The 2 Week School Website Optimisation Challenge
Earlier this month we were asked if we could help improve the struggling ranking of a new campaign website to help get a new primary and secondary school built in West Hampstead.
Helping create more school places using the power of SEO seemed a great thing to be involved with, so we quickly set to work optimising the site for keywords related to the new school campaign.
The most important keyword was deemed to be proposed new school’s name, which was being searched for, but was only found on page 5 of Google results and stood very little chance of being discovered as it was so far below all other sites mentioning the new school such as local newspaper sites which had recently run features on the campaign.
As part of our optimisation, we added meta data and unique descriptive titles to pages and added explanatory text to pages including ALT descriptions for images where before there were none. We also advised the campaign team on ways to increase the incoming links to the website – the main way being to ask for links from the other sites around the web which were currently talking about the campaign, but had linked through to an old version of the site on a previous domain.
Other improvements included adding an external survey and also adding a large PDF prospectus into the site without loss of quality by embedding a version uploaded to file-sharing site Scribd.com (which is great for sharing large files and slideshows on social media and websites without reducing loading speeds).
SEO Results
Less than 2 weeks later, we are pleased to report that the site reached number 1 for its main keyword in Google UK – moving up 46 positions since optimisation began! And the other target keywords are also making vast improvements too.
On the day the website reached number 1 – which was in 10 days – far less time than expected, campaign leader Clare Craig had the following to say:
“Our website was stuck on page 5 for our main search term. Within days of Michelle at Meritorious working her magic it started moving up the rankings and was in position one within a week. Michelle has had excellent suggestions for ways to solve our problems and has been startlingly efficient in getting changes made to the site. Highly recommended.”
We loved working on what will hopefully become a successful school website in the near future and look forward to working on our next similar project soon!
