Technical SEO for schools has a job most business websites never face: it must help prospective parents find admissions, fees and campus details quickly, while keeping student information and internal notices out of search results. I work with private schools, school groups and colleges to fix the technical layer of their websites so the right pages are found and the wrong ones stay hidden.
The pages parents actually look for
Parents research schools in bursts, mostly in the months before admissions open, and mostly on their phones in spare moments. Their searches cluster around a handful of topics: how admission works and when it closes, the fee structure, the curriculum (Cambridge, IB or a national board, for example), transport routes, campus locations, and the school’s name followed by “reviews”.
Technically, that means a small group of pages must be fast, indexable and linked prominently from the homepage: admissions, fees, curriculum, campuses and contact. On many school websites these exist only as a scanned notice, a PDF prospectus or a post buried in a news feed. A parent searching on a phone at the school gate will not wait for a heavy PDF to download, and a search engine has very little to work with when a fee table is a photograph of a printed sheet.
What should never be in Google
This is the part that worries principals and IT staff most, and rightly so. In audits of school sites I specifically look for:
- Student names, photos, result lists and class lists published in news posts or galleries, still indexed years later.
- Parent portal, LMS or result-checking login pages showing up in search, sometimes with URL parameters that reveal internal structure.
- Staff directories listing personal email addresses or mobile numbers.
- Old circulars, timetables and fee notices left as files on the server, still findable after the page that linked to them was deleted.
- Staging or test copies of the website left open to crawlers.
Fixing these takes more than a noindex tag. A URL blocked in robots.txt can still appear in results if other pages link to it, and a noindex tag only works if the crawler is allowed to fetch the page and read it. For sensitive files, the reliable fix is to delete them from the public server or put them behind a login, then use the removals tool in Search Console to hide them temporarily while Google recrawls. What the school may publish about its students is a decision for its own safeguarding and data protection policy. My job is making sure the website actually does what that policy says.
A 90-day plan for a school website
- Days 1 to 15, inventory. A full crawl, Search Console access, and a list of every indexed URL, PDF and subdomain: the parent portal, LMS, alumni site and any third-party admissions form. Anything sensitive is flagged for immediate action.
- Days 16 to 30, close the exposure. Remove or protect sensitive pages and files, request removals, lock down any open staging site.
- Days 31 to 50, admissions first. Turn fee structures and prospectus content into proper HTML pages (keeping the PDF as an optional download), fix titles and headings, and make sure an externally hosted application form is linked clearly without creating duplicate pages.
- Days 51 to 70, campuses. For multi-campus schools, one page per campus with its own address, map, phone, timings and grades offered, matching each campus’s Google Business Profile exactly.
- Days 71 to 90, markup, speed and archives. Add structured data, fix mobile performance on image-heavy galleries, and tidy the news and events archive: empty calendar months, endless pagination and hundreds of near-empty tag pages.
The order is deliberate. Exposure problems come before rankings, every time.
Structured data for schools, colleges and school groups
schema.org includes School, with more specific types such as Preschool, ElementarySchool, MiddleSchool and HighSchool, as well as CollegeOrUniversity and the broader EducationalOrganization. For a group, I mark up the parent organisation and each campus as a separate entity with its own address, connected through properties like parentOrganization. Open days can carry Event markup when date, time and place are on the page. Colleges listing programmes can use Course markup for each one.
I keep markup accurate rather than exhaustive. Structured data that claims something not visible on the page does more harm than having none.
Why school websites drift, and how to stop it
Most school websites are updated by several hands: an admin officer posting notices, teachers uploading event photos, an IT coordinator, and a web vendor who built the site years ago and rarely returns. Nobody owns the technical side, so problems accumulate quietly: full-resolution camera photos slowing every page, duplicate news posts, notices uploaded as images with no text at all.
Part of my handover is a one-page publishing guide for staff: image sizes, how to post a notice as a page rather than a scan, how to name files, and what must never be published. It is the cheapest way to stop the site sliding back after the fixes. The wider scope of my technical SEO service is on its own page, and my case studies show how I write up audits and fixes.
Questions school administrators ask
Our application form is on a third-party platform. Is that a problem?
Not in itself. The form page rarely needs to rank; your admissions page does. What matters is that the admissions page explains the process in text, links clearly to the form, and that the form tool does not publish its own indexable copies of your admissions content. I check both sides.
Photos of former students still appear in image search. Can you remove them?
Yes, if the files are on your website or a platform you control. We delete or protect the original files, check they now return a “not found” or require login, and submit removal requests. Images copied to other websites or social media need separate requests to those platforms, which I can help you list.
We have separate websites for our junior and senior sections. Should we merge them?
Often, yes, because parents search for the school’s name and expect one place for everything. Merging means careful redirects from every old URL, so I map the migration page by page before anything is switched off. Where the sections are genuinely separate institutions with their own identity, keeping them apart can still make sense.
If you are not sure what your school’s website is exposing to search engines, or why parents searching your school’s name land on an old notice instead of the admissions page, ask me for a free audit. I start with anything sensitive, then move to the pages parents need.