What to put on your social media? On your Facebook, Instagram or LinkedIn newsfeed. It's a common question, and a lot of schools get it wrong. So the easiest way to explain how you do that is to tell you about the 80/20 rule.

The 80/20 Rule
The 80/20 rule is this 80% of what you put online on your social media should be good content, and 20% should be promotional posts about your school.

You should provide interesting and valuable content that helps people understand and learn about your teaching subjects.

To do this effectively, you should create a student avatar.
An avatar is a detailed description of your ideal students
It will include their point points and frustrations
Once you know their pain points, you can create content that addresses this,
If you have a language school, create blog posts or videos about grammar, pronunciation, typical mistakes.
Help your potential students with their problem points. By speaking with your current students, it is easy to compile a list of the top issues they have.

Your goal is to create good a connection with your followers, help them with their problems. Your content can be anything blogs, Videos, infographics etc.
But don't put out promotion after promotion, people don't care about your offers, and they will not come back to your social media page if this is all you offer there.. They will get bored very quickly If all you are doing is promoting yourself.
People only care about how you can help them.

So if you help your potential students by giving value first, they will be more well disposed towards you. They will see your school in a more positive light and associate it with solving their problems.
So keep it very simple

This is a quick video, so you can learn where to find your Google and Facebook review links. You will need to include one of these links in the email you send out to your students. Always try to build up your Google reviews first as there are more benefits with higher Google reviews than any other platform. Check you our last video on the benefits of Google reviews for your school.

More reviews on Google will 

• Improve your SEO and your online visibility
• Build brand awareness
• Understand your students better (their feedback)
• Generate more traffic to your site
• Boost sales

If you don't have a website, then focus on Facebook reviews.

Emailing your Students for Reviews

Don't be shy when asking your students for reviews, most students are more than happy to leave a review. Recent studies have shown that if asked: "71% of consumers would be happy to leave a business a review".

Reviews are the key to attracting more students and growing your school so make it a big part of your marketing. 

How to ask your students for a review.

The easiest was is to email your students and ask them. Don' overthink it, a simple email will be enough

Subject: Quick question

Dear John,

I hope you are enjoying your course to date. Do you have any feedback for us

I want to ask you if you won't mind leaving our school a quick review on Google? 

It would only take a minute, please click here and you will be taken there directly

Please of you have time, can you mention the quality of the teachers, how you liked our method etc

If you have any questions, please contact me

Regards

Timing is everything

The key to getting more Google reviews is timing! If you get the timing right, you can increase the number of reviews you receive by up to 8 times!

The best time to ask a student to leave you  a review is when they are the most excited and engaged. This is usually a week or two into the course. You will have to play about with this to find the optimum time. New Students are more likely leave reviews that older ones because they are feeling the most grateful for your service. Asking at the optimum time can get 40% of your students to leave a review as opposed to approx. 10% of old students.

Google reviews and why your school needs them.

Amazon has trained all of us to check online reviews. Every time we buy something online, we check the reviews.

Hotels, when you book a hotel, you check the reviews.

Restaurants, you know, we check Trip advisor.

So why would your school be any different?

If you went to look for a hotel and came across a hotel with only two stars on Google reviews, you probably wouldn't book that hotel. With reviews for your school, it works in the same way! You really need lots of good reviews for your school.

So Let's take a look at why reviews are crucial to attracting new students.

Are you aware that 97% of customers read online reviews? almost half of them said they'll only trust a business with four stars and above.

With a single negative review, immediately, you can drop your sales from five to eight per cent. 94% of people said they avoided a business because of bad reviews, so they're essential.

So what are the benefits of having good reviews?

• They increase social proof: 97% per cent of people said they check reviews before they even interact with a business.
• They increase visibility, and reviews give you a better SEO.
  If you want to be on the top school in the Google Map Pack, you need reviews.
  If I Google language school near where I live in Google Maps, it will show me a list of all the schools nearby. The schools with the highest reviews are pushed to the top of this map pack. So if you want to be in the top three, you need good reviews, or otherwise, you're on page two, et cetera. They give you better SEO. Google rewards businesses with better reviews. It forms almost 20% of your SEO score.
• They generate more trust for your school. So who would you trust more? A school that has between 0 reviews or five reviews? or a school with 100 plus reviews?
• There are increasingly becoming a significant part of the final sales decision: So imagine a student  wants to go to school, but they don't know anybody who went there and that school had terrible reviews, They're probably not going to go there! But, If the same school had high reviews, it's an easier choice to make. People don't trust advertising anymore; we are becoming more skeptical of what we see and read. But reviews are basically what your students are saying about your school!
• They're an excellent source of feedback from your students. You want to know what students are saying. Are they happy? Are they are unhappy? If they're unhappy, you need to do something about that. It's pointless sticking your head in the sand and pleading ignorance.
  
  

So how do you get more reviews?

You ask!
But keep the following in mind when you're asking for reviews.

1. So firstly, have believable reviews.
   If you don't have reviews at the moment, you might be tempted to ask your friends to leave you some reviews! Please don't!
   Be careful! Because fake reviews sound inauthentic.
   It's better to get genuine reviews. They sound better. And like I said, they're more authentic.
2. Ask often. Don't ask your students once, then leave it at that. You're going to have to ask your students again and again. Learn the best was to ask for reviews here
   So it'll be good if you put it on your emails when you are communicating with students, get your teachers to ask students to regularly leave reviews. You need to ask repeatedly
3. Make it as easy as possible for your students to leave reviews for your school. If you send them an email asking for a review, include a link to your Google My Business page so they can leave your reviews very quickly.
   Please don't make your students work to give you reviews. 
4. Give your students at least two platforms to leave your reviews. So Google is the most important, but Facebook is excellent as well.
5. Respond to all the reviews that people leave you! The good, the bad and the indifference. Always respond to them. If you don't leave a response, the people who are reading these reviews will think you don't care about the feedback or unsatisfied students.
6. One very important thing to keep in mind!
   Timing is crucial, so never ask your students for a review a couple of weeks after they've completed the course.
   Always ask them, you know, when they're most excited and when they're most engaged. So this is probably maybe a week into the course, and students are excited. So this is the best time to ask for reviews, and it will increase the response by up to eight times.

What to do with your reviews?

Show them out, put them on your website, put them in all your marketing materials. If you have good reviews, show them off, they will attract more students. 

Did you know that almost eighty percent of people looking for products or services will research the Web before making a purchase and of these seventy-five percent will not look past the first page of Google when making a decision about paying for that service or product?

This is why it’s very important to have your website or blog on the first page of a Google search if you want to sell your product or service. In this post I will show you how to plan an article using search engine optimization or SEO to help you get your article on the first page of Google search which accounts for ninety percent of all web searches

First of all, it’s important to know what Google wants when it decides which site will go on its first page. Google wants its users to find the best possible result for their search queries, which means that when a user types in a search term, Google will do its best to give that user the most relevant and high-quality result it can find.

So when writing an article, it’s important to think about what particular need the user has, i.e.you must know the question before you provide the answer. This will help you structure an article that answers a particular user's needs instead of just writing an article for the sake of it.

One of the most important things to consider when writing an article is search intent, which means that when planning an article you must be clear about what information the user is looking for and structure your article in a way that gives the user exactly what they want. In this way, Google will see your article as a specific solution to a specific question and rank your article higher than less specific articles.

KEYWORD RESEARCH

So how do we do this, the answer is keyword research. What are keywords? Keywords are simply words or terms that users type into Google search when looking for specific or general information about something. General terms or head keywords are search terms of three or fewer words that users type into Google when making general searches. These terms have very high volumes, i.e. many people search for them every month.

Because of this, these keywords are highly competitive and difficult to rank with as thousands of other websites will be trying to rank for them, also it’s difficult to find search intent because these terms are too general to see specific search intent. An example would be a user typing a term like “computer software.“ It would be difficult to find this user’s intent as he could be looking to buy software or to write his own software or he could be looking to sell software, until this user types in a more specific term, we have no idea what he is looking for.

This brings us to our next keyword term which is ”long-tail keywords” which are keyword terms of three or more words. These terms are much more specific and have a clearer search intent even though they have a much lower search volume. This also means that these keywords are much easier to rank for and more importantly they answer a specific user need, for example ”how to use Microsoft Excel.“ The person typing this keyword would be much more likely to read your article or buy your course if you provide an answer to this particular need.

So when planning an article, it’s important to be aware of both the general subject and specific need of the user and use head keywords and long-tail keywords within the text of our article. In this way, Google will find it much easier to rank our article. It’s important to remember to use these keywords naturally within the text and not just repeat them as often as possible as this is called keyword stuffing and will not be liked by Google. A good strategy would be to use the long-tail keyword in the title of our article as this answers the specific need of the user and use the head keyword within the text of the article as this shows Google the general subject the article falls within.

When looking for keywords and keyword ideas, we can use the Google search bar which will give us a number of similar keywords and also at the bottom of the search page we have related search terms which give us even more related terms. For a more detailed and targeted keyword search, we can use Google Keyword Planner or Neil Patel's Ubersuggest both of which are free to use. As I said earlier, we should try not to repeat the same keyword within the text, but rather use similar words of the same meaning which will make your article sound less repetitive and more interesting to read.

RANKING FACTORS

There are three things that Google considers when ranking an article, the first of which is relevance, this means that your article must be relevant to the specific keywords that you use and therefore relevant to the user’s keyword search.                                                  

The second element that Google considers is authority, this means that the more helpful and informative your article is, the higher Google will rank it.

The third thing that Google considers is volume, this is how many times a particular keyword is searched for in a month in Google. It is important to know when choosing keywords to use within our text as it's no good ranking for keywords that nobody is searching for, also the more times that your article is read and shared, the higher that Google will rank it.

In this first part of this blog series, I have summarised some of the concepts that should be considered when planning to write a blog or article and which will help you to rank higher in Google search. I hope this has been helpful and in the next part of this series I will be speaking about technical SEO which will further help you achieve higher rankings in Google search.

On Page S.E.O. Six Important Factors

1 Title Tag

This exists at the top of your article and lets users know what your article is about, it is also the clickable link on Google search that will lead people to your article and should contain your most important keyword or keywords. It's important that these keywords are relevant to the article as irrelevant keywords in the title tag can cause poor ranking in Google search. Also, it's important to avoid duplicate keywords in title tags as this can also negatively affect rankings.

 2 Meta Description

This is located directly below the title tag and provides a description of what the article is about, so it's important to put relevant keywords in this description as users will often click on an article by what they see here. It's also worth knowing that Google only allows 150 characters in this description so keep your description within this limit as Google truncates the description after this. Therefore, when writing a meta description it's important to keep it short and relevant to the article it describes.

3 Header Tags H1- H6

These are HTML elements and are used to identify headings and subheadings and also used to separate these headings on a webpage and help with readability and page organization. These help Google crawl a page and are good for SEO because they help improve user experience.

4 Main Body Text

As stated above, it’s important to consider the solution you are providing and the question you are answering before writing the main text of your article and then make a list of relevant keywords and their synonyms which you can incorporate naturally into your text while keeping in mind the solution you are providing to the user query, the more relevant and helpful your answer is, the more Google will like it.

5 Image Optimisation

Images are important in an article as they help improve reader experience and they also improve the user experience of visually impaired people when descriptive alt tags are used which accurately describe the image being used. Google also likes properly described alt tags which can contain keywords which are relevant to the image being described and this helps SEO in the article. When adding images to a page, it's important to use image formats which can load quickly and do not slow page speed which is an important SEO factor so make sure that your image file sizes are properly reduced so page loading speed is not compromised.

Using Yoast Plugin

All of the elements that are described in this article can be edited within this excellent free plugin which is designed with SEO for WordPress in mind and also works to improve many other SEO elements such as site maps, robots.txt files, breadcrumbs and so on. You can learn more by following this link Yoast for beginners.

I hope this article has been helpful and will help you rank better in Google.

Sean Honan