What to Do to Get Your Charter School to appear on Search Engines
In this modern age, where is the first place we go when we need information? Google, right? Google has a world of information available at our fingertips, and for marketers we can use this to our advantage to get our content in front of the right audience. A big part of this is using the right keywords to align with what people are searching for.
Keywords are a very powerful tool in a marketer’s tool belt. In a sense, they’re a way to get free advertising. By including keywords in your website and content, it shows Google what your business is about. This helps Google to know which searches to include your website as an option. Keywords can range from being one or two words to being a whole complex phrase. When you type these into Google, it cross-references content and shows results that match the same terms. The order of the results depend on factors such as website authority and relevance, quality, and ultimately the content of the page. As I’m sure we all know, rarely will people click to the second or third pages of search results, so it is in your best interest to get yourself on the top of the first page.
At this point you might be asking, “What does this have to do with my charter school?” Well, when marketing for charter schools, we can greatly use Google Ads and keywords to our advantage. Rather than showing up for random searches that will charge us for irrelevant clicks, we can narrow down what we appear for. If our website content contains more high-ranking keywords than other competing websites, then we will appear higher in results when those keywords are searched for. So, not only do keywords help to improve paid advertising efforts, but they also help to improve organic traffic. For example, if your charter school offers a great STEM program, you will want to include keywords and content that reflects your strengths to stand out from other local schools.
How do we determine what keywords to use and what to base our content around? The nice thing is that Google provides programs that take the guesswork out of making your keyword list. At Charter Connect, we use both Google Search Console and Google Ads to curate our keyword lists. Google Search Console can provide a list of keywords that your website is already ranking for, and then we go through the list to find top keywords. We then use those keywords to create content that includes keywords that competitors might be missing out on.
With Google Ads, we can decide which keywords will trigger our ads to appear in search results. In addition to this, we can see what search terms our website is appearing for and specify to Google which ones we don’t want to show up for due to irrelevance. This not only helps to get our ads in front of the right audience, but it also helps cut down cost from clicks that will not lead to students in your classrooms. With all the information Google provides in these programs, it makes it much easier to know the things parents and students are looking for.
Overall, keywords are not just a marketing tool but something that should be considered by anyone creating digital text content because they can drastically change the exposure of your content.