What customers and purchasing are to a business, students and enrolments are to a school. Far beyond being the target market to sell to, students are who schools and educational institutions aim to establish relationships with. Given that, it’s also quite important that schools have good marketing tools, the best of which is SEO for your website.
Why SEO for education marketing?
Because you are marketing a centre for education, it’s essential that you are able to present yourself as professionally as possible. While other forms of digital marketing such as social media marketing and PPC advertising do a good job in putting you out there, there is no better way to establish your mission and vision as an educational institution than with a quality website that’s perfectly search engine optimised.
There are a myriad of ways to use SEO to your website’s marketing’s advantage. Here are some ideas to get you started:
Audit your website
Before starting optimisation efforts, it is best to “clean up” your website first to better ensure that things run smoothly. By auditing or cleaning up your website, you can identify issues that could possibly keep users and search engines from using or indexing your site as best as they could. This not only improves their being able to find your website, it also allows you to maximise the rest of your SEO efforts to follow.
Optimise your home page
Your homepage, apart from being the first thing that visitors encounter when they open your website, is a great place to start when optimising your website. The most important thing to ensure is that the keywords and your page title are correct.
The page title should be the name of your school, and ideally, keywords should be:
school name (i.e. St. Mary’s)
type of school (i.e. Primary School)
Mind your URLs
Similarly, it is also recommended that your page’s title match, or at least make up the core of, your URL. As the user browses through the different levels of sitemap, the URL should remain matched to the page title, although adapted to fit the current page they’re on. For example:
University of Sydney Main Homepage: https://sydney.edu.au/
University of Sydney Research Homepage: https://sydney.edu.au/research
University of Sydney Research Funding Page: https://sydney.edu.au/research/research-funding
This can come in helpful for higher education institutions such as universities which typically offer various types of courses, such as undergraduate, post-graduate, and certificate courses. The same goes for larger universities with a grade school or high school department.
Complete page titles and meta descriptions
Another important aspect of SEO for your school’s website are the page titles and meta descriptions. These are typically the elements that appear when your website appears among search results, which is why it is highly recommended that relevant keywords are included in them. Ensure that the search engine crawling your website gets the idea of what your content is so it can better analyse its relevance in connection to what is being searched for.
Keywords, keywords, keywords
If there is any great weapon that experienced SEO specialists will tell you to utilise, it’s keywords. Check which keywords refer the most traffic to your website. In doing this, it is best to ask:
What information your prospects are looking for in a school? Is it accessibility, or maybe even the availability of grants from the Department of Education?
How are they most likely to search for such information? Will they be including local terms or focus on broad search criteria?
You can make use of tools such as Google Analytics in exploring the best keywords to use in your web content and blog posts.
Successfully incorporating SEO into your education marketing
These quick tips are just for starters – there remains so much you do to optimise your website SEO-wise. Just as you would only take the best teachers into your institution of learning, it is also the wisest choice for you to work only with a reliable and experienced digital marketing consultant.
Better yet, when it comes to optimising your website, work with a consultant that understands your local market and knows how to reach them best.
Get in touch today and let’s discuss the online needs for your school.
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