Performing a thorough SEO audit for your school is essential to ensure that your school is easily found on search engines and that the correct information is coming up. However, a full audit can be time-consuming. Here are 5 quick and easy things you can do to improve your school website’s SEO right now.
Improve your school website’s SEO in 5 steps
- Audit your keywords
- Check your website speed
- Use Google My Business
- Check your reviews
- Optimise your images
Step 1: Audit your keywords
Use a tool like Moz, Semrush or Keyword Finder to check which keywords your school’s website is ranking for and spot any opportunities to improve.
For example, if you rank well for “Central London School” but “Central London Prep” is nowhere to be seen, that’s a keyword you can focus on in the future.
Step 2: Check your website’s speed
Did you know that a two second increase in page load time can lead to a bounce rate increase of 32%? That’s significant.
You can check your website’s speed with Google PageSpeed Insights Tool, which also provides recommendations of what to do to improve it.
Step 3: Google My Business
Google My Business is a free and easy-to-use tool for businesses to manage their online presence across Google, including Search and Maps.
This is key for schools because all your listings need to be up to date and correct, not only for your reputation but so that any prospective parents can find the information they need.
Here’s a Google My Business checklist:
- Do you have a GMB listing? If so, is it claimed and verified?
- Is all business information present and correct?
- Do you have multiple reviews and a high cumulative rating? Are you responding to reviews?
- Do you have appropriate business categories listed?
- Do you have images of the business?
- Have you created any GMB posts?
- Are you participating in the Questions & Answers section?
Step 4: Check your reviews
You probably know how important reviews are for stores, restaurants and other services, but did you know that good reviews can hugely help schools too? Good reviews solidify your school’s digital presence, build a good reputation and give your customers a place to share feedback.
Google also picks up the keywords people use in their reviews, so it affects SEO.
Step 5: Optimise your images
A quick audit of the images on your site can help improve your SEO. Each image needs to have an appropriate file name and alt text so that the search engine can tell what the image is.
Try and use your keywords as much as possible in file names and alt text, so search engine crawlers are more likely to rank you higher for your desired topics.
You can also see big improvements in page load speed when images are optimised to reduce their file size without impacting their visual quality. Use a tool such as Screaming Frog to check this.
To summarise, improving your school website’s SEO in a sustainable and effective way will take time and resources. But small actions like those mentioned in this blog post will also contribute to a better SEO ranking for your school.
If you would like more professional tips on marketing your schools do get in touch with the Digithrive For School’s team who are always happy to help. contact us here