SEO for high schools
Build parallel paths for students and parents: show school life, outcomes, future opportunities with on-page SEO and social amplification.
The problem
Two people search, and they want different things. The parent wants outcomes, safeguarding and transport. The 14-year-old wants to know whether the sixth form does the subject they care about and what the uniform looks like. A high school site that speaks only to the parent loses the student, and the student is increasingly the one doing the shortlisting.
Two audiences, one domain
The mistake is to treat this as one funnel. Parents search in the language of institutions. Students search in the language of subjects, clubs and other students.
Both sets of queries are winnable; they need separate pages, not a single page trying to do both.
Subject pages are the underused asset
Most high schools publish one page per department and then never touch it. Those pages are the only part of the site that can rank for what a student is actually curious about.
- One page per subject at the level it is taught, not one page per department
- Extra subjects and post-16 options separated from the main curriculum tree
- Results and destinations published as data rather than as a PDF download
Open evenings drive the year
Search demand for a given school is not flat. It spikes around open evenings and application deadlines, and the site is usually updated too late to catch the spike.
AI tools and shortlisting
When a parent asks an AI tool (ChatGPT or Gemini) to compare four local schools, the comparison is built from published outcomes, inspection text and whatever your own pages state plainly.
Vague prose loses to a competitor who published a table.