John Zhu

In 2019, I developed a new section on the Duke Graduate School website aimed at prospective graduate students who were looking for advice on the what, where, when, why, and how of evaluating and applying to graduate programs. The goal was to draw more prospective students to our website early in their graduate school search process and to help reinforce the Duke Graduate School’s status as a leader in the field.

Our competitive analysis suggested that there were few top-tier educational institutions that offered high-quality, objective information aimed at helping prospective students choose a graduate school rather than trying to convince them to choose a particular graduate school. That identified a potential niche for us to provide good, useful content backed by Duke's strong reputation, established credibility, and significant domain authority.

I created a content framework consisting of six main buckets of information:

1. The difference between master’s and Ph.D. degrees
2. What to look for in a graduate program
3. Where to find information about graduate programs
4. Tips on creating a strong application
5. Advice from students, alumni, and faculty
6. Questions to ask a graduate program during an interview

Working with an intern, we adapted content from existing materials and created new content where needed. Launched in 2020, this content has served its purpose very well. It consistently ranked in the top three results on SERPs for the most relevant search terms. Collectively, the pages in this section ranked in the top 10 on our site in terms of pageviews, and most of those views were coming via organic search, delivering a significant amount of top-of-funnel traffic that we otherwise would not have had.

More on how we developed this content