“Good SEO work only gets better over time. It’s only search engine tricks that need to keep changing when the ranking algorithms change.” – Jill Whalen, CEO of High Rankings
As more and more private and charter schools take hold in local communities, it can become a challenge to attract new students. While community efforts, fundraising events, and scholarships can attract new students, you can also use some local Orlando SEO tactics in order to drive some inbound enrollment for your school. The decision-making process for students and parents for education has changed dramatically with more than 66 percent of prospective students using search engines to do research on schools, and digital recruitment has replaced traditional recruitment.
If you’re new to digital marketing as a whole or you have no idea where to start, we can provide some guidelines to follow to provide a roadmap to increase your student enrollment.
66% of prospective students use search engines to do research on schools.
Get Found in Google Local
Google Local is the map in the Google search results with three listings with addresses and phone numbers underneath. It has very good positivity, and for someone doing research, could be the first the point of contact for your organization during their research process. In order to have good visibility within Google Local, you will need a complete a verified profile. Also, keep in mind that Google serves their results based on proximity to those local searchers (by their IP address), relevance to the search query performed, and the organic ranking of your website. The good news here is you can really target a tight radius of people looking for private school education around your organization.
Content Marketing
What type of extracurriculars, sports, and differentiators does your school have to offer? What new events do you have going on? Have your students been recently recognized for their academic or athletic efforts? Adding content to your website with updates on your events, students, programs, and staff can help keep current students updated, but it can also help attract new students, as it shows them that you’re a living, breathing school. In addition, it allows for share-worthy content that gets your school shared and talked about on social media platforms.
Retargeting
Finding the right school can be a process that includes research, which means visiting a website one or more times, sometimes never to return. Since the research process is tedious and it could take anywhere from 14 – 90 days, generating a retargeting campaign to serve ads to those who have already visited your website is a great idea. The way it works is that for anyone who visits your website, the retargeting program you choose will serve ads you create to specifically market to those who have already visited your website over the next 30 days. This can help increase enrollment, as its serves ads to people who are already interested in your school. You can narrow it down to users who have only visited certain pages so that you can choose not to serve ads to users who might already be attending or to parents of current students. So, for example, you can serve ads to those who visited your Enrollment, New Student, or About page. You can set your geographic region within your campaign to serve these ads locally.
Meta Tags
Optimizing the title and description on every page can lead to a positive user experience, as well as a boost in local Orlando SEO. You have an opportunity to utilize keywords, as well as describe the page so that a user can easily find what he or she is looking for. When looking for a private school, parents and students have different priorities, so if you’re optimizing for all of your different features, all within your geographical region, and you can gain visibility for a variety of different things that people are searching and attract users who are looking for specific programs that your school offers.
Local Orlando SEO cannot be ignored when it comes to generating a strategy to increase inbound enrollments. There are more strategies you can implement to help increase your visibility within your community even more like social media, directories, etc, but ultimately, research like that done for educational institutions start with a search in Google.
If you’re in need of a comprehensive local Orlando SEO strategy to help increase enrollments in your private school, contact the digital marketing professionals at On Target Digital Marketing. We have extensive experience helping schools increase their digital footprint, and we can help you, too. Call us at 866-998-6886, or fill out our contact us form today.
