Search Engine Optimisation for an Independent School

Elevating a School’s Online Presence Through Ongoing SEO

Introduction & Brief

Situated in the heart of the city, set amongst vast acres of idyllic grounds, this independent school welcomes pupils, offering them both day and boarding places.

Whilst the school has a long-standing reputation and is well recognised within the community, their online presence didn’t reflect that same prominence. They approached us to help improve and enhance their visibility in search engines, aiming to consistently rank higher and attract more organic traffic to their website.

What we did

With the brief understood, our first action was to audit the website to help us understand how the website ranked and performed. This first step is considered the most important for many reasons. It provides a benchmark which is used in the future; the data allows you to understand the behaviour of those visiting the site, but it also highlights the actions that are needed for the project to succeed.

After the initial audit had been completed and an outline of the necessary actions mapped out, we began our keyword research. Identifying the right keywords was paramount to the success of the campaign. As an example, targeting a keyword with a low search volume wouldn’t bring enough new users to the website, but opting for a keyword that was too competitive would leave the site low in search rankings.

Over the course of six months, we worked on improving the content on the website, using the targeted keywords throughout the site, whether that was refreshing existing pages or creating new ones. We also worked on the technical SEO elements, fixing errors on the site from broken links to 4XX codes. It was also important to try and improve the load speed of the site, as this is a factor that plays an important part in search engine optimisation.

Outcome

SEO is a long game, but over the duration of the project, we took the site from having 93 errors down to 0. We saw organic search results consistently grow month on month, with February ’25 seeing a 125% rise compared to February ’24. We’re proud to continue our work with the independent school with incremental improvements to their SEO strategy monthly, whilst monitoring the site for errors that could affect their organic rankings.

Please get in touch with us to discuss an SEO strategy for your business