A lot of you know that as a University we have a lot of words for things that can often be construed as jargon. What *we* call something at our University might not be what *everyone else* calls it.
Our site search statistics demonstrate this. Let’s talk about housing on campus. Most of us refer to the housing we offer here as “Residence Halls” or something thereabout. But when you talk to a current student or incoming student, they’ll refer to them as “dorms” or simply “housing.” So what do the search stats say?
Ranked #619: residence halls
Ranked #156: dorms
Ranked #24: housing
The problem with this is, the search term “residence halls” actually yields better results in the search. Mainly because we’ve created our content with how we refer to it at the forefront. When in reality, most people looking for this info are using either “dorms” or “housing” as their search terms.
So what’s the difference in how many people are performing these searches? Here are the number of people off campus searching with these terms (in a 4-month time period):
housing: 8,950
dorms: 1,366 (“dorm” singular yields another 317)
residence halls: 376
There you have it!
So what are some other things we might call something internally that folks outside the University are calling completely different? Filling this gap can make the website easier for people to use.
