How To Use Daycare SEO To Be Found Online

As a daycare center manager or owner, you may think you don’t need a digital marketing strategy, and SEO (search engine optimization) is an acronym you don’t need to understand. We’ve got news for you – if you aren’t optimizing your website, you’re missing out on a large percentage of your target audience.

However, digital marketing for daycare centers probably isn't your thing. It requires a lot of technical knowledge and skills, which you may not have time to learn or implement. If, after reading this article, you think you need to take action, reach out to our daycare SEO agency, and we’ll work together to drive more traffic to your website.

Want to learn more about the Digital Authority Partners approach to SEO? Watch this video!

Local SEO

On average, 46% of searches are looking for local information, and this figure is even higher for a daycare center. The vast majority of your target audience will be local. A child either lives in the area goes to school locally or has a parent working close by. If you conduct a quick search for daycares near me or daycares in {insert town name}, you’ll be presented with a map with three pins and a “see more” button, listing all of the daycare centers in that locality. Your aim is to rank in the top three – but how?

     1. Google Business

First, you need to create a Google Business listing, verify the location of your daycare center, and complete all the relevant fields in your profile. This is your chance to give Google and search engine users as much information as possible about your business. Be as thorough as you can, as the more information you provide, the higher possibility of ranking in the top spots.

     2. Reviews

As you might expect, one of the most important local SEO ranking factors is reviews. Google likes to see frequent, detailed, and honest reviews. You’ll notice that businesses with fewer reviews rank higher than some with lots of reviews – this is due to how recent the reviews are and the quality of the rest of their Google Business listing.

     3. Citations

You’re probably thinking, what the heck are citations? Essentially, these are backlinks for your listing. To acquire citations, you need to add your website to as many relevant online directories as possible. This could be local guides or worldwide websites such as Yelp.

Top tip: ensure you list your business name and address exactly as you did on Google Business.

Technical SEO

Online daycare marketing must incorporate technical SEO. While these are the more complicated elements of SEO, they’re crucial for ranking highly in organic search and local results. Technical SEO enables users and bots to navigate your website easily and enjoy themselves while doing it.

     1. Mobile-Friendly Website

Nowadays, over 50% of searches are conducted on a mobile device, so if your website isn’t optimized for phone screens, you’re losing out on over half your audience. Most templated websites will have mobile responsiveness built-in. However, if you’re working from scratch or have developed a website specifically for your business, you must ensure it works seamlessly.

Things to look out for include text or images running off the edge of the screen, content being too small to read, clicking on a button and it not working, or sending you to the wrong page.

A free tool you can use to test this is Google Mobile-Friendly Test.

     2. Rapid Loading Speeds

How long do you wait for a website to load? If you click on a search result and a website is slow, do you give up and look for something else? As users, we’re impatient – we need websites to load rapidly, as we want information immediately. When marketing a daycare center, you must factor this in.

Commonly, overly large image sizes, unnecessary code, and loading techniques cause standard websites to load slowly. Again, there is a free test from Google you can use to run diagnostics on your website – Google PageSpeed Insights.

     3. UX Design

UX stands for user experience, and that’s quite self-explanatory. This is the practice of designing a website that is user-friendly. Mobile-friendliness and page loading speeds are part of this, but it extends further to things like user journey and how pleasing to the eyes your website is.

You need to make it as easy as possible to find the information a user needs. Be succinct, and don’t bombard them with information as soon as they land on your website. Highlight the most important content and pages within your navigation bar and home page, then give them all the details as they dive deeper into the website – no one likes an overly confusing navigation bar and content-heavy homepage.

On-Page SEO

     1. Keyword Optimized Content

Your website won’t rank for all the important search terms if you don’t use them within your content – it’s that simple. Using a tool like Semrush, you can conduct keyword research to discover what search terms your audience is using. From here, you can begin to include it in your content.

Our top tips here are to use keywords naturally, don’t put them in sentences multiple times so that they don’t flow. Additionally, they’ll be more impactful if you use them in titles, headings, and subheadings.

     2. Calls to Action

What do you want your visitors to do when they land on your website? Give you a call, book an introduction, take a tour, or do something else? Whatever the goal of your website, you need to make this abundantly clear throughout, driving users towards a conversion, capturing their data, and hopefully securing them and their children as clients of your daycare center.

In Summary

Keep in mind that there is no quick fix for SEO. Everything we’ve mentioned is a case of ongoing optimization and improvement. However, even if you decide to implement just a few of the tactics mentioned in this article, you’ll likely see an increase in website traffic and an improvement in rankings. Finally, if you’d like the assistance of an expert daycare SEO agency, reach out to us at Digital Authority Partners today.