Partner landing page requirements

• Why is it important?
• What should be on every partner landing page?
• What should partners avoid?
• FAQs

Partner landing pages are pages on the FutureLearn.com website which introduce learners and potential learners to each individual partner - it’s an opportunity to stand out from other partners and to demonstrate your institution’s reputation, expertise, and offering on a macro level (rather than on an individual course level). 

All of the partner landing pages are linked to from https://www.futurelearn.com/partners.

Why is it important?

• If this page is properly written and optimised, it will help your courses get more traffic and ultimately more enrolments. 
• This page is the online course equivalent of a prospectus introduction. 
• This page groups all of your courses - short courses, microcredentials, and degrees - in one place for people who are specifically interested in your institution.

What should be on every partner landing page?

• 250-350 words of unique text: it’s important that you have enough text on the page for good SEO. This text should not appear anywhere else on the internet, including your own website, as duplicate content is bad for SEO and will hinder the ranking of your partner landing page. 

• Details of your institutional offering: this is an excellent opportunity to discuss your university’s history, reputation, and career prospects that your graduates may enjoy. 

• Details of your online offering: given the course format, it’s also useful to mention your online offering, when your institution started offering online courses, and whether there are any interesting facts related to this activity (eg, being the first to offer a particular course online).

• Information on your educators and specialisms: learners and potential learners will be interested in your educators. If you have any particularly high-profile academics running your online courses, this is an excellent opportunity to mention them and their contribution.  

• Important keywords: some terms are searched for more than others online - mentioning these keywords can improve the chances that you rank for the search term, and could increase the amount of traffic your partner landing page receives. Important keywords for your partner page may include:
• Online courses
• MOOCs
• Lifelong learning
• Professional development
• Online degrees (if offered)
• Online MBAs (if offered)
• Distance learning 

In most cases, relevant content will naturally include important keywords but it’s worth considering these when writing your copy (especially the parts relating to your online offering). 

What should partners avoid?

• Duplicate content: do not copy/paste content from your institution’s ‘about’ page on the website to this section of the FutureLearn.com website - this will negatively affect your rankings, and will often contain content that is not relevant to the online learning experience (for example, information on your campus and facilities). 

• Irrelevant content: please ensure that the content on your page is relevant to the context and what you offer on the FutureLearn platform. For example, if your institution is world-renowned for engineering but you only offer psychology courses on FutureLearn, this information is not immediately helpful for learners. 

• Writing with keyword density in mind: a lot of online information about SEO is out of date, so if you Google ‘SEO tips’ you may come across information about keyword density (ie. how many times a keyword should be mentioned for good optimisation). This does not have a positive impact on SEO and it’s best to write naturally for human readers, rather than prioritising a particular density percentage.

FAQs

Does this page compete with our own website rankings? 

No - FutureLearn can’t outrank your website for your own brand name (and would not want to). We do, however, want to ensure that your partner page ranks well for searches that include your institution’s name with terms such as MOOCs, online courses, and online degrees to boost your enrolments. 

Why is SEO so important for these pages?

A large proportion of FutureLearn traffic and enrolments come from organic search, and we aim to grow that figure significantly. As a primary marketing channel, it delivers free traffic that is highly engaged and looking for courses to enrol in.