From K-12 to Grad School, All Schools Can Benefit from SEO
If your school is struggling to bring in more students, it can be hard to do so if your website isn’t getting search engine optimization (SEO) tactics applied to it across the board. From your content, to your links, and more, there are various areas of your site that could likely benefit from SEO.
Ways Schools Should Utilize SEO
Check out these techniques you should try:
Program Pages
While this applies more to higher education, children’s schools could still take some tactics from this approach as well. Given that internet users will be looking for schools that offer specific programs, it is important that you tend to those pages on your site by applying basic SEO principles to them.
However, K-12 could also apply this to special education or other enhanced learning programs they offer that other schools may not.
Our checklist for on-page SEO can help you evaluate different areas of your program pages to give special attention too.
Blog Posts
From helpful content for students or parents, to informational articles about activities going on at your facility, a blog can open the door to help bring more traffic, and potential students, to your site.
Blogs can also help you create content with keywords that you can’t quite fit into your normal inner pages, especially long-tail keywords!
Location Pages
Whether it be you have satellite locations, or various branches of your school system, having location pages can allow you to add in a variety of keywords that can help users find their site based off their searches.
Because no matter what grade range you teach, location can be a big factor in determining where students apply and enroll in. Whether it be families moving to a new area exploring both private and public options, or a college student debating staying close to home or going out of state, location can be key.
Google My Business
Speaking of location, it is important that you utilize your location pages by using them in your Google My Business (GMB) profiles, and you further optimize your GMB profile so it has higher probability of showing up for local searches such as “schools near me” or “colleges in Columbus.” Here are the different areas of your profile you should make sure you are paying attention to:
- Business name
- Categories
- Reviews
- Review responses
- Services
- Photos
- Videos
- Posts
Reviews, services, and posts are all something to keep a close eye on especially because these are 3 areas that Google will pull in information from to show as a snippet in results:
(Review snippet result shown above for “art college near me” query)
Local Link Building
Does your school partner with other local businesses? Or have you been featured in local news articles? No matter the situation, there are likely a wide variety of opportunities for your website to get more backlinks from other local businesses that can help strengthen your site.
