Are You Making This Mistake With Your School’s Blog?

We launched our school blog roughly five years ago when we started implementing inbound marketing at Sewickley Academy. Our blog launched with three goals in mind: Increase inquiries, help with branding and improve our search engine rankings through search engine optimization (SEO).

While all three goals are benefits of blogging, in my opinion, using a blog to increase inquiries is the most important and the goal that I most often see not implemented properly or not at all.

What is the biggest mistake schools make with their blogs?

The biggest mistake is not including a call-to-action at the end of every blog post.

Are you making this mistake?

Let’s discuss the theory behind launching a blog at your school and how to properly convert a prospective family visiting your school blog into an inquiry.

To convert a prospective family into an inquiry, you first need to “attract” that family so that your blog can be found by them. This is the definition of search engine optimization. More specifically, SEO is a collection of techniques and practices that allow your school’s website or blog to show up in a search result for a particular search term.

By way of example, my school, Sewickley Academy, is a “Pittsburgh private school” but when we first started using inbound marketing we didn’t show up on the first page, second page, or even the third page of Google’s search results for that particular search term, “Pittsburgh private school.” Using search engine optimization techniques, we were able to improve our results and now very frequently show up in the first three slots in the Google search results on the first page — a huge improvement. Proper utilization of SEO would have my school trying to rank for 25, 50, or even 75 search terms so that we help a prospective family find our school.

Now that a family can find our blog we need to convert them into inquiries. How do we do that?

How do we do that?

At the end of each blog post, we have an image with a single call-to-action. For us, that call-to-action offers prospective families a guide or ebook that provides value to those families, and while the guide is available to them for free there is still a transaction involved — we provide the guide, and they provide us with their email address.

This transaction is the single most important purpose of having a blog at your school.

Are you making this mistake?

If you are, I hope you change it as quickly as you can.

Originally published at Inbound Marketing for Schools | SchneiderB Media.