HOW TO INCREASE ENROLLMENT IN PRESCHOOL
education company increases preschool and daycare enrollments
Overview
A large education company operating 250+ preschools nationwide wants to increase enrollments and reduce their cost per lead.
The majority of preschools have their own website with their own domain. Other preschools have a presence on a centralized education website. All preschools share a unified goal: increase enrollments.
Some are spending a healthy sum on Google Ads. Others are reliant on word of mouth, while some drive visibility through Local SEO.
How do you help local preschools schedule more parent tours and reduce PPC spend?
Challenge
The challenge the education company faced was deploying a uniform approach to preschool marketing.
There were a couple of things prohibiting a uniform deployment. The first is that there wasn’t a uniform website that every preschool utilized. Some domains were built using different platforms, which made it difficult to have a uniform approach to SEO, conversion tracking, or content creation.
The other challenge is that each school is in a unique locality. Some preschools may already rank #1 for their local preschool keyword, and don’t need paid ads. Other schools may be in a more competitive market like Houston and may rely on PPC because they rank #23 for local preschool search terms.
With varied costs for leads and inconsistent web technologies, how could the education company best support a conglomerate of preschools?
Solution
While there wasn’t a uniform approach to technologies across the network of preschools, it was decided that a uniform approach to marketing would produce the best results.
The areas of opportunities to have a uniform approach would be:
- Google My Business profiles
- Content Creation for centralized school website
- Linkbuilding to target school websites
After identifying a uniform approach that would apply to all schools, we then identified the schools who needed the most marketing support. These are the schools who had the poorest search rankings, highest cost per leads, or were most vocal about receiving support. For these targeted schools, we could venture away from a uniform plan to focus on:
- Technical SEO issues
- Citation building on the local level
- Specialized content creation for local school website
By taking a uniform, yet an as-needed custom approach, we were able to deploy a solution that would satisfy most – if not all – stakeholders.
Result
The results?
- Obtained first page search rankings for key terms like “Preschool in CITY NAME” and “CITY NAME Daycare”
- Build external backlinks to help increase the domain authorities of target schools
- Reduced need for PPC advertising and reduced monthly budget by gaining first page organic visibility for target keywords
It’s hard to capture results in a graph, but this graph shows an upward trend in traffic and keywords for a centralized school website that was responsible for referrals to different preschools and daycares.
As organic traffic increased, we were able to bring down the cost of paid ads across different schools. Here’s a graph showing the increase in traffic value.
All in all, SEO helped connect quite a few parents with a preschool or daycare option for their child.
