Marketing Tips for Your School — Part 2

How to Boost Your Studio's Position in Search Page Results

Want to get your studio's website to climb up in search results? Try these strategies:

• Optimize your content for search engines. Use language on your website that supports what your target customers are looking for. For example, if you think your prospects are likely residents of Fairfield, Ohio who are looking for a dance school for their young child, make sure that your website copy includes phrases similar to "dance schools for children in Fairfield Ohio." Sites like Google and Bing can use this info to link their site visitors to your school. Don't forget "invisible" HTML content, such as page titles and page descriptions; they should also support your target customer's search efforts.
  
  
• Establish a strong "backlink" strategy. Seek links from respected websites that connect to your site. Important: purchased backlink services are a risky strategy, so stick with legitimate backlinks, such as encouraging business partners and customers to link to your studio site, getting on your town's business listings sites (chamber of commerce, for instance), or writing articles that get published on reputable sites.
  
  
• Do social media. As noted in Part 1 of our marketing tips article Why Your Business Needs a Facebook Page, having your business represented on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. makes your business more relevant, and is an easy way to create quality of backlinks to your site. Blogging does this too!
  
  
• Have an active website. A site that never changes appears stagnant (and thus unimportant) to Google. Consider adding pages to your site that naturally need a regular update, such as a calendar/events page, a blog page, or a class schedule page.

Above all, be extra cautious in hiring a search engine marketing firm to "game" the system, trying to beat the search engine's algorithms with what Google will recognize as poor quality or "unnatural links" – backlinks from websites that only exist to create backlink lists. Search engines are smart enough to catch such tactics.