Frequently Asked Questions
From Daycares

What SEO activities are required for daycares to rank highly in search results?

A focus on customer-centric content boosts your daycare’s SERP (search engine results page) rankings. This involves on-page content, off-site content, and technical SEO tactics that give users a better experience visiting your site. Our Daycare SEO Agency helps ensure you have relevant, well-formatted, highly-sharable content. Our SEO experts guarantee there are no barriers preventing search engines from easily finding, crawling, and ranking your content.

Ranking high in search results leads to more traffic to your daycare website. Think about how you search for things. You probably perform a quick Google search for the product or service you’re seeking and make a selection from the first few results. Parents searching for childcare options are no different. Daycare search engine optimization ensures your daycare location appears both at the top of search results and within the Google Map section of search results.

A good SEO strategy clearly defines the deliverables required for your specific daycare to rank #1 in search results.

Factors that impact the strategy include: how established your daycare is online, the level of local competition, and your time horizon to get to the top of search results.

Our experts conduct an SEO audit to determine the exact deliverables required to meet your SEO goals.

SEO is worth the effort. It has the single highest return on your marketing investment.  As part of your daycare’s comprehensive digital marketing strategy, it plays an integral part in helping bring clients in the door. The world is online and businesses have to go where consumers are. SEO is a vital tool to help get your information in front of prospective parents.

It is important to choose a daycare SEO agency that is data-driven, results-oriented, and transparent in its SEO process. We’ve worked with many daycares who would gladly serve as a reference.

SEO campaigns produce results in both the near and long term. Some results will be immediate. For instance, you will benefit from having a more professional-looking website and more relevant content to share with current and potential clients. Other benefits will be reaped in the long term. It takes time for search engines to crawl, index, and rank your site. You will benefit from your pages steadily appearing much higher on search results pages.

Helping daycares and preschools
generate a positive return on investment since 2016.

Case Studies

ladybug case study
Education

LadyBug & Friends Daycare and Preschool

  • 200% Increase in revenue year over year
  • 253% Increase in organic traffic year over year
  • 2,000+ # of local keywords ranking
View case study
Room to Read website on screen
Education
Non-profit

Room to Read

  • 35k+ students using the portal on their path to literacy
  • 1k+ teachers have integrated portal into their classrooms
  • 2 nations currently testing program for their own literacy initiatives
View case study

Schedule Your
Free Consultation

Questions about SEO for your daycare business? Schedule an appointment now with a DAP SEO expert and start driving enrollments through SEO.

Why Daycares Choose DAP
to Market Their Business

  • We’re Experienced. – Your daycare will benefit from our team’s diverse skills, backgrounds, and wealth of experience. We’ve been working with daycares since 2016 and we know the in’s and out’s of marketing daycares to parents.
  • We’re On-Time and On-Budget. – Plain and simple: We execute on the deliverables agreed upon in the monthly retainer. No surprise costs.
  • ​​Track Record of Success. – We’ve worked with hundreds of local businesses over the years helping them rank highly in local search results.
content-img
Daycare SEO

What is
SEO for Daycare?

SEO for Daycare is the process of organically attracting more parents to your daycare or preschool’s online presence. Essentially, it helps your daycare’s webpage appear higher up on SERPs (search engine results pages).

Our daycare SEO agency will work with you to increase traffic to your website & generate interested parents. Our SEO specialists are experts in both on-page and technical SEO, two elements crucial to increasing your website’s visibility on search engines.

On-page SEO involves creating excellent location pages, blog content, and an incredible user experience.

Technical SEO is the process of ensuring you have a mobile-friendly site, submitting accurate sitemaps, and a fast and secure website.

What is SEO for Daycare?

SEO for Daycare is the process of organically attracting more parents to your daycare or preschool’s online presence. Essentially, it helps your daycare’s webpage appear higher up on SERPs (search engine results pages).

It is crucial to be at the top of search results. In fact, industries spend billions of dollars just to appear in these coveted spots.

Our daycare SEO agency will work with you to increase traffic to your website & generate interested parents. Our SEO specialists are experts in both on-page and technical SEO, two elements crucial to increasing your website’s visibility on search engines.

On-page SEO involves creating excellent location pages, blog content, and an incredible user experience.

Technical SEO is the process of ensuring you have a mobile-friendly site, submitting accurate sitemaps, and a fast and secure website.

SEO is a pillar of digital marketing for daycares. Especially when combined with our other services like PPC (pay-per-click) advertising. SEO, however, differs from these services because it is not paid advertising. Because of this, it can actually serve as a baseline of authority that other services can be built upon.

There are many aspects of creating an SEO for Daycare strategy, which involve many creative and technical team members. DAP has an organized process and established relationships with these team members who can help you audit, rework, and boost your on-page and technical SEO among other things.

How well your daycare site’s SEO performs depends upon its expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.

Expertise is determined by things like having a writer who is a known, established figure in the daycare space author material on your site.

Authoritativeness is established by having lots of quality links to your page.

Trustworthiness involves things like avoiding keyword stuffing, which sophisticated algorithms can suss out.

It’s important to not get discouraged as your daycare embarks on its SEO campaign journey. Results take time to see, but the benefits are absolutely worth your time and investment.

How does SEO help daycares get more business?

Our Daycare SEO Agency exists to help build your daycare or preschool business.

Daycares and care centers provide crucial services. They are run by people who believe deeply in caring for and raising the littlest members of society. But we don’t have to tell you that daycares are also a business that offers a product to sell – childcare – like any other business.

And businesses need a continuous stream of paying clients so they can offer those services. Children don’t stay young forever, and you need to replace them as they age out of needing your business’s care.

Daycare search engine optimization helps connect you with those clients. By helping prominently display how your daycare is an established and authoritative presence in the community, SEO helps you attract and retain customers.

It communicates your vision to potential clients like parents and guardians who want the best for their kids. Local SEO in particular helps connect parents in your community to you and increases your visibility to people most likely to benefit from your services.

While hiring DAP or another digital marketing agency to help you boost your SEO is a cost, it pays off in the form of increased revenue. It is also something your daycare wants to pursue because it is not paid advertising like PPC advertising or paid social media ads are. This means your daycare will continue to benefit from SEO efforts as long as the internet and search engines are in use. There is no end date to SEO’s benefits in contrast to paid advertising.

But DAP knows plain traffic to your site is not all your daycare wants out of SEO. While it’s great to get as many as possible viewing your site and content, SEO is pointless unless it helps you convert those eyes into paying customers.

We help make these conversions happen by highly targeting the customers we collaborate with you to go after, having really clear CTA (call to action) buttons, and implementing other on-page and technical SEO techniques to turn visitors into paying clients.

How to choose the right keywords for your daycare

It’s not so much that you want to attract as much traffic as possible to your site, as you want to attract the right traffic to your daycare site. Choosing the right keyword helps you target key audiences interested in services like yours in your area.

Our Daycare SEO Agency takes the time to meet with you to determine what kind of audience you’re looking to attract. Is there a market you’re targeting? What kind of parent does your daycare business cater to? What sets your daycare apart? These are things you probably intuit, but we help you actually write them down and spell them out.

Then comes the translation stage. We take this portrait and create a customer profile. This is a fully-formed character we’ll use to imagine how they’d search for your product. We’re connecting the dots between their mind and your services.

Understanding your character’s psychology and motivation helps us determine words they’re most likely to use to search for you. We ensure those keywords are central to all of your marketing collaterals.

As part of our SEO audit, we also study your competitors’ SEO to see what keywords they’re using. It’s equally as important to determine what keywords they’re not using, which can present a prime opportunity for you to gain a competitive advantage.

DAP also specializes in longtail keywords. These are words or phrases less obvious and less searched for than regular keywords, but that often yield higher conversion rates.

Your keywords will become a central part of your SEO efforts and indeed all your marketing materials. They will become a kind of online mantra for you to incorporate at every possible opportunity, though we’ll also be careful to help you avoid keyword stuffing.

Types of content to create for your daycare blog

Our Daycare SEO Agency can help ensure you a well-optimized online presence by creating lots of valuable SEO-boosting content that sets you apart from competitors.

And a prime medium for this content to live on is your daycare site’s blog. Do not underestimate the importance of having a blog. Longform, visually exciting, highly engaging blog content should be an important part of your overall SEO campaign.

It keeps parents (current customers) engaged, and can give a very humanized window into the daily life and values of your daycare to potential customers.

And remember those keywords we take careful time to come up with? This is another place you’ll be able to use them.

And the beauty of the daycare industry is that you have an almost built-in, guaranteed audience. Your daycare search engine optimization efforts will be bolstered by lots of site visits from relatives of the children you care for who want to get a glimpse of what their loved little one is up to at a place where they spend so much of their time.

What parent, grandparent, or godparent has ever not wanted to see pictures of your child and read about how they’re growing and learning? The answer is none!

Parents want to know everything about their kids’ lives. No detail of your daycare’s day or approach to care is too trivial. You can start with the basics and go from there.

Here are 6 blog topic ideas for you to create long-form content about:

Fun games and activities the children play
Recaps of special holiday celebrations
Meal or snack plans for the week or month
Employee or child spotlights
Stories about how children exhibited good behavior or were model citizens of the daycare
Helpful tips for parents about arts and crafts they can do at home when your daycare is closed

This is just a list to get you started. You can even have a bank of posts ready to deploy so that you’re able to create them when you have available time and deploy them at a cadence we help establish together.

Once you’ve published your blog, make sure you blast them on social media. Share them on your daycare’s Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, and any other relevant place like email blasts. All of this helps generate traffic to your site, which boosts your SEO.

How to claim your Google Business Profile for your daycare and Why it Matters

Your Google Business Profile helps parents searching for childcare services find your daycare. It is an especially important factor in Local SEO, which helps send more qualified leads your way, that is, people in your area who search for services like yours who are more likely to actually purchase your services.

The more robust the information in your daycare’s Google Business Profile, the more visible it will be to parents and guardians searching for child care in your area. Having as clear and up-to-date information helps establish your Google Business Profile as trustworthy and by extension contributes to your daycare’s overall trustworthiness as a business.

So how do you claim your Google Business?

First, you’ll need to create a Google account if you do not already have one. Create one using a business email address. Don’t lose it, as Google will send you information about your Google Business Profile to this account.

Second, locate your daycare by entering its address. At this step, you’ll decide if you want your business to appear on Google Maps, which you should. This is a crucial step to increasing visibility.

Third, spend some time as accurately and completely filling in as many information fields for your Google Business Profile. The more complete your profile is, the more appealingly helpful it will be to searchers, and even more importantly, the higher it will rank in search results. We’re not overstating when we say having your hours of operation listed could be the deciding factor in whether local searchers are presented with your business information or not. A local daycare with a more complete Google Business Profile could be shown instead of yours. Keep in mind this is where you can also upload things like photos, your website URL, and questions and answers. Reviews by customers will also eventually appear here.

Fourth, it’s now time to verify your account by entering a PIN number Google sends you one of three ways: via phone call, text, or a physical postcard sent to your address.

Fifth, you’ll want to keep your business information as up-to-date as possible. If your phone number or hours of operation change, remember to update them on your Google Business Profile

Consider this scenario: a parent may have heard about your daycare, but if they have trouble finding information about or securing an address for it during their initial search stage, it’s much less likely they’ll stick with you all the way up to the conversion stage. This illustrates the absolute necessity of having a Google Business Profile, which displays your daycare’s information neatly and has a big impact on Local SEO. People are used to instantaneous gratification when it comes to online search results. DAP can help ensure your information is readily and accurately available to potential clients.

How to get backlinks to your daycare website

You want your daycare website to be localized, targeted, and full of high-quality content.

But you also want your content to be considered authoritative. One way to do that is to get backlinks to your daycare website.

The importance of backlinks can not be understated. In fact, they’re so important, that our daycare SEO Agency has dedicated backlink specialists who specialize in getting other websites to link to your sites.

Backlinks are a critical way to steadily build your SEO. But like technical SEO, backlinks are often overlooked. You can publish a ton of content, but if no one is linking to it, you are missing out on an important factor that contributes to SEO.

So, here are some ways to start building backlinks to your daycare website:

Write articles – This is different from blog content in that your daycare’s writing will be housed on another site. You can write about the daycare business, how you manage behavior or other valuable insights you’ve gained from your professional career. This helps establish not only your website but also you as an expert and authority on daycare-related topics.

Comment on local blogs – Add meaningful, insightful comments that draw from your daycare experience and expertise to parenting and childcare-related blogs. You often can insert a link to your site at the end of your comment.

Reach out to web directories – For this backlink-building method, research is key. Make sure the directory is credible and of high quality. Get your website listed under categories relevant to the services you offer.

How to improve your daycare website traffic with technical SEO

One of the benefits of working with our Daycare SEO Agency is that we conduct a technical SEO audit, which your daycare website will benefit from in many ways.

In addition to other, more conventional content-based daycare search engine optimization techniques, technical SEO helps your page rank higher but also gives visitors a more pleasurable experience viewing and navigating your daycare website.

Think of technical SEO as a tool that enables on-page SEO to shine. It creates conditions for your daycare’s content to be as impactful as possible. For instance, DAP’s technical SEO audit identifies if you have any broken links, out-of-date or duplicated content, or suboptimal website architecture. These issues don’t make the content of your daycare website inaccurate or wrong by any means, but they do make it harder for search engines to gather information from your site when crawling your website.

When your daycare website is more easily crawled by search engines, you have a higher likelihood of appearing high on or near the top of search engine results pages.

Another important aspect of technical SEO is the enhancement of your daycare website’s security. In an age of rising cyberattacks, every company no matter what industry they’re in has to make website security a priority. A technical SEO audit takes into consideration any security flaws on your site and pinpoints how best to fix them. A safer website helps contribute to potential clients’ overall sense of safety they associate with you.

Two more related benefits of technical SEO for your daycare are having a more mobile-friendly website and a better user experience. Most people view the web on their phones. Your website may look great on a desktop version, but if it’s not optimized for mobile viewing, you’re missing out on putting your best foot forward for more than half of the visitors to your site. Believe it or not, mobile-friendliness has a huge impact on SEO, as search engines are less likely to show a difficult-to-navigate site to searchers than one that is more mobile optimized. Technical SEO also contributes to giving your visitors a more pleasurable viewing experience. We are now sophisticated internet consumers who expect a lot from websites when it comes to structure, flow, and navigability. Technical SEO helps ensure users don’t encounter a lot of error pages, can easily get to the information they’re looking for, and that pages load quickly.

How reviews help your daycare SEO

We’re a digital marketing agency. We know the power SEO has, but we also recognize the power recommendations from real people in your area have. Online reviews help you benefit from the confluence of these things.

They convey things like your daycare’s worth, value and unique attributes from local sources that can be verified. And they boost your SEO.

Sometimes people are digital natives and compelled to write a review about your daycare and how much they love your services unprompted. Often, though, people write reviews because they’re asked.

If you’ve ever ordered an item and opened up the box, did you see a little slip of paper asking you to write a review? Or have you ever received a confirmation email, pop-up on a site, or QR code on marketing materials asking you to leave a company a review?

We bet you have. And there’s a reason! It helps tremendously with SEO. Let it become a second-hand response to asking people who thank you for the level of care you’re providing their child or mention how much their child enjoyed a particular activity that your daycare did to share about their experience online. You offer arguably the most important service in their lives. They have a vested interest in your continued success and will probably be more than willing to.

You may have to overcome some initial hesitation of feeling like it’s a quid pro quo you’re engaging in. But think about it like this: parents, guardians, and children benefit from more, high-quality reviews you get, too. The more you are reviewed, the more employees and customers you’ll be able to attract, which means the more funds you’ll be able to plug back into your business, which everyone benefits from.

Additionally, add a request for reviews to any marketing materials you might distribute like email blasts. It may take persistence, so allow stakeholders multiple opportunities.

Keep in mind employee reviews are also important for helping build your daycare’s SEO. Employees are a key but often underutilized stakeholder whose reviews convey just as much trust and authority in your daycare and its leadership. Additionally, just as there is competition among daycare customers, there is competition for well-qualified employees.

Request employees leave reviews. Transparency about your workplace can go a long way in helping attract and retain a high-quality workforce. And keep in mind that customers and employees can also see each other’s reviews. Parents take everything into consideration when choosing a place to look after their children. They want to know not just that their children will be well looked after, but also that you treat your employees well. It’s part of an ad hoc decision-making process.

You want your daycare or preschool to be as findable as possible on search engines. Customer, employee, and other stakeholder reviews help build your daycare’s SEO.

Read more
Do you want to grow in 2024?