Private School Marketing

This has implications from both an SEO (search engine optimization) and user experience perspective. For a few years now, Google has encouraged website owners to make sure that their sites worked well on mobile – going so far as to filter out non-responsive sites on mobile searches. Starting in 2018, Google is now prioritizing mobile-friendly websites even if the user is searching on a desktop. This has made it imperative for business owners to have a responsive site.

The basis for all search marketing is finding out what customers are searching for. Search engines are designed to provide solutions to questions so the most effective way to show up in the search results is to provide the best answer to the question.

Keyword research covers a broad range of topics and techniques. For example, you’ll want to consider where in the sales funnel each term falls – “private school open houses” is more likely to lead to a booking than “private school uniform policy”, but they both have value in the search strategy. You will also want to consider the difficulty and specificity of a keyword – “private school” will be difficult to rank for and will probably not lead to business, while “best private school in Brooklyn NY” will be easier to rank for and is more likely to get leads. 

Conversion Rate Optimization has gotten a bit of a bad reputation because people wrongly assume that it is just people changing the color of buttons. In fact, you can change almost every element of a webpage to try to make your site as effective as possible at converting visitors into customers. It may be as simple as changing the image at the top of the page or the location of a contact form to redesigning whole elements of a page.

The most important rule is that all changes should be based on evidence – only change one thing at a time. At ThinkHead Design we make extensive use of heatmaps and multivariate testing to ensure that any changes we make are evidence-based.

The traditional way is to just type the keyword into google and scroll through the pages until your website shows up. There are a couple of things to bear in mind when manually checking rankings. Firstly, Google presumes that you will want to look at a result you have clicked on before. That means that your website is likely to show up higher than it would for someone who performed the search for the first time. Secondly, Google presents results based on location. Someone in the adjacent zip code may get totally different results to you.

To get around these limitations, have people in different areas look up the keywords on different computers – make sure you use incognito mode to stop Google manipulating your results.

If that sounds like too much work, you could contact a company like ThinkHead Design who will send you a nicely presented PDF report every month with your keyword progress clearly displayed.

A heatmap is basically an overview of where people hovered their mouse cursors, where they clicked, when they scrolled, what pages they visited, and much more. There may be something on your page that is confusing to visitors. With analytics, you may be aware that visitors are bouncing but you may not know why. With heatmaps, you are much more likely to pinpoint the reason.

Heatmaps can also tell you important information about how engaged your audience is. The information you learn may lead you to move an important message higher on the page if users do not scroll down very far or a heatmap may encourage you to reduce the length of a form based on the abandonment rate.

Heatmap providers (such as Hotjar) have a free tier that is usually adequate for the amount of visitors a small business gets. The options for larger businesses are still very affordable.