Many language school owners ask what they can do to improve their website in order to get more sales for their language school business.
After you have improved your own content on your language school website with frequent regular updates that make it fresh and relevant (see our article: What language schools can learn from canned food), the most important work you need to do for your website is actually not ON your website, but on OTHER websites.
Getting links from other websites to your website is the most important work for a long-term marketing strategy that is actually non-negotiable.
This is not a magical short-cut to get customers and visitors to your website. It is a high-quality long-term strategy that will make your website valuable.
Let\’s take a look at what this means.
First of all, we are not talking about some \”link exchanges\” that were so popular over a decade ago. The ones where you set up a page and said: \”I link to you and you link back to me\”. That is not just an outdated strategy that will get your website actually removed from search engines or pushed down so far in the results that nobody will find you anymore.
This is also a strategy that ignores the fact, why you are looking to get high-quality links from other websites back to your website: authority and relevance.
You want to find as many relevant websites that find your language school website valuable for THEIR readers and because of this, they will put a link to your website.
So there are two basic strategies to achieve this:
- You have amazing information and content on your website that is so helpful that other websites will link to you automatically and will reference you as the source. This is a great way to get links to your site even without contacting other websites, individuals or companies.
- You write content that is helpful for another website in form of really useful and valuable (!) guest article or guest blog post and then this has a link at the end. If readers on other sites like the value that you did provide they will come back to see who you and your company is. This is a very high-value link back to your website and always requires interaction with other businesses, individuals, and websites at first.
By the way: you should always link from your website to other relevant resources yourself. The search engines usually value websites if there is a balance of incoming and outgoing links (usually with the focus on getting more incoming links than outgoing ones).
A good way is to offer others to be a guest author on your website as well. Now, this is some true-value \”link exchange\” that gives real benefits for your own readers and keeps them coming back to your language school business website. It adds authority and reliability and makes your language school look like a true team player.