Strategies for Getting Your Child Care Center Website Ranked High in Google’s Local Search

By Kris Murray

A recent report by independent research firm eMarketer.com (September 2009) provided some great insights into how people are searching online for local products & services. Here are some of the major findings of the study:

• 37% of people who conducted an online local search ended up visiting the store in person.
• People were 46% more likely to go to the store after finding them in a local online search, when compared to other ways of finding a business.
• Even more local searchers contacted the business by phone after finding them online.
• The top 2 business categories for local searches were child care and hotels.

All in all, the days of the phone book are gone. People now search online (primarily Google) for a business when they need them, and child care is one of the TOP business categories that people are searching for online.

When you search for anything, who do you contact first? The top few results, maybe the top five. If you are like most people, you start with the top two results and only if they don’t work out do you continue down the page. Moreover, page two might as well be the moon - only the few diehard searchers get that far.

Based on these findings, your child care center needs to be high up in search results for your area (preferably in the Top 5), in order to increase the number of prospects contacting your about future enrollment. Now you don’t need to be number one, although you should be trying, but you should be “above the fold” so nobody needs to scroll down to find you.

The first thing you need to do is some keyword research. What terms are people typing into Google and Yahoo search to find child care in your area? For my area, here are the keywords I came up with. Feel free to adapt this list to your local town or region:

• Child care, Hudson, OH
• Childcare Hudson Ohio
• Child care centers in Hudson OH
• Best child care centers, Northeast ohio
• Daycare in Hudson Ohio

When choosing keywords, do not forget about the areas and towns surrounding you. Far too often child care centers focus only on the city they’re in, but you likely have customers from other towns. Would you fit with a surrounding town, or neighborhood? How about big employers nearby? Target all of these too, not with as much effort as your main term, but still with some effort.

(By the way, the techniques that I’m going to teach you in this article are not being used by many centers, so by taking action on these tips, you’ll come out ahead of your competition!)

After you take action on these tips, it won’t take much time at all to see some results. Here’s an example I did the other day just for illustration purposes. These results took less than 5 hours to achieve.

I targeted Aurora, Ohio, the town next to ours for this example. Here you can see the results for “child care” and “daycare” in Aurora.

You can do this with any location. Now I did my example quickly and I would get even better results if I had let this run for more than 5 hours. However, I followed the techniques I will teach you and here are the results.

Yep, there I am number 5 for child care, and number 2 for daycare!

Do you think I would get some calls and customers off being that high up? Yes, I would. In addition, if I gave it more time I would be higher, and on the map section. It can take a couple of days to get there, which is still a relatively short amount of time to get a huge amount of online traffic.

I took the whole thing down after 5 hours, because I didn’t want to confuse parents actually trying to find child care. I just didn’t think that was right to do to them. Try this for yourself and you will be amazed at the results you get, and how little time it takes.

Here are the 7 steps to getting your child care web site to rank high in local search results. To get the most out of your work I suggest you do things in this order, but I would rather see you get as many items done as possible rather than delay while earlier stuff was completed.

• On-page keywords. I know this should sound obvious but I see it missed repeatedly. Make sure the exact words people are using to search for you (also known as keywords) are on your home page. i.e. “Aurora Ohio child care” or “child care centers Aurora, OH”. You also want the name of your business and the full address and telephone number on every page, so people don’t have to search for the phone number on your site.

• Behind-the-scene coding. This is all the stuff that goes on behind the scenes in the programming the actually makes up your web site. There’s a lot of information passed between your site and the search engine, which is vital to the search engine finding your site. Things like what your site is about, and what items are important. You can do most of this yourself or have your webmaster person do it for you. But you want to:

• Make sure your “title tag” has the terms you want to rank for in it. This is what shows up at the top of a page in blue on search results. i.e. “Aurora, OH child care - Daycare Aurora, Ohio – child care centers”. I usually recommend 3 or 4 keyword phrases in the title tag, separated by hyphens.
• Make sure the “description tag” contains the words you want and encourages people to click on your site. This is the text you see about your site. I.e. "take a look inside our child care and daycare center in Aurora, OH."
• Have your “keywords tag” include your main words and other areas. This helps tell the search engines what words you think are important and is a great place to add other area to your site. I.e. child care aurora Ohio, child care Hudson Ohio, Murray’s daycare…
• Make sure your address is included inside an “address tag”. You don’t see this on you page but this tells the search engines this is your address and should be used.
• Try to have your keywords include in an “H1 tag”. This generally shows larger and in bold but also tells the engines this is the most important set of word on this page. I.e. Murray’s child care and daycare in aurora Ohio offers award winning care.

• Get in the local and main directories. Directories are the new phonebooks. They contain lists of sites organized by topic. Google, Yahoo!, and Bing all have an option that allows you to submit to their directories for free and indicate you are a local business. Also, look for local or regional directories. Care.com is a big one but Aurora, Ohio also has a small local only directory. Get in as many of these as you can. Most are free but even if they cost a couple of bucks, it is well worth it.

You will find these directories very helpful because Google and Yahoo will list local results first in searches if it appears people are looking for local information like child care. Search engines gain this information from you telling them, and from looking in the local directories.

• Make a video or two of your child care center. A simple 2-4 minute video showing people your daycare, just as you would new parents is an amazingly powerful tool. Take these videos and put them up in YouTube, Viddler, Yahoo! Video, Metacare, Tube Mogul, and other video sharing sites. You will be amazed at the number of people who find you through these videos.

• Create a Facebook Fan Page for your Center. This is a great place for people to talk about how much they like your daycare, and form a community. This will take 5 minutes and the search engines do notice. Go to Facebook.com, and click on the small link at the bottom that says “Advertising”. Then click on “Pages”, then “Create a Page”. Add a main photo of your staff or the outside of your center, and start adding content. Be sure to communicate your new Fan Page to your currently enrolled parents and staff, and ask them to become a “fan”. Also, if you’re planning on adding photos of the kids in your care, make sure you get a signed release from parents authorizing you to do so.

• Make sure if you are paying for advertising online, it includes a link back to you. If you are paying to be in the online Yellow Pages or BBB, make sure they have a link back to your site and it is correct. Also, try to get your keywords into the link. I.e. "Murray’s child care and daycare in Aurora Ohio.” This will help with people clicking on your link and help you show up higher in search results.

• Get into the social scene. Social bookmarking is big right now so use it to your advantage. Encourage parents, friends and coworkers to reference your site on social networks. Have people join your Facebook fan page, Digg your videos and any informational articles you put out, have people bookmark you site, have people comment about your site and your business online. To show you the importance of this look at this:

I know this all may appear to be a lot of work, and somewhat overwhelming, but really, it isn’t. Most of this you can do in a couple of hours and what you can’t do a webmaster should be able to do for you. If you would like some help, contact us and we will see what we can do to get you up to the top of your search results.

As you can see, it is very important to be at the top of the search results and it doesn’t take much time at all. I’ve shown you how to get it all done and be near the top in less than 5 hours. Now it’s your turn to give it a go.