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The Importance of SEO for your school websiteHow do search engines determine your position within their results pages?

There are many different factors that Google takes into consideration when it comes to ranking your website’s position within the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a marketing discipline focused on increasing the visibility of organic (non-paid) search engine results. This technique encompasses both the technical and creative elements required to improve rankings, drive traffic and increase awareness in search engines.

SEO isn’t just about building search engine-friendly websites. It’s about making your site better for people too; providing them with helpful, relevant and engaging content that will answer their search query.

Search queries - or keywords - are the words that people type into the search bar. These words carry extraordinary value and can provide you with direction with what content your audience is searching for, how often and how you can tailor your content to coincide with them.

In addition to making content available to search engines, SEO also helps boost rankings so that content will be placed where searchers will more readily find it. The internet is becoming increasingly competitive, and by performing SEO in your school, you will have a decided advantage when it comes to visitors and potential enrolment.

Get Noticed

Understanding SEO is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or web page in a search engine’s unpaid results pages.

Lots of people search for things and it is this website traffic that can be extremely powerful for websites, not only due to the volume of traffic, but also the specific nature of high-intent traffic.

High-intent traffic relates to long-tail keywords - search terms usually containing three words or more. The idea being that the more specific the search query, the searcher has more of an idea of what it is they are looking for.

Targeted traffic can provide publicity, revenue and exposure to any website, like no other channel of marketing. And without SEO, a website can be invisible to search engines.

What is SEO & Why is it important?

Infographic: Does SEO matter?�

Providing answers

‣How do search engines actively determine your place in SERPs?

Search engines crawl websites through links. These links allow search engine robots - crawlers / spiders - to reach the billions of interconnected pages on the web. Once the engines find the pages, the code is indexed in massive databases. When someone performs a search, they expect results instantaneously so these engines work hard to provide answers as fast as possible.

‣How is your page ranked?

Search engines are answering machines. They sift through their copious amounts of data, documents and pages to return only those that are relevant or useful to the searchers query. After this, a search engine will rank these results according to popularity - this can also be determined by the trust and citation of website (how credible they are according to the pages linking into them). If a website with high trust and citation links into your website this ‘juice’ or credibility will flow into your site.

‣What are title tags and meta descriptions?

The title tag of your page should be what can be found on that page - e.g “[School Name] | Home” or “[School Name] | News & Events”. It should be kept short and sweet as it will be the name of the user’s tab or browser window (found at the top of the screen). The meta description is the short piece of text that appears below the title in Google’s search pages. Keep them under 160 characters, anything above that will be cut off. Use these descriptions to briefly advertise what the user can expect to find on that page. E.g “{School Name] is located in [Location]. Get more information on the prospectus, news, location, history, events and finances here.”

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Google’s AlgorithmsGoogle’s algorithms determine which pages to return in response to a search query. This is an extremely complex system that is constantly iterated, taking more and more into consideration with each update. These updates are constantly improving search results to be increasingly relevant and appropriate - so the searcher finds the information they want within the first page.

•Mobile-friendly (April 2015) -

boosting mobile friendly sites

and penalising un-responsive

web design / navigation.

•Rank Brain (Oct 2015) - machine

learning artificial intelligence to

help process search results.

•Pigeon (July 2014) - provides

more useful, relevant and local

search results.

•Hummingbird (Sept 2013) -

paying more attention to each

word ensuring the whole

sentence meaning is

understood.

•Panda (April 2012) - caught sites

that deemed to be spamming its

search results by buying links or

through link networks designed

to boost ranking.

Google is looking for pages that contain high-quality, relevant information about the searcher’s query. They determine relevance by ‘crawling’ or reading your website’s content and evaluating (algorithmically) whether that content is relevant to what the searcher is looking for.

Googleislookingforpagesthatcontainhigh-quality,relevantinforma9onaboutthesearcher’squery.

Ranking Factors

Based on link / citation metrics such as quantity of links, trust, domain-level PageRank etc.

Domain-Level Link Features (8.22 / 10)1

PageRank, trust metrics, quantity of linking root domains, links, anchor text distribution, quality / spamminess of linking sources, etc.

Page-Level Link Features (8.19 / 10)2

Content relevance scoring, on-page optimisation of keyword usage, topic-modelling algorithm scores on content, content quantity / quality / relevance.

Page-Level Keyword & Content Based-Features (7.87 / 10)

3

Content length, readability, Open Graph markup, uniqueness, load speed, structured data markup, HTTPS, etc.

Page-Level Keyword-Agnostic Features (6.57 / 10)

4

Data SERP engagement metrics, clickstream data, visitor traffic / usage signals, quantity / diversity / CTR of queries, both on the domain and page level.

Engagement & Traffic / Query Data (6.55 / 10)5

Offline usage of brand / domain name, mentions of brand / domain in news / media / press, toolbar / browser data of site usage, entity association, etc.

Domain-Level Keyword Usage (4.97 / 10)6

Exact match keyword domains, partial - keyword matches, etc.

Domain-Level Keyword Usage (4.97 / 10)7

Domain name length, TLD extension, SSL certificate, etc.

Domain-Level Keyword Agnostic Features (4.09 / 10)

8

Quantity / quality of tweeted links, Facebook shares, Google +1s, etc. to the page.

Page Level Social Metrics (3.98 / 10)9

(https://moz.com/search-ranking-factors)

Here are a few examples of ranking factors that determine any website’s position within SERPs. A group of 150 search marketer experts were asked to rate the influence of broad ranking factors on Google’s core search algorithm. Each area was rated on a scale of 1 (not influential) to 10 (highly influential).

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What Keywords Should I Use?

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One of the most important elements of building a digital marketing strategy is to fully understand your stakeholders along with their wants, needs and challenges. Once you grasp what your target market is looking for, you can more effectively reach and retain those users.

Typically, there are three different types of search queries that people generally make:

The primary responsibility of a search engine is to serve the relevant content to their users. So put yourself in their shoes, find out what questions they’ll be asking or what information they will be looking for; and ensure your site delivers it to them.

Beauty in the eyes of your customers

Do Schools Need PR?

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• “Do” Transactional Queries: I want to do something, such as enrol my

child to a school.

• “Know” Informational Queries: I need information, such as the most

recent newsletter or the date of parents’ evening.

• “Go” Navigation Queries: I want to go to a particular place on the

internet, such as your school website or your news & events page.

Read about customer-centric marketing here.�

Keyword Targeting

It’s important to consider what keywords you want your website to target, along with the search volumes of those specific keywords - in order to efficiently drive traffic to your website.

‣Search Volume

When you’re conducting keyword research, you will identify the search volumes of each keyword or search term. This is the average, monthly amount of times that specific word or term is searched for across the internet. You can use the free Google Adwords - Keyword Planner to find new keywords and get search volume data.

‣Competition

As with any business opportunity, in SEO you will have to take into consideration the potential costs and likelihood of success. For this you need to measure the level of competition that specific keyword beholds. For example, the term “blogging” will have an incredibly high search volume, however - it will be much more competitive and harder to rank for than long-tail terms such as “how to write a great blog post”.

‣Relevance

Frequently searched for terms are great; but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily relevant to your target audience. If you’re promoting your school and it’s facilities - you don’t want to show up for searches like “pet supplies”. However, you might think that “importance of competition in schools” or “the psychology behind learning-by-play” might not be specifically relevant to your school, but this is content that your target audience will be interested in reading; whether it’s existing and potential parents or students or teachers. This would be a great initial connection with your target audience - providing them with useful, relevant and engaging information.

What keywords are you ranking for?

Keyword research is the process of identifying actual search terms that people enter into search

engines. Knowing these terms can help to inform your overall marketing / content strategy.

In order to see which words your website is currently ranking for, you can download Google’s free

Webmaster Tools interface. This is a very valuable tool for unearthing your search query data and

diagnosing various technical SEO issues. You can set up your account here.

It is also valuable to look into what your competitors are ranking for, which will help you to better

understand which areas you’re missing out on and where the best opportunities lie.

Actions:

• Identify what keywords your website is currently ranking for.

• Conduct research into what your stakeholders want from your website.

• Conduct keyword research into what your competitors are ranking for to spot any areas you may

have missed out. You can do a number of free reports with SEMrush.

• Come up with keywords using the keyword.io and by asking the “Do”, “Know”, “Go” questions.

• Look at related searches (at the bottom of Google’s results pages. These are semantic keywords to

that of the search term entered in the search bar.

• Identify long-tail (specific) keywords or search terms, for some quick wins.

• Use Google’s free Keyword Planner to get search volume and traffic estimates.

• Optimise your website by using title tags and meta descriptions.

• Create content around your keywords.

• Promote and earn links to your content.

Be sure to re-evaluate these keywords every few months - once a quarter is a good benchmark.

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If you require any more help or advice, please get in touch.

We are always looking for ways we can help our clients. That’s why we launched the e4education Academy. Packed full of free resources for schools, the e4education Academy covers some of the most pressing marketing and communication matters of the day, from Social Media, to e-Safety, Blogging and SEO. Resources are added weekly and include infographics, short guides, videos, e-books, templates and info packs.

Some of our top resources include…

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•How to write the perfect Headteacher’s Welcome Message

•How to save money on print

•Social Media in schools: What you need to know

•10 Tips to get more press coverage for your school

•How to write a killer blog post

•How to market your school or academy

•What should I be posting from my school’s social media

accounts?

•How to write breaking news headlines

•Blogging: Getting started.

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