SEO For Schools: A Step By Step Guide

In today's digital age, a strong online presence is crucial, especially for schools. With so much competition, ensuring your school ranks high on search engines is essential. That's where SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) comes in.

Don't worry! This guide will walk you through each step of improving your school's SEO. Completing these steps will increase your school's visibility whilst building trust and credibility, resulting in more applications. 

1. ANALYSIS

Conducting an SEO audit is a crucial first step, often overlooked by beginners. An SEO audit provides a comprehensive analysis of your websites current performance, identifying issues and areas for improvement.

Jumping into optimisation without a clear understanding of your sites strengths, weaknesses and opportunities can lead to wasted effort and possibly further harm to your rankings.

Your audit should also include a competitive analysis to identify what other schools are doing well and where you have opportunities to outperform them.

This might sound overwhelming, but help is on hand! There are many tools available to assist with website audit.  

2. KEYWORD SEARCH

Keywords are the foundation of SEO. The aim of a keyword search is to identify what information people are searching for and what they are typing into their search engine.

When conducting a keyword research it is important to consider what your audience is seeking as well as what sets your school apart from its competitors. For example, if your school has unique sports facilities, consider what a parent who's child is interested in sports will be typing into their search engine. It is also important to consider trigger phrases- arguable the most common trigger phrase used when searching for schools is 'best'. Whether that be the best school in a particular county or the school with the best sports facilities, parents are always seeking the best for their children.

There are many methods for conducting keyword research. You can explore this further yourself or opt for leveraging a variety of free and paid tools designed to do the hard work for you.

3. WEBSITE OPTIMISATION

There are multiple tools available to test your website speed, many of which are free to use. Google's analysis of your website's speed contributes to how your website ranks, so using their own tool Google Page Speed Insights seems logical.

Google considers page load speed and mobile friendliness important ranking factors. Page speed also effects user experience and conversion rate.

There are several actions you can take to improve your website speed such as reducing the size of images and files.

4. OPTIMISE LOCAL SEARCH 

Since most people searching for schools are likely to be looking in a specific area, local SEO is vital. There are several ways you can optimise your local search, here are the top three:

• Claim and optimise your Google My Business profile- If a parent searches 'Schools in X location' Google will pull through the business information from Google My Business profiles of schools in that location. Make sure, when creating your profile, to include accurate information such as your schools address, phone number and website.
•  Use local keywords- Make sure to use location-specific keywords in your content. Examples include, 'boarding school in Cambridge' or 'bilingual school in London'.
• Contact information page- Ensure that your schools name, address and phone number are all listed together on one webpage.

5. ON PAGE SEO

On page SEO involves optimising individual webpages to improve their search ranking. There are multiple elements to consider when it comes to on page SEO: image optimisation, page titles, headers, meta descriptions, internal linking and page URLs.

6. OFF PAGE SEO

Off page SEO refers to actions taken outside of your schools website to improve it's ranking.

Ultimately, off page SEO works to build trust and credibility to your schools website causing search engines to deem it a valuable source of information.

As with on page SEO, there are multiple elements to consider: link building, social media, local news mentions, podcasts and forums.

7. MONITOR AND ADJUST 

SEO is an ongoing process, to ensure you're heading in the right direction, regular monitoring is essential.  It is important to monitor metrics such as: organic traffic, bounce rate and keyword ranking. There are tools available to assist with monitoring.

By regularly reviewing you SEO performance, you can adjust strategies to improve results.

By following this step-by-step guide and delving deeper into some of the strategies mentioned, you can successfully improve your schools ranking on search engines. Increasing your schools visibility whilst building trust and credibility will undoubtedly result in more parents enquiring about your school.

SIMILAR BLOGS:
⭐ Using HubSpot for SEO in Education

⭐ SEO tools within HubSpot CRM, and why colleges should use them

⭐  Digital platforms: Is your content the right content?