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As a child care provider, you know that your website is one of your most important marketing tools. It’s the first-place parents go to learn more about your programs and services.
A website can help you attract new clients and grow your business if designed well. On the other hand, a poorly done child care website can have the opposite effect and send potential customers to your competitors instead.
If you’re interested in building an effective child care website that paints the right first impression of your business, keep reading to learn a few things that you can do.
Parents can find it overwhelming to choose a daycare to provide care and support, as well as an educational environment for their children. Families have high standards, and because they’re entrusting you with the safety and overall, well being of their child.
Your website is often the first impression of your daycare family. It’s also the first time they are interacting with you. That is why having a strong online presence through your website design is so important. You want to establish an immediate connection to offer a meaningful experience to parents.
To demonstrate to parents that your daycare can cater to their children’s needs, you have to provide them with information online. They should see your site and know exactly what you have to offer and have compelling evidence as to why they should choose you over your competitors for their child’s care.
If you are designing or refreshing your daycare website design, these steps will help you create the best one to attract new parents and satisfy existing ones.
More and more people are using their smartphones and tablets for all of their Internet activities. Finding a daycare is no different. With young children, parents are often on the go and it’s highly likely that their search for a daycare will be on their phone.
If your daycare website isn’t mobile optimized, your parents are going to bounce and go find a daycare that is. The more that visitors have to scroll to view and read the content on your website, the longer it takes for pages to load, the more images that are cut off, the more likely parents are to return to the search results and view a competitor’s website instead.
By creating a responsive design for your website, you can keep this from happening. Responsive design is a design layout where your website’s elements are organized so that your site will automatically load correctly on all devices, regardless of size. A responsive design will ensure that all the information and images on your website remain the same and you can also reduce your website’s bounce rate.
For some parents, finding a daycare to entrust their child with is already a stressful process. You don’t want to end up leaving them frustrated trying to find information on your website. You need to simplify your website’s navigation if they have to click through multiple pages before getting to the information they’re looking for.
Condensing this information into a sub menu will give you a more organized and clean feel. Make the main tabs the main, overarching information like educators, classrooms, curriculum, parent resources, etc. If there is some extra information you want to link to, but it is not that important, you can put it in the footer of your site.
Your website should not take too long to load because parents with young, active children don’t have time to sit and stare at your website. If your website is slow, you’re losing money. If your site is taking more than a few seconds to load, parents will leave your site and you’ll lose potential clients.
One way to speed up your site is to get rid of or compress images on your homepage. A redesign can also help you eliminate graphical elements that are part of your navigation.
If you want to learn more about your website’s page speed, try a page speed SEO Checker!
It should be easy to find your contact information and other important information. For example, your daycare may want to make it easy for you to access your phone number and the information for scheduling a tour.
Don’t put this important information in the footer where people won’t see it right away. You should also be aware of the font size and color. Make sure you also increase the font size and color of your phone number so that it stands out from the rest of your site content.
The more convenient and easier you make it for parents to call you or schedule a tour, the more likely they will be to do so.
You must keep your brand values in mind. To this, you have to begin developing your perspective and chain brand message for the childcare advertising system. Brainstorm points and pick the best. Just remember that you have to think from parent’s perspective as well.
Answer significant questions like:
Why would a parent come to your center?
What are your core values?
What makes your center different from other childcare centers?
How would you attract a large audience?
Before you launch the action plan, these are some of the questions you need to address. Create a unique story for your brand to promote so that it is on the top of the mind of new parents.
The most important tool for establishing your identity in the market is a website. It is the first step to your daycare center finding itself. It also gives you all the information about your center. A domain name and hosting is what you need and you can acquire it according to your budget. Wix is already free and there are other options in the market. When you build your website, ensure the following points:
If you are not on social media yet, we hope you are already, and if you are not, it is high time you build your brand’s presence on social channels. These are powerful tools to reach a larger community. Social Media Marketing Industry Report states that two-thirds of market business can be influenced by creating a Facebook brand page. Since Facebook has a larger community of people, you can always let them know of the key events like open houses, important dates, or updated learning services on your brand page. When communicating with the audience on social media, make sure to always keep it warm and professional.
A Google Business Profile is a great way to attract your target audience and get them to contact you or find out more about your daycare center. The Global Online Survey found that 3 out of 4 clients search the business online and make their selection. To do this you need to create your Google My Business Account and answer a series of questions. Ensure that your information is current as this is the point of contact between you and your prospective customer.
Some tips to highlight your daycare center are:
This is the Number One most important thing for any website today. Most parents are looking at most websites from their phone. If your site is not mobile responsive, it’s near impossible to view on their phone, and they will bounce (leave) immediately.
Plus, Google doesn’t like it when you give your visitors a bad experience. So it’ll just drop your daycare down in the search rankings, because it’s not mobile responsive. Then, you have a high bounce rate and they’ll drop it down again.
The good thing is that everyone knows this, so all the web developers nowadays will build mobile responsive websites and it doesn’t cost extra for that.
If you’re not sure whether your website is mobile responsive, simply go to your site on your phone and see if it fits the screen automatically. You know it’s not responsive if you have to scroll left or right to view pages, if text is small and hard to read, or if menus do not have mobile drop down bars. It’s time for a new site right away.
You have a Call Now button that is on every page in your header. The header is the part of the website that is always the same on the top of each page. You want it on every page, not just the homepage, because you never know what page they’ll land on first.
This needs to be a button now. If it’s a button, I can click on that on my phone and it’ll automatically call your center. Putting ‘Call Now’ in front of your number doesn’t count.
In this day and age, mobile users want it to be as simple as possible. The less easy you make it for them to call you, the less likely they are to. You don’t want that.
Along with a call button, you should also have a Schedule Tour button that has a place where parents can type in their name and email to schedule a tour. This can be set up by your web developer, so that you receive an email automatically when someone fills out that form.
And don’t be shocked if your web developer tells you to make your button a different color like orange, even if it doesn’t match your site’s theme. Data shows that visitors are much more likely to call if a call button stands out to them rather than blends into the site, but it might not look as pretty.
You can even put this button in the footer of every page, so when parents scroll down, there’s another reminder to call. And it’s so easy!
There are many websites with a Contact Form that ask parents to fill in their name and email, and then you reach out to schedule a tour. This should be placed at the bottom of every page on your site.
This wouldn’t be as effective without a drop-down menu for two reasons: 1) You don’t know what they are asking about so you can’t personalize your call or prepare ahead of time and 2) the parent can’t clarify what information they need.
A contact form with a drop-down box means you can have a list of the most common questions asked by your parents like, “How much does your program cost?”, “Do you have room available for age X?”, “Do you do split days?”, etc. As the Director, you will know the 5 most common questions.
Bottom line, your teachers are selling your classes. Good teachers are what parents trust, want, and care about far more than your facility, curriculum, or you as a director. Parents want to know that their child will be loved and educated by the person with whom they spend the most time each day.
Parents want to know about qualifications, how long they have been with the center, and years of experience. This can be very good to have on the site. But it’s really the pictures of smiling staff that have the biggest impact.
However, even if you do not include qualification information or years of experience (we all know how hard it can be to find and retain great staff) it is still a good idea for each teacher to create a little bio. This is where they might be from, what they do, and why they love working with kids.
If you have staff with great qualifications and they’ve been around for a while, definitely show it off. If that area is still a struggle for you, look for other positive qualities of the teachers.
Have you heard this before: “Our school is a place for children to learn and grow.” We believe that every child is special and has his own special talents. At this age, education and play are so important, so we teach children through play, blah, blah, blah.
The above is a great educational and care philosophy, but the problem is that we see this on every single child care website we go to in some variation.
To understand what’s unique about your center in the market. This could include a phrase like “We are the ONLY center that….” or any other differentiators you are proud of. For example, “We are the only center on the Southside of Indianapolis that incorporates a true Montessori approach” or “Our center has been NAEYC accredited for over 15 years, more than any other center in Carmel!”.
Definitely, this information should be on your About Page, but we actually suggest you add this information on your Home Page and skip the About Page. With websites, less is more.
Many businesses, including daycares, tend to want to stuff as much information as possible onto their websites. We strongly recommend against this.
It should be just enough information of what they need to know and they can contact you for the rest. It also helps to keep it simple and uncluttered, which also provides a better user experience and actually lowers bounce rates, who would have thought?
Here are the pages that we recommend every center have:
There are some daycares that want a page where parents can download enrollment packets, but these can be handed out during the tour and are easily emailed. They don’t need to be online, really.
Blogs are also very useful for building up Local SEO, which we’ll talk about in a minute, but aren’t necessary for most single center child cares. They are also a ton of work to maintain and we’ve found that most centers don’t have time.
They are a great idea for larger, multi center operations, but you’d probably want to outsource such work to professionals rather than burden already overworked teachers and directors with adding to their workload, particularly if they don’t have strong writing abilities or understand SEO best practice.
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