3 Ways to Optimize Your School Website

It’s surprisingly difficult to find examples of school websites that are actually designed to rank well in search.

And despite the fact that students, parents, and faculty use a school’s website regularly to find necessary information, many educational institutions fail at presenting the content in a way that is easy to locate and digest.

This holds true for private preschools all the way to the higher education level.

Not only do current students and their families use the school website to learn about things like after-school programs and changes to the curriculum, prospective students might want to ascertain whether or not they might want to attend by visiting the website before applying.

A website acts as a person’s first impression of a school in many cases, so having a poorly designed site can actually decrease someone’s opinion about the school’s ability to provide quality education, which is obviously a huge problem.

Fortunately, if you’ve been looking to optimize your school website, you’ve come to the right place.

Here are 3 website optimization tips that you can implement for your school right away to increase your chances of ranking at the top of the search results and appeal to your target audience with the right content and design.

Let’s get to it.

Keywords

The words and phrases that people enter into the search engine are called keywords (more on that in our beginner’s SEO guide for schools). Google and other search engines use these keywords to determine the most relevant pages to show the searcher.

And at this point in the race to the top of the results page, most highly searched keywords are extremely competitive, especially in the education industry. This means that there is pretty much zero chance for you to rank for a competitive keyword without having a clearly defined plan to “go after” that keyword.

So, before you decide what content you want to add to your school website, you need to identify your best keyword opportunities by doing keyword research.

This process begins by looking at things like how often your potential target keywords are searched by your target audience, how competitive the keywords are (how many other institutions are trying to rank for the same words and how much authority do they have in), and which terms will result in the most revenue for your education business.

Your School’s Keyword Strategy: Things to Remember

• Keywords in the education space may be competitive, but there are still opportunities to be had. Do your research to identify your best ranking opportunities and plan your content strategy around targeting those terms.
• Use free tools like Keywords Everywhere to see search volumes, related terms, and CPCs. This will help you see where your greatest chances for ranking lie.
• Don’t forget about managing your local listings and optimizing for local SEO. Most private school students will live within a 10-mile radius of their chosen school, while only 11% of college students venture more than 500 miles.

Content

The arguably most important piece of the website optimization puzzle is content.

The design of your site should allow for effortless consumption of your content and be structured in a way that provides viewers easy access to what they are looking for. Not only does design play into your site’s usability, but the content itself must also be engaging, strategic, and above all, relevant to your audience.

This means thinking about the person on the other end and deciding what topics to cover, what mediums to use, and how to create the most valuable experience for them.

Many schools have had success with video marketing, as this format has proven time and time again to be more engaging than image and text-based content.

Creating videos and embedding them within your web pages and blog posts has two key advantages:

• Longer time on page, and,
• Better user experience.

Not only that, YouTube is owned by Google so you can increase your chances of ranking in search by creating and uploading educational videos, student testimonials, or virtual campus tours to YouTube as well as embedding the videos on your website.

Just make sure you understand how to optimize your YouTube videos by including keyword-rich headlines, descriptions, and tags.

Web Content Strategy for Schools: Things to Remember

• The way your website is designed should allow for easy content consumption, and the content you include should be relevant to your audience, strategically planned, and presented in a way that is easy for visitors to find and understand.
• Don’t just write a couple of blog articles and call it a day. Video has been proven to increase engagement and help education brands tell their unique stories. Videos uploaded to YouTube can rank well in search, thus increasing your likelihood of being found.
• Think about your personas when creating content. Schools and higher education institutions will often have multiple audiences to speak to, not just parents or students.

Backlinks

You can have a great keyword strategy, an optimized website structure, and all of the best content in the universe, but you’ll be leaving a critical SEO component off the table if you forget about building backlinks.

Good backlinks are worth their weight in gold, and here’s why.

When deciding which pages should rank for what keywords, search engines don’t just look at the text on the page. They also take into account the number of external links pointing to that page from trusted websites.

If you have a lot of backlinks from high-quality websites, this is a signal to the search engine that your website is trustworthy, relevant, and valuable to searchers.

As a general rule, the more websites that link to you, the better your chances are to rank well in the search results. Of course, spammy backlinks from low-quality sites can hurt your SEO, so you have to be conscious of who is linking to you.

And while backlink outreach is another time-consuming process, getting those links is paramount for improving your search rankings.

Building Backlinks for Your School Website: Things to Remember

• Backlinks from high-quality websites are a signal to search engines that your website is trustworthy, and your content is of value.
• Identify relevant websites and reach out to them to see if they will link to your site or content.
• If your school is covered by the media, make sure you ask them to link to your school in their article. News outlets typically have very high domain authority, so the more, the better!

Website Optimization for Schools: Final Thoughts

While ranking on the top of page one in Google is super important if you want your school website to be found, website optimization is about more than just your position on the search results page.

The keywords you choose to target, the way you set your website up, the content you create, and the story you ultimately choose to tell on your site will all have an impact on how prospective and current students perceive your brand.

Thinking about how you can not only optimize for search, but also for user experience, student happiness, and brand equity will set your school apart from the rest of the pack by a long shot. 

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Loved this article? Read the full version on the Hearst Bay Area blog here.