College and trade schools thrive the most when they can effectively attract the people that live closest to them. If you’re doing online marketing then you know that this is a job for local SEO services to handle. Local SEO allows local businesses to rank on the top of search engines for local searches.

Investing in local SEO services is a solid strategy to attract locals to your school. Without SEO, you run the risk of missing out on qualified traffic. Here are some services you might want to consider in 2022.

1. Free SEO Audit

To improve your SEO, start with free SEO auditing services to check the health of your website. This step is essential to find the cause of your current SEO performance and identify areas for improvement. 

A local SEO audit is like a car checkup. You often take your car for maintenance to ensure everything is fine. A diagnosis can save your car the same way an SEO audit can save your college website. 

A comprehensive SEO audit can help you discover content and technical issues restricting your site from its ranking potential. SEO issues stop search engine crawlers from understanding your content. 

The quickest way to know if your website has issues is to check its search engine score. A bad ranking calls for testing for individual pages’ scores. Use this free local SEO web grading tool to test your site and pages for SEO performance. 

An SEO audit will check different parts that contribute to your SEO performance. Think of site structure, indexability, quality of content, linking, hierarchy, speeds, and more. 

In a nutshell, an SEO audit is the beginning of an SEO project. With it, you’ll find issues like broken links then repair them to your SEO performance. It’s one of the most local SEO services to include in your package. 

2. Website Cleanup and Optimization

An SEO strategy for your school is a must-have for a user-friendly website. People want to enjoy using your college website regardless of the device they’re using. If your site is heavy and slow loading, you risk losing many leads.

The best local SEO services will clean and optimize your website to make it user-friendly. Cleaning and optimizing your website is like decluttering your home. It makes it organized, lean, clean, and easy to use. 

Your site gathers clutter like media files, user data, and integrations as your business grows. Continued and untracked website growth can make it heavy, cluttered, and slow loading.

A cluttered and slow-loading website is a huge pain point for your visitors. 42% of your visitors will leave your website because of cluttered layouts and slow response time. A streamlined user experience is a key to increasing traffic for school websites. 

The best local SEO services may automate your website’s cleanup and optimization. This way, you can ensure your site’s continued accessibility and usability. Otherwise, you would integrate a cumbersome manual website cleanup plan into your SEO strategy. 

3. Keyword Research 

Keywords are the phrases potential visitors use online when searching for information related to your school. Examples may include terms like “colleges near me” or “colleges and universities near me”.

You need to rank on search engines with your keywords to attract local traffic. Your website pages or blogs should appear on the top of search engines when users use your target keywords.

Local keyword research is an essential SEO service to help you find the best keywords for your school. It takes research to know what keywords your visitors use to find your or competitor’s school on Google.

The worst mistake in a school’s local SEO strategy is guessing keywords or not having them at all. Lack of an SEO keyword strategy is likely to mean neglecting keywords that could help your school increase leads.

An SEO marketing agency will help you ensure your keywords have a high potential to attract more traffic. They’ll ensure your keywords relate to your services. They’ll also consider user search intent and search volumes. This way, they will build a local SEO strategy that resonates with your target visitors. 

4. SEO Content Writing Services

Quality SEO content to your website is like great food in a restaurant. Attracting and converting leads in any business takes high-quality SEO content. 

High-quality SEO content is well structured, subtly integrated with your keywords, easy to read, and persuasive. Creating high-quality local SEO content is an art demanding the skills of the best SEO marketing agency. 

SEO-optimized content meets both search engines’ and users’ standards. Randomly adding keywords into shallow content can damage your search engine rankings. Google expects expert, authoritative and trustworthy content. 

You need to consider expertise in content creation when looking for the right online marketing agency for your college. A pro SEO marketing agency will help you create authoritative, engaging, branded content. They’ll help you build a quality SEO blog and videos. 

5. Creation and Optimization of Google My Business Profile

Google My Business (GMB) is another optimizable tool you can use to boost your school’s SEO results. A typical business receives more than 59 actions from its GMB account. According to Google, an action can be clicks, views, calls, or emails. 

84% of users are likely to find your college or business through discovery. They don’t know your school’s name or address. So, they’ll use discovery keywords like your school’s location or course to find your business. 

Hiring the best SEO marketing agency can ensure you reap all the benefits of an optimized GMB listing. GMB optimization services can boost your college’s visibility, local SEO, and reputation. 

6. Improving Your Online Accessibility

Every school or college needs to make sure it’s easily accessible online. Higher accessibility is the secret to attracting more local or international students.

Local SEO services are effective tools to boost web traffic. But it doesn’t enable a complete digital presence. Your social media presence is equally essential for more traffic to your business.

Social media is first a relationship-building tool. It’s a perfect platform to engage and nurture leads and grow your audience. Social media presence can help your school interact with new audiences and boost publicity. 

Social media works together with local SEO. 80% of respondents in one study reported using social media for seeking new information. Participants said they used social media to learn about deals, products, events, and business services. 

Contrastingly, the study showed only 40% of respondents used social media for information sharing. In short, there’s still room to take advantage of social media growth and use it to grow your school. 

Local SEO services can provide many social media services, including optimizing your profiles. Potential students are likely to search for college information using keywords. Leveraging SEO services for social media SEO is essential for success. 

7. Reputation Management

Your college’s reputation is at risk when you take your business online. People can post comments or reviews on your website, GMB listing, or social media pages. 95% of the people with a negative brand experience have told people about it. 

SEO reputation management is an essential service in your school’s marketing strategy. The first brand touchpoints for your school are your website and social media pages. 

Potential students need to encounter positive reviews when searching for your school online. They won’t click your web pages if their search shows negative results. Your schools’ reputation is bound to hurt without SEO reputation management services. 

The best SEO marketing agency uses high-quality reputation software for your school. They’ll help you gather more positive reviews and share them on your platforms. Positive reviews encourage 68% of customers to trust local businesses. 

8. Press Release Management

Press releases are hugely popular in digital marketing. This is because they’re one of the most affordable local SEO services. They are also a quick way of boosting your visibility.

Press releases are instantaneous and also have a timeless value. Once you release it, it can boost your SEO through backlinks and endless readership. 

Over the years, more colleges have been investing in SEO press release services. Press releases can attract tons of authoritative and high-quality backlinks. 

With the right SEO marketing agency, your press release goes to many authority news outlets. In turn, your website receives backlinks from many authoritative sites. 

SEO PR is a great tool to boost your school’s website traffic. Locals will visit your website when they read about your school on popular channels. This will help you attract more students and boost your school’s reputation.

A well-read and shared press release is a form of social proof. It’s a tool to show your school’s credibility and popularity. Any popular marketing tool will likely generate positive marketing results for your college. 

9. SEO Link Building

Link building is an SEO strategy to ease navigation between your website and other websites. Backlinks can bring traffic to your site. And external links can take your users to external educational resources.

External and internal links can make or break your school’s SEO results and performance. Quality backlinks can bring referrals and speed up your site’s indexing. Quality external links can boost your send positive signals to search engine crawlers.

Link building is one of the most critical SEO marketing services. It’s crucial to get authoritative sites linking to your site to show Google you’re building a helpful website. 

An SEO marketing agency can use different tricks to boost your link-building strategy. One is to create quality content to make your website link-worthy. Amazing content to attract backlinks includes ebooks, case studies, whitepapers, industry reports, videos, and infographics. 

An SEO marketing agency may also leverage its network for your guest blogging campaigns. Guest blogging is the act of sharing your expertise on other businesses’ blogs. Proper guest blogging networking can boost your traffic and SEO results fast. 

10. Video Marketing

Video marketing is one of the most reliable and effective marketing strategies. 92% of marketers say video is the most crucial part of their marketing strategy. 

Video marketing for SEO is a sure strategy to outrank other schools in your community. Your school’s website is 53% more likely to rank on the first page of Google if it contains a video. 

The worrying thing is many businesses consider video marketing as a challenging strategy. 66% of marketers say video creation is too time-consuming and 41% say it’s too complicated.

You can see video marketing has a massive potential to boost your school’s SEO. But like other marketers, you may think it’s a pretty big ask. This is why hiring a professional SEO marketing agency is essential. 

An SEO agency comes with pro videographers and equipment to produce quality videos. On top of that, you’ll have your videos SEO optimized before publishing. Click here to allow Local Finder to take over your school’s video marketing strategy. 

11. Improving Your User Experience 

A focus on user experience improves user satisfaction and organic SEO performance. Enhanced user experiences reduce bounce rates and points to a valuable site.

Google algorithms also take into account user experience as a search ranking factor. The better your site’s user experience, the more search engine ranking points it earns.

Your visitors will enjoy using your site when it’s navigable, friendly, and value-packed. Users can interact with your content without disruptions.

An SEO audit and user testing tools can help you understand how your visitors react to your website. You can track usability, navigability, and user behavior with these tools. You’ll gather great insights to improve user experience and boost conversions. 

12. SEO Services Reporting

At the basic level, you expect Local SEO services to show proof about the effectiveness of their SEO strategy. You’ll also want to know whether your investment in SEO is helping your bottom line. 

SEO reporting is a tool to track your marketing agency and marketing results. SEO reports will give you information on whether to continue with an agency or a project.

Your local SEO agency must have experience in web analytics and tools. You want in-depth and detailed regular audience reports and analytics. Audience and conversion insights are essential for your school’s growth. 

Local SEO Services for Your Business

Outranking other schools near you on search engines gives you a massive competitive edge. Your school will have a better reputation, attract more traffic and have a strong brand image.

Professional local SEO services are the key to improving your SEO and brand image. Professionals have the experience to create a practical SEO strategy for your business. Contact us today if you want to earn more traffic and convert leads.