School’s out for the summer – and that can only mean one thing… implementing SEO best practices for schools onto your website!
The school is closed for a few weeks and you can take the time to formulate a plan for your to improve your online presence.
Your school website is not only a hive of information and support for teachers, pupils, and parents. It is also the go-to for potential pupils, families, and new teachers looking to join your school community.
But how do they find your website?
It all comes down to how well optimised your school website is – and that’s where SEO (search engine optimisation) becomes important. Creating and implementing an SEO strategy for your school website is crucial so that your key service pages and blogs, where you show off your school, rank higher on Google and Bing. Alongside this comes an improved user experience and better quality content, enabling you to attract higher quality prospective stakeholders to your amazing school.
In this article, we will be introducing just a few of our SEO best practices for schools.
Your Blog
Your blog doesn’t have to be about what’s going on in school on a daily basis – it can also be a great way of re-sharing activities and trips that have occurred in the past, sharing tips for home learning and engagement during the summer holidays, and even communicating lessons that parents should get involved in such as e-safety for kids.
Keeping an active blog has many benefits in terms of SEO. An active blog shows Google that your site is not lying dormant, and gives your school community something to continually engage with even when the school itself is closed. Google in particular will rank an updated site higher, with new content showing the search engine that you are regularly interacting with your audience and providing them with newly updated answers to their questions.
TOP TIP: Ask your website developer what your school site’s keywords are for each page, and which ones are worth targeting – factor similar or long tail keyword variants into your blogs and direct them to these pages.
The User Experience
SEO isn’t just the words you type – it’s the way your website functions when used by the audience. Website user experience is measured across many metrics by Google; ease of navigation, design, page load speed, and much more. Using platforms such as SEMRush can indicate which parts of your site need to be looked at in order to ensure a smooth user experience, or as we call it on-site optimisation. This could be anything from broken links and 404 errors, to redirect loops and no internal links. An improved user experience will be favoured by Google, so vital when implementing the SEO best practices for schools.
Link Building
Link building means working with high domain authority sites in order to gain links from them pointing to your site – otherwise known as backlinks. One way of doing this is by writing guest blogs for popular news outlets or other online media sources. This could mean writing about recent achievements of the school or a partnership within the community – all the while gaining links from their reputable sites to yours. In turn, Google will view the information on your site as more trustworthy.
Plugins
New content is great – but that doesn’t mean your old content has to go! There are a whole host of plugins that you can download and access, which will update your old content and ensure that each post is optimised, tagged correctly, and supported with full SEO tracking and analytics.
A great example of a plugin that is easy to use and delivers valuable insight is Yoast. Yoast allows you to bring your on-site content up to the highest standard via an easy to use, traffic light system approach that tells you how well optimised your blog is for the keyword you are focusing on.
Remember SEO best practices change…
Just as your school curriculum changes on a regular basis, so does the algorithm behind Google and what SEO best practices for schools it wants to see. One of the most recent Google updates, The March 2024 Core Update, aims to combat the new wave of AI generated content which lacks depth, accuracy, and the expertise of industry experts. Despite AI not being prohibited by Google, the search engine’s aim is to promote high-quality, relevant, and trustworthy content that follows the acronym E-E-A-T (Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness).
The Takeaway for SEO best practices for schools
The crucial thing to remember is that just because your school is closed for the summer, it doesn’t mean your website is. In fact, the website is about to become more important than ever, as the main touchpoint for existing and prospective parents and pupils alike.
Focus on the areas listed in this post to ensure that your SEO strategy is both consistent and effective, and don’t hesitate to get in touch with the Cleverbox team. We’d be happy to support you in optimising or implementing these tips, and more.