9 Tips for School Website SEO
Parents want to find your website and enroll their children. Your school website needs to stand out in search engines, like Google. We’ll give you our top 9 tips for SEO for private school websites.
1. Fresh content
Search engines, like Google, notice when you regularly have fresh content. You don’t need to blog every day, but you should routinely have new content on your site. Find your routine and make a plan. That could be once a week or every other week.
2. Optimize Your Homepage
When visitors view your site, can they quickly find the name and type of school? Will visitors know what ages attend your school? Does your home page appeal to your ideal prospective student?
Link to recent blog posts and upcoming events from your homepage as well. This provides Google with strong internal linking.
3. Create Internal Links
As your school website grows, users will naturally want to navigate from one place to another. Give users an easy way to find any related information.
Aside from linking from your home page to other pages, you’ll also want to link within blog posts to other posts. On your open-house posts, share links to your admissions and registration pages. Link from one blog post to another when appropriate.
4. Identify Keywords
It may surprise you, but users often are not searching for the name of your organization. They may search for phrases like “bilingual preschool” or “kids cooking classes”. These are keywords.
Think like your audience. Make a list of the terms they might use that should bring them to your website. Then, look through the content on your site. Do you find those phrases anywhere? Now, go search on Google. Is your website turning up in the results?
It is also worth searching based upon the name of your business as well. Know what others have said about your school, who may be linking to you, and if any other groups have a similar name.
5. Consider Your Page Titles
Page titles are a place to use those keywords. Let’s say you have a Montessori school in the Washington D.C. area. Use the term Montessori School as a page title on your website, and use it in your content where it makes sense. Use the term “Montessori School in Washington DC” as an SEO Title on a key page on your website.
Share blog posts with specific terms that are related to your main focus. For the Montessori School, parents may also be searching for child-centered schools, cooperative play, or even individualized education. Use these terms in titles of blog posts.
You may have several pages (or posts) with nearly identical names. If you name them all the same, you may get “Duplicate Page Title” errors since Google doesn’t like when the titles match too much. When you have similar content, such as recurring open-house events, try to use slight variations on the name for events that are live at the same time to avoid confusion and improve your school website SEO.
6. Outline Your Pages
Sub-headings make your content more readable to your website visitors. They can also be a great way to use keywords and help search engines understand the content on your school website. Make it easy on yourself and your readers by using sub-headings.
7. Give Google Your School Website Blueprint
You want Google to know all the content on your school’s website. The best way to do that is to give Google a complete map of your site. Think of this as a blueprint. Your website can tell Google what pages are where, and update itself as soon as new pages are published. You can submit your sitemap to Google Search Console.
8. Measure Your Traffic
Keep an eye on what your private school website SEO and traffic looks like. You can learn details like what people searched for that led them to your website or what pages received the most traffic. Google makes this possible with Google Analytics. Compare your results once a month or every three months.
9. Get Help
Do what you do best – inspire children. We can help optimize your website content, track your results, provide coaching on ways to improve and help you compare your competition. Contact us to improve your private school website SEO.