Technical SEO Basics Every School Marketing Team Should Know
Great content still needs a solid foundation
You can write the best admissions content in the sector, but if your site is slow, difficult to navigate on a phone, or hard for search engines to crawl properly, that content will struggle to be found. Technical SEO is the unglamorous groundwork that everything else in your SEO strategy sits on top of.
Page speed and Core Web Vitals
Most parents are researching schools on their phone, often on the move, and won’t wait around for a slow site to load. Google measures this directly through Core Web Vitals, and a slow, clunky school website is penalised both in rankings and in how many visitors stay long enough to enquire.
Mobile usability
It’s no longer enough for a site to simply ‘work’ on mobile. Menus need to be genuinely easy to use with a thumb, forms need to be quick to fill in, and key information like fees, entry points and contact details shouldn’t require several taps to find.
Crawlability and indexing
- A clean, logical site structure so search engines can find every important page
- An accurate, up to date XML sitemap submitted to Google Search Console
- No broken links or orphaned pages left behind from old campaigns
- Secure (HTTPS) throughout, with no mixed content warnings
A quick health check habit
You don’t need to be a developer to catch most technical issues early. A quarterly check of page speed, mobile usability and broken links, alongside a look at Google Search Console for crawl errors, catches the majority of problems before they cost you visibility.
If a technical audit sounds like more time than your team has spare, our team can run one for you and flag exactly what’s worth fixing first.
