Local SEO (search engine optimisation) is essential for boosting your school’s visibility online, ensuring local families searching for educational options find you among the top-ranked establishments.
But knowing its important isn’t the same as knowing how to do it, so this article aims to help fill your knowledge gaps and provide an easy, step-by-step guide to dominating your local search results.
1. Optimise Your Google Business Profile
Your Google Business Profile is the easiest way to rank in local search results. But having one isn’t enough – for best results, you need to optimise it.
Here’s how to do that:
- Create a Google Business account to claim and optimise your Google Business Profile.
- Complete each section, but ensure your school’s name, address, phone number, and website are filled out straight away. The category and attributes, from the business, Q&As, and products and services sections require more time and effort.
- Double check your contact information as any discrepancies will flag as inconsistencies, putting you lower on the SERP (search engine results page).
- Write the “from the business” section, ensuring you put key information within the first 250 characters, repurpose content from your school’s website, and use keywords that parents/students use to search for local schools.
- Add photos to your Business Profile via your Google My Business account dashboard. This will boost engagement, build trust, and prove credibility.
- Post to your Google Business Profile about announcements, open days, events, awards, and more.
2. Use Local Keywords Across Your Website
Your website doesn’t just need to entice students and parents who’ve already found it; it needs to read well to Google’s crawlers, too (i.e., the algorithm that ensures you rank highly on the SERP). As such, you should use specific keywords (such as, “primary school in London” or “secondary school in Milton Keynes”) across your website to boost local visibility.
Focus keywords in your page titles, meta descriptions, headers, and body content, but be careful not to overdo it – Google’s crawlers negatively receive overusing keywords (called keyword stuffing). Aim for a density of 0.5-2% in content and copy.
3. Build Local Citations and Backlinks
Both local backlinks and citations play a key role in skyrocketing you up the rankings and improving visibility on Google Maps. But to understand how to build them, you need to know what they are:
- Local citations are mentions of your school’s name, address, and phone number on local directories or media sites, even if they don’t use a link to your website.
- Local backlinks are links from other websites in your area that point to your business site (i.e., provides a clickable link).
Establishing both takes time but is worthwhile. Here’s how to go about…
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Building Citations |
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4. Encourage and Manage Parent Reviews
The competitive nature in education isn’t slowing down. So much so that parent reviews might be the only thing separating your school from one down the road. As such, you need to encourage said reviews and manage them accordingly. Doing this well empowers your establishment to build trust with prospective parents, enhance your online reputation, differentiate your school, drive enrolment, and ultimately, dominate the SERP.
The first step — encouragement — is arguably the hard part, but with some simple tweaks outlined below, you can improve the chances of parent reviews:
- Simplify the process to ensure leaving reviews is effortless.
- Ask for a review at the right time, such as shortly after positive interactions at parent-teacher conferences, milestones, and events.
- Use multiple platforms, including Facebook, your website, education review sites, and Google My Business.
- Showcase reviews creatively, such as in newsletters, social media posts, in banners on your website, and in video testimonials.
Finally, you can employ these tips to maximize the impact of your review gleaning and managing efforts:
- Take advantage of your Google Business Profile.
- Automate review requests, particularly after key events.
- Ensure your reviews sit proudly on your website by using widgets and creative formats.
- Conduct quarterly surveys to garner deeper insights.
- Monitor metrics to find out what works and what doesn’t.
5. Create Local Content that Builds Trust
Content marketing is a tried-and-tested way to boost your search result ranking. Write blog posts, resource pages, and articles that discuss local concerns, events, and other topics families in your community care about. This can include posts like, “Why Choose a Public School in [Town],” “The Benefits of Forest School in [Neighbourhood]”, or “[City] Summer Camps in 2026.”
6. Track Your Performance and Refine Your Strategy
After implementing the above local SEO practices, tracking performance is essential as it allows you to change things that aren’t providing the desired results. Use Google Search Console, and Google Analytics to monitor organic search traffic, most useful keywords, and click-through rates.
On top of that, keep updating your website’s content, SEO practices, and profile listings as time goes on to stay competitive. After all, local SEO for schools is an ongoing process!
6 Local SEO Tips for Schools
Local SEO is your school’s one-way ticket to improved online visibility. The next time a parent/student searches “schools in [Place],” you’ll be proud to see your establishment within the top results. Keep at it, and you may well sit at the number one spot!
If you’re looking to increase pupil admission numbers, get in touch to learn about our school website design or marketing services.
