Berkeley Hall School
Digital marketing to boost visibility in a very saturated school market.
Berkeley Hall School is a private school for nursery through eighth grade students in Los Angeles, California.
Challenges:
- They felt like a “hidden gem” in a market with over 230 independent schools, not to mention hundreds of public and charter schools.
- Target families where they would be the first-choice selection if the student was accepted.
Goals:
- Rank in the top 15 for single-school organic listings.
- Attract best-fit families to increase the percentage of students accepting an enrollment offer.
Digital Strategy:
PPC
- After getting to know the school’s ethos and running a general search campaign to benchmark what copy is resonating with their users best, we quickly pivoted into a Middle School Virtual Events focused campaign on both Search and Display.
- We kept the general awareness search ad going so that we could still capture parents who weren’t searching for a middle school program, but the major emphasis was on Middle School enrollment.
- Once the Middle School events ended we shifted our focus to a Rolling Admissions campaign that let parents know that Berkeley Hall was still accepting applications even though the deadline had passed.
- Throughout the summer, we pushed campaigns revolving around a date (August 31st) as the first day of school. This campaign was much like a general awareness campaign that offered personal tours both in-person and virtually, but with the added sense of urgency as we were able to incorporate a date in our headlines.
Throughout each of these pivots, Berkeley Hall was able to advertise year-round and be in front of interested parents at all times. The Truth Tree team meticulously manicured all aspects of the ads from copy and keywords to audience targeting and bid strategy. We were also able to separate normal organic funnel on the native website with non-navigable and non-indexed landing pages so that we could monitor paid traffic and results vs organic.
SEO:
- Through a full audit of the website our SEO team identified the top pages that needed on-page optimization of Meta tag, title, alt tags, and heading tags.
- Truth Tree also identified 5 keywords that ranged from easy to hard in SEO work needed to gain upward mobility on.
- We provided monthly optimization suggestions that the partner implemented on their site starting with the pages that would provide the most boost.
- While on-site optimizations were being executed our off-site optimization team worked on submitting the website to directories and building backlinks.
Results:
- Moved from 68/235 schools to 2/235 for organic search
- Went from 0 mentions on pages 1-5 of a Google search to 2-3 mentions on page 1
- Increased site visitor quality score from 52% to 89%
- 13% increase in new student enrollment
- Increased the percentage of accept-to-enroll by 20
John Abdelnour
Director of Advancement at Berkeley Hall School
"Truth Tree's SEO and SEM strategies are driving healthy traffic to our website and admission event pages. Bottom line—we are seeing results."
