Today’s topic is search engine optimization or SEO. A lot of child care centers that we work with are curious about it because they’re often getting pitched by different marketing agencies or marketing people saying: “Hey, you need to improve your search engine rankings! You’re not ranking in Google.

However, there’s a lot of mystery behind the search engine optimization and what that actually means; what it entails. How do you actually grow your rankings?

So today, I want to give you a couple of details about search engine optimization along with some useful tactics that we’ve been deploying for other childcare centers alike to help them grow their rankings and then start to attract those parents which ultimately ends up in more placements and more students and children in different centers.

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization, or SEO for short, is simply working on getting your website ranking in search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing, as high as you possibly can. Now by high I mean the top spot is the number one spot. That’s basically as high as you can go. You can get more than one spot in the search engine. So you could be number one and number two, for example. Number one and number eight, or even have more than two. But if you’re looking at it from a simplicity standpoint, let’s say that your daycare center is in Fresno. We want to make sure that if someone’s going to Google and typing in daycare Fresno that you’re showing up on page 1 in Google.

Why is it important to rank on page 1?

Why is it so important for you to rank on page 1? Well, simply because most parents are not going to page 2 and definitely to page 3 or beyond. That’s just never happening. Less than 5 percent of people go past page 1 of Google. They’re looking at that first page, looking at the map listings or the Google three pack as it’s called. They’re looking at the results that are way at the top and that’s Google Ad Words or paid traffic. But we’ve got to make sure that you’re ranking on Page 1 of Google and SEO is that tactic or that method of getting you to rank.

Quick tips to rank high in Google

Here are a couple of quick tips on how you could grow your rankings if you were a daycare center, for example, in Fresno. The big one is really making sure that your website is constructed properly. And when I say properly I mean that it’s loading quickly, it looks great on mobile, you’ve got lots of really good content for parents to look through.

Quick tip number #1: Make sure that your website is flawless on mobile, tablet or desktop.

Quick tip number #2: Write lots of really good content.

Quick tip number #3: Drive quality links to your daycare center in Fresno via press releases, social media, local citations, etc. Building quality links is important because the more links you have that are pointing to your website, the better.

Google is going to look at that stuff and they are going to determine how high of an authority they believe your website is. Any company that promises you page 1 rankings guaranteed for a hundred dollars a month, for example, trust me they are just not legitimate companies.

Is your website optimized for search engine optimization?