SEO for schools

Search engine optimization for a school is the work of making sure the right families find the right page, and that the page tells them what they came to check. It covers the website itself, the school’s Google Business Profile, and every other place the school’s facts are published.

Why it is not ordinary local SEO

A school is chosen by a parent on behalf of a child, once or twice per child, usually within a few miles of home. The searches are few, seasonal and high-stakes. They cluster around admissions deadlines, open-day months, moving house, and the weeks after an inspection report publishes. A school’s website is read before the school is visited, often late in the evening, on a phone, next to three competitors’ sites.

A school website is also a compliance document. Policies, statutory information and term dates have to be there, and they tend to crowd out the pages a family actually needs.

Word of mouth still decides most school choices. Search is where that word of mouth gets checked. A parent who hears your name at the school gate will look you up, and what they find either confirms the recommendation or quietly ends it.

• Discovery: families new to the area, or choosing a next stage, find schools by searching the area and the stage, not the name.
• Reputation: the results for your school’s name show your website, your Google profile, reviews, inspection outcomes and local news, side by side.
• Admissions enquiries: a clear admissions page with dates, criteria and a contact route turns a search into an enquiry or an open-day booking.
• Programme discovery: sixth-form subjects, SEND provision, boarding, languages or music are searched on their own, and each is a reason to choose you.
• Competitive position: the schools a family compares are the ones that show up together. If yours does not, it is not in the comparison.
• Durable traffic: a page that ranks keeps bringing visits every admissions cycle, where paid ads stop the day the budget does.

None of this fills places a school cannot fill. Catchment, demographics and reputation set the ceiling. SEO removes the reasons a family who would have chosen you never gets as far as the open day.

Most school searches fall into two kinds. Unbranded searches ("secondary schools near me", "primary schools in [town] with a nursery") are where a family builds its shortlist. Branded searches ("[school name] open day", "[school name] term dates") are where it checks one school in detail. Both need a page that answers them directly.

The topics that come up, again and again, across school types:

• Location: school searches by town, district, postcode or “near me”, and distance or catchment for a specific address.
• Admissions: how to apply, deadlines, criteria, waiting lists and in-year places.
• Fees, bursaries and scholarships, for fee-paying schools.
• Open days and tours: the next date, and how to book.
• Term dates and the school day, which existing parents search for constantly.
• Subjects and curriculum, including options at GCSE, A level, IB or the local equivalent.
• Facilities and extracurricular activities: sport, music, drama, clubs, before- and after-school care.
• Special educational needs, inclusion and accessibility.
• Policies: uniform, behaviour, attendance, safeguarding.
• Staff: the head, the leadership team, and who to contact about what.
• The prospectus, and the questions a family would otherwise ring the office to ask.

Older students search for themselves, mostly about subjects, sixth-form options and what life at the school is like. Parents search about everything else. The pages that serve each should use that audience’s words.

These are the fundamentals I check first on any school website. None is exotic. Most school sites get several of them wrong because the website was built from a template and then filled in by different people over years.

Page titles

The title is the blue link in the search result. Each page needs its own, led by what the page is about, followed by the school’s name and place: “Admissions and how to apply | [School name], [Town]”. A site where every page is titled “Home” or just the school’s name gives Google nothing to match.

Keywords that match how families search

Map one clear purpose to each page: admissions, open days, fees, sixth form, SEND. Use the words a parent uses. “Open evening” or “open morning”, “Year 7 entry” or “secondary transfer”, depend on where you are, so check the language locally rather than borrowing it from another school’s site.

Meta descriptions

The short description under the title will not move a ranking, but it decides whether the result gets clicked. Write it as the answer: the next open-day date, who the page is for, what they can do on it.

Header tags

One H1 per page, naming its topic, and headings below it that follow the questions a family asks. School CMS themes often make the logo the H1 on every page, or use heading styles for decoration. Both blur what the page is about.

Images and image metadata

School sites are photo-heavy, and oversized images are the most common reason they load slowly. Compress them, serve modern formats, and describe what each shows in its alt text. Keep pupils’ names out of filenames and alt text, and publish only images the school has consent to use.

Mobile friendliness

Parents search on phones. Test the admissions page, the term dates and the contact details on a small screen. Tables that scroll sideways, menus four levels deep and PDFs that open at desktop size are the usual failures.

Page speed and Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals measure how fast the main content appears, how quickly the page responds, and how much it jumps around while loading. On school sites the usual culprits are full-screen image sliders, embedded social feeds, calendar widgets and third-party translation scripts.

Internal linking

The pages that matter most, admissions, open days, fees and contact, should be one click from the homepage and linked from the news posts that mention them. If admissions lives under “Parents › Information › Documents”, neither families nor search engines treat it as important.

Off-page authority

Links and mentions from your local authority, trust or diocese, feeder and partner schools, local press, sports clubs and community organizations tell search engines that the school is established and local. Keep the school’s name, address and phone number identical everywhere they appear.

Accurate, current content

Last year’s open-day page ranking above this year’s, fees from two years ago, or a head who left last summer: stale facts cost trust faster than missing ones. Put a review date on every page that carries dates, fees or names, and keep one page per recurring event instead of a new page each year.

Monitoring

Google Search Console shows which searches bring families to which pages, split into branded and unbranded. Review it at least each term, alongside where enquiries say they heard about you. Rankings on their own are a vanity measure; enquiries and open-day bookings are not.

The technical problems on school sites are predictable, because most schools use one of a handful of specialist platforms and inherit the same defaults.

• Policies, prospectuses and newsletters published only as PDFs. Keep the PDF if you must, but put the key facts on a web page.
• Calendars and news archives that generate thousands of thin, near-identical pages.
• Old domains left behind after a merger, an academy conversion or a rebrand, without redirects to the new pages.
• Trust or group websites and individual school websites competing for the same searches.
• Missing structured data. School, organization and event markup lets search engines read your address, phase and open-day dates directly.
• Accessibility gaps. An accessibility statement is expected, and fixing contrast, headings and link text helps every visitor, search engines included.

For most schools, the most valuable result is not a web page. It is the Google Business Profile in the map results: the photos, the opening hours, the reviews and the link to the website. It needs the same care as the homepage, and the same facts.

Parents are also starting to ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Perplexity to compare nearby schools, and Google’s AI Overviews answer the same question above the results. Those answers are assembled from whatever is published in plain, consistent text: your website, your profile, local authority listings, inspection reports and news coverage. If your admissions criteria exist only in a PDF, or your fees differ between two pages, the AI either leaves you out or gets you wrong.

The fix is the same for both: state the facts clearly, on the page that owns them, and make them match everywhere else they appear.