16 / 05 / 2012

The Importance of websites for marketing schools

Author

Chris Hodgen

Category

Insights

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school-marketing

Gone are the days when a good website was just a luxury, it is now essential.

A school’s website needs be a central part of an education marketing strategy; a great website can generate a channel of leads if designed and developed well from the ground up, and also offers a great platform to engage with current and potential stakeholders.

A well designed website can create an interactive platform on many levels. Not only can your website be a great way of promoting the services, departments and strengths of your school, but for current stakeholders it can offer interactive day to day content to further engage with them.

With developments in software such as content management systems (CMS) from cost effect open source versions to fully bespoke enterprise editions, a website is now able to be fully managed internally. This means a school can update the website without the worry of any additional costs, and gives the flexibility to add search engine rich text into your website on a regular basis.

The more regular content you put on your site, the more search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN & BING will come back to your site to index the new content.  If you don’t update your site, these search engines will not return as regular as they should, which will have an impact on how important Google ranks the popularity of your site. Search engines want to make sure that its users are being fed the most up to date information as possible so will they will not rank your site very positively if you don’t update it. The old saying is true in search engine optimisation (SEO) - Content is King.

So far in 2012 Google has already updated its algorithm 11 times. Google’s algorithm is a calculation for measuring how to index and rank content within your website to make sure that Google users are always delivered the most relevant content.

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm used by Google that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as a web page, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set. Google updates its algorithm regularly and it will be up to your digital agency to make sure that your website is optimised for these changes as they could have a massive impact on your online visibility should your website not conform.

Google’s algorithm update on the 3rd February for example focused on speed, freshness, and spell-checking elements. Gone are the days that a text heavy website would rank highly based on just having good copy; Google now rates the whole site from quality, design, speed and content as it strives to deliver the best results for it’s customer – the searcher. Websites really do need to be built properly from the ground up to get results!

Rich media can now be easily embedded into your school website, to include video, high resolution images and social media integration. Videos are a great asset as they can be used to show high quality equipment and facilities, the running and schedules of departments, showcase lessons and promote key personnel.  A video simply brings your school, college or University to life before your stakeholder’s very eyes. A few years ago, creating video used to be an expensive process. Technology advances have now allowed video to be broadcast online in a cost effective manner. Companies such as YouTube and Vimeo allow for easy streaming of online video content that can then be embedded into your site.

Social media marketing (SMM) is a growing phenomenon especially amongst young people.  There are many channels in SMM, from Facebook and Bebo through to Twitter, Pinterest, Foursquare, YouTube and Flickr, all of which are easy to integrate into a website; they also provide a great grounding for SEO.  Used on a daily basis, Students use SMM as a simple way to both communicate with friends and to connect and research into their interests – your school.  As an independent school, it provides a great tool to interact with your students and their parents outside of their classroom activities.

As with all school marketing activities, branding is a very important aspect.  Your brand is your identity and as your website will be one of the first ports of call for the majority of your prospective parents, it is important to ensure your brand is fervent throughout your online proposition, defining your identity and personality as a school.

However no matter how good your website looks it might fall down on its user experience. The best way to overcome this is by developing a “User Centred” website design. This is achieved by involving the people who will be using the site, right from the start of the design process via market research and focus groups. You also have to develop your site to optimise the “user” journey. A current pupil will navigate your website differently to a prospective parent. Each user journey needs to be defined and optimised to make sure each user gets to the information they want as easily and as quickly as possible. If they get lost in a badly thought out site structure they may never return and will be lost to your competition.  At Absolute we dedicate the right amount of time to developing the right user journey for each website that we create. Failing to do this might reduce your budget but it will suffer in the end results.

Online marketing is now moving into a new era where the development of e-portals and parent portals are allowing schools to interact with both the students and their parents in a much more detailed and secure manner. When I was at school (18 years ago) I only had the parents evening to be scared about! Now parents can keep track of their loved ones 24/7. As an agency we are getting asked more and more to build fully integrated websites that include the front end website for prospective parents as well as password protected extranet for all current stakeholders. Could this be the start of the e-learning revolution? Only time will tell.

For more information about how we can improve your school’s marketing strategy, or to arrange a visit, call Chris Hodgen on 01204 669666 or contact us via our contact form - https://www.absolute.agency/contact