Leading Education SEO Agency
SEO for Schools

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Schools is the strategic process of enhancing a school's online content to enhance visility when users search for you. By carefully writing, organizing, and structuring the material, as well as well as tactically aligning your activities off the website (e.g. on review sites, social media and more) it aims to elevate the visibility of your school in search engine results pages (SERPs) and gain meaningful website traffi. This optimization targets specific phrases and keywords that are most relevant to your potential users.

Just like SEO in the commerical world, SEO for educational institutions is done through several tactics. You'll get the best results when you combine technical SEO, on-page and, off-page activities. 

On-page SEO refers to everything you do on the specific webpage you're trying to get ranking in SERPs. The biggest component of this is making sure the content is comprehensive, readable, supplemented with rich media and imagery and, where appropriate, well sourced. 

Past that, it's important to make sure the content is keyword optimized (i.e. it's placed in key areas such as headings and urls where naturally appropriate). This helps search engine crawlers understand what your content is related to alongside other signals.

Off-page SEO is everything that happens off your website to encourage users to your site or specific page in question. This can include outreach to specific websites that are well regarded/read by parents to obtain backlinks. For example can you reach out to review sites or other education institutions, such as feeder schools for a link. This can also be suppoerted by building up a solid social media presence.

Technical SEO is the last piece to the puzzle. It can make all the difference when competing schools are already performing well in organic search. This practice refers to reviewing how your website performs technically. For example, ensure your site has the right security certificates. Also, make sure loading speeds are as fast as possible. 

Find out more in our SEO Strategies blog article

SEO is crucial for schools because—when executed correctly—it significantly enhance their online visibility and google ranks. This drives an increase in traffic from the right audiences, leading to higher enrollment rates.

SEO is often seen as a long-term effort. However, when done correctly and consistently, it can provide great benefits for schools. These benefits include:

• Reducing PPC costs for branded and local searches, making it a cost-effective marketing strategy.

• Diverting users from external content sources like third-party school ranking lists and review sites, thereby controlling the narrative around the school’s image.

This is why it's so important for schools to adopt SEO in house or hire a specialist SEO agency for schools. 

Implementing SEO for schools shares similarities with commercial SEO practices but is tailored to meet educational needs. Effective SEO strategy involves several key steps:

• Keyword Research: As a seasoned school marketer you'll already know a great deal about your audiences. Using current persona insights, you need to find the search terms users might type into search engines. This is when they look for your school or its competitors.

  If you have keyword research tools at your disposal, input your lists to delve into more data around semmantic variations, questions and more.  From there you can start to investigate search volumes for keywords, and 'difficulty' to prioritise which you should target on your website, and where!

• Content creation or revision: Align your keyword research with existing copy. If you spot gaps, you'll need to develop high-quality, informative content that addresses the needs and questions of your audience, incorporating the targeted keywords in a natural way. Black-hat SEO techniques haven't worked for years now, so it's important you prioritize your users and fulfilling their needs quickly and seamlessly.

• On-Page SEO: On individual pages, the target keyword should be present, where naturally appropriate; in headings, alt tags for images, the page url, links and rich media.

• Technical SEO: Next you'll need to ensure your website is technically optimized for SEO by improving site speed, mobile responsiveness, and usability best practices.

• Monitor and Optimize: Google Search Console, is a free and often under-rated tool. It's a great way to monitor the performance of your SEO efforts.

  One handy method is to check impressions for your optimized pages, and cross referencing which keywords are driving those impressions. These insights are often surprising and can help guide how to refine your page, to better align with user intent.

  While SEO tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush offer advanced features, they come with a cost and steeper learning curve. So you may want to consider a reputable education SEO agency can handle ongoing content optimization and performance reporting for you.

Whilst we often work closely with private schools in the UK and US, SEO for international schools (espcially those recently established) is essential for driving awareness in the crucial first few years of opening.

Competing establishments will often have higher authority websites, brand recognition, and more content! Whether you're starting with a brand new website or not, getting visibi

Search engines are designed to give users the most relevant and useful information possible. To do that they use automated programs called bots or spiders to discover and analyze web pages. They then use complex algorithms to determine which pages are most relevant to a user's query.

There are various factors and signals that influence how search engines rank your site - so if you're a school marketer, like any business wanting to thrive online, you'll need to give your web pages the best chance of ranking higher in search results by spending a little time on SEO.

This means creating content that aligns with what your primary audiences (fee payers, prospective students and parents), and secondary audiences (staff, existing parents and others) are searching for.

There are many signals and tactics you can use to improve your SEO such as:

• Relevance of content - First and foremost ensure your content matches the intent of the search queries
• Quality and depth - Content is still king, and you'll need to supply comprehensive useful infromation if you want to outrank competitors. 
• User friendliness
• Mobile-friendliness
• Page load speed
• Backlinks from reputable sources

• Clear site structure with logical navigation and descriptive URLs that include relevant keywords

• Implement an XML sitemap to guide search engines through your site

• Use robots.txt files to direct crawler behavior