SEO FOR SCHOOLS OPTIMISING YOUR WEBSITE FOR MAXIMUM EXPOSURE A BIT - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

OPTIMISING YOUR WEBSITE FOR MAXIMUM EXPOSURE

SEO FOR SCHOOLS

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SCHOOL WEBSITE

• Digital marketing agency with 10+ years dedicated to the

education market

• We’re a team of over 50 experts offering website and print

design, multimedia, SEO, PPC and Social Media services ALTA JUSTUS – HEAD OF MARKETING

• 17+ years working in marketing, both online and off
• Bring my corporate experience to the education sector

A BIT ABOUT US

WHAT IS SEO?

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the process of improving the visibility of a website or a webpage in search engines ‘organic’, or unpaid search results.

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PPC/Paid Search Ad Organic/SEO/ Natural results News results PPC/Paid Search Ad Localised results Wikipedia Information Google maps/ Localised results

TYPES OF SEARCH RESULTS

WHY IS SEO SO IMPORTANT?

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A website is the first place prospective parents and pupils will go to research your school A website that is optimised will give you the best chance of appearing on page one of Google 93% of visitors won’t go further than the first page of Google

WHY IS SEO SO IMPORTANT?

Only 21% of marketers have included SEO in their budget this year!

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Google 66.4% Baidu 11.2% Bing 10.3% Yahoo 9.3% AOL 0.53% Ask 0.21% Lycos 0.01% Others 2.1%

MARKET SHARE OF SEARCH ENGINES

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HOW DO SEARCH ENGINES WORK?

SOCIAL MEDIA ON-PAGE OPTIMISATION

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CONTENT KEYWORDS MOBILE USABILITY LINKS

KEY FACTORS THAT AFFECT SEO

...And Context is Queen!

• Google wants to deliver users high quality

content that’s relevant to visitors

• Easy to use and flexible CMS is a must
• Ensure your content is:
• Relevant
• Readable
• Insightful
• Fresh

CONTENT IS KING

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YOUR WEBSITE CONTENT

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TIPS

• Know your audience(s) and write for them first
• Try to put your keywords in the first few lines of your

content, but don’t keyword stuff

• Beef up your content. Top ranking pages now have 25%

more content so don’t be too sparse

• Include video in your content to reduce your Bounce rate

and increase your Dwell time

YOUR WEBSITE CONTENT

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TIPS

• Create a content calendar to ensure you have a strategy for

covering topics that is relevant to your audience

• Look at your Google Analytics to see the most popular content
• Include social buttons to share your content
• Find out what’s trending on social media and create a blog

around the topic

• Google loves fresh content

YOUR BLOG CONTENT

But less emphasis than before

• Use balanced mixture of terms relevant

to your webpages

• Don’t repeat where you can avoid
• Search friendly – what are people

searching on?

STILL IMPORTANT

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KEYWORDS

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• Access your current situation – does your site contain any

keywords?

• Ask yourself ‘Is the keyword relevant to your website’s content?’
• Search for the term/phrase in the major engines
• Are your competitors showing up organically?
• Are schools showing up as paid ads?
• Use Google Webmaster tools to see how people are currently

finding your school website

KEYWORD RESEARCH

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• Set up a Google Adword Account to access the

free Keyword Planner

• Enter your parameters:
• Keyword phrase
• Location
• Your URL
• Your Product Category (education)
• Keyword Planner with return suggested keywords
• Indicates the competition for that keyword as well

– ie Low, Medium or High

KEYWORD PLANNER TOOL

• Search the keyword phrases

you want to be found on

• Look at which schools come up
• Right click, choosing ‘View

Page Source’ and use ‘Find’ to locate their keywords

• Read their content – there’s a

good chance that’s why they’re ranking on that term

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KNOW YOUR COMPETITION

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TAKING A SNEAKY PEEK

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• Your School Name
• The type of school – ie. Boarding, Day, Co-ed
• School sector – ie. Primary, Secondary, Independent
• Curriculum – IB, British
• Extra-curricular – Sports, Music, Arts
• Localise your keywords by including your location
• Create variations of your keywords and group them into categories
• Decide which pages you’ll optimise with which keywords – start

small

CREATING YOUR KEYWORD LIST

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Name Type (Boarding) Sector (Independent)

YourSchoolName Girls Boarding School City Girls Independent School City YourSchoolName City Boys Boarding School City Boys Independent School City Your SchoolName County Co-ed Boarding School City Co-ed Independent School County Your SchooName City and Country Co-ed Boarding School County Independent School Country YourSchoolName variations or abbreviations Co-ed Boarding School City, Country Private School City, Country

GROUPING YOUR KEYWORDS

• Backlinks – links from external

websites pointing to yours

• Interlinks – links between pages of

your own school website

• Social links – inbound links from social

media

• Outbound links – links to other

websites

TYPES OF LINKS

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LINK BUILDING

TIPS

• Check your backlinks. Disavow spam or low-ranking sites

through Webmaster Tools

• Look to have your school listed on high domain authority

ranking sites such as ‘Education UK’ and ‘The Good Schools Guide’

• Use your keywords in your internal links, not ‘Click here’
• Try to include social links back to your website whenever

possible

• Include outbound links to authority sites such as Wikipedia

as this helps Google zero in on your topics

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LINK BUILDING

• How your website speaks to Google
• Important that your website CMS allows

you to easily make changes to:

• URL
• Page Headings <H1>
• Meta Data
• Image Alt Tags
• Check your current Google’s Meta SEO

Checker for Chrome

OPTIMISING YOUR META-TAGS:

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ON-PAGE OPTIMISATION

• The most important 'non-content' part of your page
• Each meta title should be unique
• Google displays the first 50-60 characters of a title tag so keep title under 55 characters
• Pages that start with your keyword rank higher
• Include modifiers like ‘Best’, ‘Leaders’ and ‘Guide’ in your titles to rank for long-tail keywords
• Include your Title in your H1 (header) tag

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EXAMPLE

META TITLE

TITLE META-TAGS

• This tag is often used by search engines for the description of your web

page

• This currently won’t affect the ranking or indexing of your webpage but

may change very soon

• Keep under 160 characters to encourage people to view your page

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META DESCRIPTION

DESCRIPTION META TAGS

EXAMPLE

• Use keywords or

keyword phrases that are relevant to that web page

• Include keyword in your

page headers <H1 tags>

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KEYWORD META-TAGS

• Use the keyword in the image’s file name

whenever possible

• Create descriptive Alt and Title text

including your keywords

• Be sure that your image matches your

content

• Like the keywords on your web page, don’t

stuff them

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IMAGE ALT META-TAGS

• Keep short and sweet – the first 3 to 5 words in a URL are

given the most weight

• Include keyword where possible ie:

www.yourschoolname.sch.uk/boarding

• Don’t included underscores, symbols or numbers

RENAMING YOUR URLS

• Be sure to use your CMS to create redirects on the pages that

are high in SEO juice

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CREATING SEO-FRIENDLY URLS

• Your social activity counts
• Social links are organic
• Social results show up in Google so

create content which is:

• Engaging
• Useful
• Relevant

#BESOCIAL

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SOCIAL MEDIA

TIPS

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SOCIAL MEDIA

• Grow your followers – but don’t try to cheat
• Make your posts searchable – avoid private posts on platforms
• Google likes Google+, so consider an account
• use your #Keywords in your #Hashtags
• Include social share buttons on your website – can increase sharing of

content up to 700%

• Update your content regularly and share on social media. The more the

content is shared the better domain authority you achieve & move higher up the SEO ranks

• Over 50% of all Google searches are now done
• n a mobile
• Google’s April algorithm update means a

responsive website ranks higher

• Update had the biggest effect of all the recent

Google updates – 40% of websites

• Social feeds are more viewed on mobiles so

make sure your links take them to a mobile- friendly website

RESPONSIVE MATTERS

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MOBILE USABILITY

GET VISUAL

• Over 55% of Google search results now include videos and
• ver 40% include photos
• It’s expected that search engines will continue to increase the

ranking factor of sites with video as their popularity increases

• YouTube is owned by Google & the 2nd largest ‘search engine’

so take advantage of putting your keywords on your video descriptions

• YouTube is another opportunity for backlinks from a high

authority domain

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OTHER SEO TIPS

• 1. MOBILE DOMINATION
• Mobile-friendly websites will continue to rise in

rankings, leaving others behind

• Mobile devices have now taken overtaken

laptops as the number one device in the UK

• User experience becomes even more

important

• Goes hand in hand with Dwell time and

Bounce rate

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TOP 2016 SEO PREDICTIONS

• 2. CLICK-THRU RATE (CTR)
• The percentage of time a visitor has clicked through to your

search results

• Can be tracked in Webmaster Tools/Search Traffic/Search

Analytics

• You can see the queries your website has come up on and

the CTR for each page

TOP 2016 SEO PREDICTIONS

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• 3. DWELL TIME
• Google pays very close attention to Dwell time: how

long people spend on your page when coming from a Google search

• If people spend a lot of time on your site, that may

be used as a quality signal

• Found via ‘Behaviour’ in Google Analytics
• Look to improve that by improving your content –

include videos, links to other pages etc.

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TOP 2016 SEO PREDICTIONS

OPTIMISED PAGES

• May take several days, weeks and even months

to see changes

• Give Google an opportunity to re-index your

website

• Track your keywords on a monthly basis to see

how they are doing

• If you’re not seeing any success ask yourself if a

PPC ad might be better for that search term?

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MEASURING YOUR SUCCESS

TARGETING OTHER COUNTRIES

• Look at your Google Analytics to see where your traffic is coming from
• Purchase country specific domains: .com (US), .fr (France), .mx (Mexico)
• Create localised landing pages on your existing site or a sub-domain

within your current site - www.yourschool.com/mx

• Use content, keywords and language relevant to that market
• Consider PPC to direct traffic to your landing pages

until your SEO is up and running

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INTERNATIONAL SEO TIPS

• Keyword Tracking Software
• Google Maps
• Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test
• School Website Responsive Test
• School Website SEO Articles
• Website Authority Checker
• Weekly Marketing Newsletter
• How To Create A Wikipedia Page
• Google Analytics
• Google Webmaster Tools
• School Website Webinars

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SOME USEFUL LINKS

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WHERE TO FIND US Address (Head Office)

Rowan House, Field Lane, Teddington, Middlesex, TW11 9BP

Phone

Phone: (44) 0845 262 2030

Web

www.schoolwebsite.co.uk

Social Media

twitter.com/schoolwebsite facebook.com/schoolwebsite.co.uk pinterest.com/schoolwebsite uk.linkedin.com/company/schoolwebsite plus.google.com/+schoolwebsiteCoUk

Email

enquiries@schoolwebsite.co.uk marketing@schoolwebsite.co.uk altaj@schoolmarketing.co.uk