Top 10 Best Overall LMS Websites
… and what makes them so good.
This article was originally published on eLearning Industry
There are few markets as competitive as the Learning Management System market. There are no clear industry leaders, new vendors are popping up all the time, and many of them are willing to “give it away” to grab market share. Because of this, you have to do everything right to be competitive. Especially important is your marketing, your messaging, and your salespeople. If you’re mediocre in these areas, it becomes a contest of who can offer the lowest price.
Absolutely, the most important part of your LMS marketing plan is your website. If you were an old-time retail company, you could pretty much equate your website to a store-front and maybe even the store itself!
When buyers are searching for a new Learning Management System, or a learning experience platform, or whatever you call your learning technology, they visit your website first. They might have heard of you from someone else or met you at a trade show, but nine times out of ten your website is their first impression.
Think of it as your initial interview if you were looking for a job. The goal of the most interviewers is to find a reason to eliminate you and whittle down the list to the top two or three. It’s the same for buyers looking for an LMS. When they visit your site, they’re looking for a perfect fit. If you can’t show that fit, and even worse, if your site looks unprofessional, then it doesn’t matter how perfect a fit you are. They’re not going to contact you and you probably won’t ever know why.
So knowing how important your website is and how important it is for buyers to easily find your website, Lynne McNamee of Lone Armadillo and I set out on a quest to find which learning system companies have the best websites and the best SEO to generate incoming traffic.
Lynne and I are both veterans of the learning technology market and have spent much of our marketing careers helping companies develop better marketing plans, generating more leads and creating a web presence that generates more traffic and more sales.
But what Lynne and I did not know is which of the LMS companies were the best in the business. So, we spent the last six month researching the top 300 learning system companies: their websites, their messaging, their mobile presence, and most importantly, their ability to generate traffic through SEO.
Here’s what we found.
Top 10 LMS Websites For SEO
Nothing is more important than getting buyers to your website. If they don’t find your site, then nothing else really matters. Doesn’t matter how great your product is, how great your messaging is, or how well designed your site is. At the end of the day, half the battle is getting people to your site. When Lynne and I put together our overall website rankings, we weighted SEO as 50% of the score.
#1 LMS Website For SEO: Adobe Captivate
Top 10 LMS Websites For SEO
2. Blackboard LMS for Business
4. Schoology
5. Teachable
6. Safari
7. ProProfs LMS
9. Canvas
10. WizIQ
For the complete listing of the sites with the best SEO, read Top 10 Best LMS Websites For SEO
Top 10 LMS Websites For Content
Once you get buyers to your site, then you have to convince them that your product is the right fit for them. Of course, this is much harder than it sounds, but it’s much easier if you focus your message on who you really are. The biggest mistake most LMS companies make is trying to be all things for all people and not focusing on their real secret sauce. It’s not what you want to be, but what you really are that matters.
This shrinks down your potential market size, but it also eliminates most of your competitors and increases
your win rate exponentially.
#1 LMS Website For Messaging: Unboxed
Top 10 LMS Websites For Content
2. Talent LMS
3. Absorb LMS
5. Skilljar
7. Litmos LMS
10. Vowel LMS
For the complete listing of the sites with the best content, read Top 10 LMS Websites with the Best Content
Top 10 LMS Websites For Design
This may be counter intuitive, but we placed design behind SEO and messaging in our rankings because it’s just not as important at attracting buyers and turning them into opportunities. Don’t get us wrong. It’s important. There’s a minimum design-bar that you have to get over, or you give the impression that your company is young and sloppy. No amount of SEO and great writing will overcome that, but it’s really not that hard to achieve passable designs with so many website templates available.
That being said, some website designs are head and shoulders above the rest and achieve a powerful first impression as a modern software product.
#1 LMS Website For Design: Agylia
Top 10 LMS Websites For Design
1. Agylia
2. Vowel LMS
4. Eurekos
5. Docebo
6. Torch LMS
7. Kannu
8. WalkMe
10. DayOne Tech
For the complete listing of the sites with the best design, read Top 10 Best Designed LMS Websites
Overall Top 10 LMS Websites
When we started this research six months ago, our goal was to find the best of the best LMS websites. Going in, we assumed the best sites would be from the traditional big players who have huge marketing budgets like Cornerstone, Skillsoft, Saba, etc. or it could be one of the real up and comers who have big funding like Degreed, Axonify, Edcast, and Grovo.
But we were pleasantly surprised that there are a lot of LMS vendors who are doing amazing things with relatively small budgets. That should give everyone hope in the fact that it doesn’t take a huge marketing budget and a big staff of writers and designers to develop an effective website.
What it does take more than anything else is focus. Focusing on your website and the SEO necessary to generate traffic is more important than spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on advertising. That’s important too, but if the website isn’t right and the SEO isn’t right, most of that money is wasted.
We’re proud to announce the top 10 LMS websites!
Best Overall LMS Website: Schoology
1. Schoology
2. TalentLMS
3. Blackboard
4. Litmos LMS
6. Brainshark
8. Teachable
9. WizIQ
10. WalkMe
11. Skilljar
12. SumTotal
13. Workday Learning
14. iSpring Learn
15. Moodle
17. LearnDash
18. Lessonly
19. LearnUpon
20. Cornerstone
To see the complete list of the top LMS Websites and many more tips and tricks for building great websites, download the ebook now.
About the Author
Gordon Johnson has been a marketing leader in the corporate L&D industry for over twenty years. His specialty is developing transformative marketing strategies that generate qualified sales opportunities, employing the latest digital marketing channels, coupled with traditional techniques to achieve industry-leading brand awareness, widespread web presence and high-impact value propositions. Other marketing concentrations include content marketing, messaging, social marketing, positioning strategy, analyst relations, events, account-based marketing (ABM), email marketing, customer success and lead-generation. Contact Gordon.
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