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

More and more people are searching online to find child care.  If you are not in the top couple of results you may be losing business as parents pick other daycares because they don’t know you even exist.  Fixing this is very easy and most centers are not even trying.

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 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.

To get the 7 steps click here to check out my child care marketing informational site.

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