer students and they’re going to find this valuable and helpful, it’s not really a good move. Because if you actually talk to transfer students, they will tell you that, one, most of them don’t even know what an articulation agreement is. If they do, they aren’t actively seeking it. And then for the few that actually find an articulation agreement, they will tell you, “Yeah, I looked at it, but I didn’t even have confidence that I knew how to interpret this or what it actually is.” So, that is an example of content that is exhaustively thorough, technically accurate, but not truly useful to the audience. So, be on the lookout for content that is overly thorough and accurate.
Now after you’re done with those assignments, you probably found some stuff. But if not, I would start scanning across your site. I want you to look for a couple of things. Look for bloated FAQ pages. Look for bloated quick links sections. And look for pages that are bloated with accordions. Higher ed loves accordions because they’re such a great way to tuck away just masses and masses of content. And when you roll up on a page that has 28 accordions, you know you’re in trouble, and we have seen them many times. So, look for just general content bloat.
Second, I would look for sort of the self-congratulatory content that brags about how great the institution is, but doesn’t really explain how those things actually benefit students. So, look for that kind of content.
And then lastly, again, I would circle back and look for content that you would never in a million years actually say to a prospective student face-to-face because it’s so institutional, so technical you would just know instantly they’re not going to understand what I’m saying.
Now, if any of these things ring true, it suggests that you have a website that is operating from an institutionally-centric rather than a student-centric point of view. So again, sort of a nice way of saying you have a website that’s a bit narcissistic.
Now, I want to acknowledge that that is not because the people behind the website are narcissistic. In every case, I have found that the people behind the EDU are… They’re almost always super genuine, caring folks that want to do right by students and their families. But somewhere along the way, whether it was from limited bandwidth or lack of resources or maybe just the highest paid person’s opinion, overruled what they were thinking, the website started to get off track. If that’s your situation, no judgment, no shame, no blame.
I want to say being consistently student oriented is hard, and it’s the default mode for everyone. We all tend to create and organize content with a relentless focus on our own agenda, not because we don’t care about anyone else, but because, frankly, it’s what we know best.
So, how do we begin to do better? Well, I think it comes down to getting a handful of things right. First, we need to do the work of grounding ourselves in who our priority audience is and what’s important to them. Now, as we all know, typical college or university site needs to serve multiple user groups. So prospective students, yes, but also faculty, and staff, and alumni, and donors, and the community, and potentially legislators, and people that want to do business with the university. There’s a lot of potential user groups there.
It may sound super basic, but if you haven’t already done so, you need to first acknowledge that you can’t serve them all equally well and that one of them ultimately needs to be the top priority because they may, at times, have conflicting needs and somebody’s got to be the tiebreaker. Somebody’s got to win.
So for most of the schools that we work with, they don’t have a hard time realizing that prospective students are their top priority audience first and foremost. Now, once you have that top-priority audience, then we sort of need to set about the project of understanding what they want and need from our site.
Now, I personally have noticed that a lot of times people default to trying to get to know their audience by looking in their web analytics. So they go into GA4, whatever tool that they’re using, and they start combing through that to see if that’s going to give them clues to what their audience wants and needs. And I get it, web analytics is theoretically measuring everything that happens on your website. But in practice, I find that web analytics really only gets you so far. So, yes, it can show you things like site search queries, which are super helpful. It can show you engagement rates on pages. That is good to know. It can let you segment your data in super interesting ways.
But the problem with analytics is that it tells you what is happening, but it doesn’t tell you why it’s happening. It tells you, for instance, that maybe the average visitor looks at three pages on your site, but you don’t know if that’s because they’re arriving at your site, they can’t find what they need, they click around, and then just bail out or if they arrive on your site, they very efficiently find what they need, and then they leave a happy customer. You don’t know because web analytics is not an answer machine.
To get the sort of real answers that are really going to help you improve your content, the best thing you can do is get out from behind the desk and actually engage with users. Talk to them. Run a survey. Watch them use your website. Spending half a day engaging with your actual visitors is going to be 10 times more illuminating than clicking around in GA4.
Now, there are a lot of really great qualitative and quantitative options out there. If you go down the sort of rabbit hole of user research, tons of really helpful secondary resources and user research out there as well that is higher ed specific. But one of my favorite research tools is something called top task analysis. And if you’re not familiar with top tasks, it’s a survey method that can help you understand what content matters most to your website visitors.
So when you run a top task survey, you will almost always find that it’s really a relatively small number of tasks, maybe five or 10 things that account for a disproportionate number of site visits. So if you’re trying to optimize your site for, say, prospective students, the top tasks are going to be things like finding a relevant degree program, estimating what it’ll cost to attend your college, scheduling a visit, that sort of thing.
So doing something like a top task survey and, even better, combining it with user interviews and some better secondary research that’s out there, you’re going to start to be able to make some very practical and tactical decisions about your site. If you haven’t done that sort of thing before, you are going to start having all sorts of ideas of ways to improve the content on your website.
You’ll know for example, that when it comes to the financial aid section of a college site, just finding the FAFSA code is a big deal for prospective students. So if it’s buried in the body tax of a FAFSA page, which it oftentimes is, that can create a stumbling block for those students. So you can use what you have learned through your research to make a persuasive case to do something better. Maybe put that FAFSA code in a big bold call-out right at the top of your FAFSA page. Or maybe even promote it to the front page of your financial aid section.
That’s just one example, right? But the larger point I’m trying to make is that the more work you’ve done to systematically understand your audience, the better position you’re going to be in to stay focused on how to serve them best, because you’ll actually have data. And, bonus, you’re going to be better armed to fend off some of the institutional politics and just general noise that can take you off track. Because again, you actually have data and a sound rationale for doing what you’re doing.
Now, the second thing you need to do is take a hard look at the usability of your content. And by usability, what I’m really talking about is the subjective sense your readers have that your content is helpful and easy to use. That can sound a little loosey-goosey, but there is some great research out there on usability from folks like Nielsen Norman Group and others, and they can tell you a lot about the kinds of things that can help and hurt the usability of your content.
Now, a lot of the standard advice around content usability is going to tell you to do things to make your content more scannable, things like chunking page content into digestible pieces and making judicious use of headings, and bullet points, and the content blocks available to you in your CMS. But here’s the thing, well-organized, nicely-laid-out blah-blah content is still blah-blah content. So, we really need to go a level deeper to start to actually fix your content.
I would suggest, and you may already do something like this in your own process, but anytime you create a page or you are evaluating a page, you need to start by asking yourself two questions. Number one, what are my visitors trying to do when they land on this page? Which you know from the research that you’ve done, right? And then second, what is the fastest way I can help them accomplish that?
So, we know that students aren’t coming to read 500 words from your president. They’re not there to read your self-congratulatory selling points. So, why do we put those things front and center and prioritize those above the things our users are actually hoping to do? When they arrive at your site, they’re looking for answers. They want to check out your computer science major, they want to look up application deadlines. They want to see what on-campus dining is available. So, step back and think about how you can make that as straightforward as possible.
Now, one of the essential pieces here is that the actual language on your page matters a lot. And part of what you need to do to make it more usable is to reduce the overall length of content on your page and make sure you’ve simplified it into something that a first-gen student and their parent can easily understand without sacrificing the necessary accuracy.
Nielsen Norman Group, I mentioned them just a moment ago, they recommend making your web content something like 50% the length of what it would be on a printed page. So if you’ve got bloated content, then you need to shorten it. And see if you can cut it in half but still retain all that same meaning.
The good thing is we’re in 2025. We have copious large language models and AI tools that can help with this. And this sort of task would be troublesome for a human. It would take some really careful editing. You can load this into your LLM of choice and it will spit something out that’s probably going to be 10 times better than what you already had just by asking it to shorten it up. So, there’s literally no excuse to do this.
Now, aside from length, you also really need to think carefully about simplifying the language across your site. Obviously, this can sometimes be a bit of a challenge for higher ed. We have highly educated subject matter experts who may be weighing in on our program pages and the rest of our content, but research shows that even people with advanced degrees want their website content to be written in just very plain, straightforward language. And again, that’s because when we visit a website, even if you have a PhD, you’re there to accomplish tasks, not read complicated prose, so we have to resist the urge to overcomplicate things when simpler language is available.
One of the fastest ways to do that is something I learned from a previous podcast guest, Ben Guttmann. He’s the author of a book called Simply Put. Just a fantastic book on simplifying content. And we talked about this on the episode, but what you can do is when you are writing content, restrict yourself to using only the 1,000 most commonly used words in the English language. These lists are super easy to find online. And doing this as a game changer. It’ll instantly make your content better.
Now, again, since it’s 2025, doing that is super easy. You can go to your LLM of choice, upload this list of a thousand words, tell it, basically, to rewrite the content that you put in there using only those thousand words, and it is instantly going to be better. It’s going to get rid of all that pretentious fluff and replace it with simpler, more understandable language.
Now, there is a chance that what you end up with is actually too simple, it lacks accuracy, there’s some important vocabulary where there aren’t necessarily better synonyms or easier ways to say it, it’s just a little bit inherently complex. That’s not a problem. One tip I have is just give that AI a little bit of wiggle room. Tell it that it can choose 10 or 20 words off that list that it can use where simpler alternatives just aren’t available. And if you do that, I guarantee you’re going to have language that is a lot crisper and, most importantly, more useful. And then, if you want to go back and add some of that creative flair that we were talking about, it’s a lot easier because you’re very focused on being clear. And then you can circle back and add a little bit of cleverness to it and punch it up a bit.
Now, the final thing we need to do to avoid blah-blah content is to focus on making our claims real for students. So, let me give you an example of a website that we audited a few years ago. So as part of our audit, we looked at the career services section. And in that section there was this little block of text that talked about some of the resources that could help students choose a good career and even help them choose their major. The block said basically this. It said, “Computer-administered surveys are available to students. The interpretation of these surveys is delivered in a group or individual setting. There is no charge for Focus 2 or Myers-Briggs Type Indicator surveys.” So setting aside the very clinical tone, if a student walked into the career services office and said, “Hey, can you help me choose a career?” You would never talk to somebody like this, right?
I think the other really big miss here is that it doesn’t do anything to explain the value to students. And the value is real. What it should say is, “Hey, come in, and for free we’re going to help you learn about yourself and your interests so that you can make better decisions about your major and your career path.” Who wouldn’t want that?
So when I say make it real, what I mean is I want you to make sure that every time you brag about your institution, or even just talk about some of the basic features of your institution, I want you to really focus on tying that back to how it actually benefits students. If you’re highly ranked, that’s awesome. How does it benefit students? If you do holistic advising, cool. That’s great. How does it benefit students? If you have, I don’t know, 1,400 acres of woodlands on your campus, that’s great. How does it benefit students? It seems so basic, but I see this get missed all the time.
Another way I think to approach this, another way to peel this eggplant, is to think ab
out proving what you say. And that’s a really cool way, I think, to push beyond some of the table stakes stuff that everyone else is talking about.
So, don’t just say that you have small class sizes and that your professors really value teaching. Talk about how your faculty have been awarded for exceptional teaching. Like, prove it. Don’t just say that you have a vibrant student life with something for everybody. Add a video or a reel of the psychotic student section at the big game. Prove it. Don’t just say that 95% of your grads have a job within six months. Show the logos of the companies that are hiring your graduates. Making it real is going to go a long way towards helping you stay focused on the right things and making you memorable and different from what many other institutions out there are saying.
So, those are my three tips. There we have it. Three ways to banish blah-blah content from your website forever. I hope this was helpful. I hope it sparked some new ideas.
And if you like today’s show, want to talk about it more, reach out. Let’s connect on LinkedIn or shoot me a message at jarrett@echodelta.co. That’s J-A-R-R-E-T-T @echodelta.co. I’d love to hear from you. Thanks for listening.
The Higher Ed Marketing Lab is produced by Echo Delta, a full-service enrollment marketing agency for colleges and universities of all sizes. To see some of the work we’ve done and how we’ve helped schools just like yours, visit echodelta.co.
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