Local SEO Case Studies > Independent School, Southeast London
Photo courtesy of St Christopher’s The Hall School, Beckenham, Southeast London.
St Christopher's The Hall is an independent preparatory school for boys and girls aged 3-11 in Southeast London.
We asked the school’s head teacher, Tom, to share his experience of working with us. Here’s what he had to say…
What can you tell us about your school?
Established in Beckenham in 1893, famous alumni include Enid Blyton, who was Head Girl from 1913-1914, and Sir Edmund Hillary, who made the school his first port of call when he returned from conquering Everest in 1953.
St Christopher’s the Hall is trusted by the best senior schools across the Bromley, Croydon and Lewisham areas, in preparing the children to be independent, adaptable to change and resilient as they make the exciting move onto the next phase of their education.
With a catchment area covering a wide area across Southeast London and north Kent, the school needs to ensure visibility to prospective parents looking for a preparatory school.
What challenges were you facing before working with us?
We are always keen to attract new parents, and their children, to the School.
Current and former pupils and their parents are usually our best promoters, but we need to ensure that parents new to the area find us when searching for independent prep schools in their local area.
With a limited budget for advertising, we didn't really want to throw what we had on Google Ads.
We weren't aware there was such a thing as Local Search Engine Optimisation, but a conversation with James at LocalMark opened our eyes to the opportunity, and urgency of building the School's visibility on Google and Bing.
What have you achieved since working with us on your local SEO?
Prior to working with LocalMark there were a number of important keyword searches for which we weren't appearing at all.
Within just a few months, we had a number of 1st and 2nd position rankings across Google organic, Google's local pack and Google Maps.
The number of visitors and visits to our website from organic search has steadily increased since working with LocalMark. Our online reviews are steadily increasing too, which is increasing our exposure to the local audience.
Most importantly, our open day bookings are now regularly oversubscribed.
Has anything exceeded your expectations since working with us?
Local SEO was previously a completely unknown area of marketing to the School, and we've certainly benefited from LocalMark's expertise, guidance and support throughout.
LocalMark also helped set up and provide guidance on our social media activity.
Having a plan and tools in place that result in our reviews growing daily has been really helpful to us, not only for marketing but also to engage with our existing parents.
On a scale of 1-10, how likely are you to recommend our local SEO service to other schools?
10/10.
It’s been a completely painless experience, and with LocalMark’s very helpful guidance, it made the whole process easy to make those quick gains.
What's the main reason you would recommend our local SEO service to other schools?
The expertise from LocalMark was particularly helpful, and was delivered in such a way that really helped us see the benefits.
The manner in which you helped to get us on board also wasn’t at all intimidating, which can sometimes be the case when looking at a technical area such as this.
Most of all LocalMark delivered results in a really cost effective manner.
What would you tell any other schools considering working with us?
I would like to let other schools know that LocalMark’s local SEO service provides an effective way to optimise our online presence for search engines which aids internet traffic to the school.
And this in turn is a good start for marketing without having to plough a larger sum into advertising in the more traditional sense.
If there’s one word you could use to describe your experience working with us, what would it be and why?
Reassuring.
The reason being, I felt safe in the knowledge that I was really being assisted by someone with the experience and know-how to make those quick and effective local SEO fixes which would ultimately lead to gains that we were looking for on the budget we could afford. This would also give us time to measure the impact of this, and what the next steps would be.
“LocalMark’s local SEO service has been instrumental in improving the visibility of our school to parents of prospective pupils searching Google... Our website visitors have increased, and our open days are regularly oversubscribed... A pleasure to work with, I’m more than happy to recommend LocalMark to other schools looking to improve their local visibility.”
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