As a child care center, your customers are local residents. They most likely both live and work in close proximity to your business. The new parents you’re trying to appeal to your center are also likely to live and work locally. Because you’re interested in attracting families already nearby, you should tailor your search engine optimization efforts to reach them using local SEO.
What is Local SEO?
Local SEO encompasses all the digital optimizations used to promote a local business with a physical location. For child care centers, this means turning local searchers into website visitors and website visitors into new clients for your daycare.
Your child care center should already be using an SEO strategy that includes site speed, keyword research, responsive design and up-to-date content. These are all important for local SEO as well. There are also local SEO-specific tactics that can help your daycare rank well in your location specifically. This is true whether a new parent searches with a location in the search box or uses a generic term and allows Google to access their device’s location.
4 Simple Local SEO Tips
Add Your Location to Your Title Tags
Each page on your website has a title and short description that Google and other search engines use to describe what the page is about. Adding your city and state to the title helps both search engines and users know that your page fits their needs and could be worth clicking on. Each page on your site can have a location within the title tag, as long as other parts of the title are unique to that page.
Verify Information on Directories
Directories like Yelp and Yellow Pages often rank well when potential customers search for local businesses. Making sure your information is correct and user-submitted reviews and photos are accurate will help your daycare’s local SEO. You should also check industry-specific directories like Care.com.
Use Appropriate Schema.org Markup
The more space your website can take up within search results with information that encourages users to visit your website, the better! Use Schema to help Google find and display your hours, address, accepted payment methods and more. Keep in mind that Google has punished websites that use markup that doesn’t apply to their business, so this strategy should be used correctly or not at all.
Share Community Projects Online
If your daycare staff volunteer time to a local community center, one of your center’s classes decorated cards for local veterans or you donated books to underprivileged families, share the good news! Write a quick blog post and let your local news outlets know about your good deeds. This will help your website and business gain visibility in more local searches.
