Not sure why you need SEO? In this post, we explain why SEO can be crucial to the visibility of your school website online.
When Did SEO Become So Important?
With the rise and prevalence of the internet, it became essential to ensure that search results were accurate. So began the development of criteria that Google, Bing, and other search engines would use to rank websites based on their relevance and quality in a simple search. Search engine algorithms are now the standard measures that enable website visibility. SEO is essential to the visibility of websites today, and here are four reasons why the best school websites benefit from it.
4 Reasons Why Your School Website Need SEO
To Become Easier to Find Locally.
An often unforeseen benefit of SEO is its ability to make the best school websites easily show up on local search results. It’s great to optimize for internet-wide visibility, but it’s also common for a search to come from a person in an area physically near your school. Did you know that 46% of Google searches are local?
Today, Google is the go-to search engine for any sort of internet search, including for schools “near you”. They made this even easier when they launched Google My Business back in 2014, an official listing that brings up local businesses for the person searching for a service within a specified area.
Google My Business is an amazing tool for SEO that brings your school name up on searches to users who may not even know you exist. This local visibility alone is a big enough reason to utilize it for your school website!
To Raise Awareness for Your School.
When searching for information online, it’s common to gravitate towards specific websites whose content you find more reliable. It’s only because these websites show up in search results so often that you’ve come to find their content so credible. That’s the power of good SEO. It brings the best school websites up in searches more often, establishing them as the more trusted brands for relevant information.
For your school website, SEO offers an opportunity to raise awareness about your school and the values that you represent as an establishment. Ideally, you want people searching for relevant school-related information to find your school website among the first results more often. This is possible when your school website is well-optimized.
To Gain More Organic Website Visits.
Did you know that as recently as 2022, over 45% of search result clicks were organic? This was the discovery of just one of many studies demonstrating how much people trust organic search results over paid advertisements online. When the content on your school website is optimized well enough, a good portion of the website visits you get are most likely to be organic clicks. This means more people intentionally clicking on your website and a higher chance that they take further action afterward, such as inquiring about your school. More organic visits are better for the long-term marketing strategy for the best school websites, a benefit made possible with good SEO.
To Save On School Marketing Funding.
A well-designed website is an asset to the marketing strategy for your school because it draws in more organic traffic, which results in more inquiries. SEO is good website design because it helps it rank higher in search results, which, over time, translates to more visits, and likely more inquiries overall. Traditional marketing relies on the purchase of ads which often tend to only be effective at driving traffic during the periods in which they’re up. The best school websites, on the other hand, are well-optimized to retain visitors over time, and can only get better with more improvements. We’ve discussed this in more detail in our post here, which explains this phenomenon in more detail.
All in all, SEO is a part of good website design, and its benefits are experienced over time, usually at a lower cost than traditional marketing.
Conclusion
Any improvements you make to your school website should include SEO. Its benefits to the number and quality of the traffic you receive cannot be overstated, and are clear to see in the best school websites out there.
At Gradelink, we’re happy to announce the rollout of our SEO services for the improvement of school websites for all schools! Reach out to us here to learn more about getting your school website optimized and ready to attract more traffic today!