As the staffing crisis shows no signs of easing, for many schools blogging may not seem like an important way to spend your time.
However, invest time in blogging, and you might just find that having a central source of information can be a great way to boost parent engagement, promote your school’s reputation, and save time for overstretched teachers in one fell swoop. Read on to discover the benefits, and find out how to turn this indispensable tool to your school’s advantage…
For example, when pupils go on school trips, parents want to know what happened – but it’s not always that simple to get information out of their children. So, parents turn to teachers for answers – the problem with this is it eats up staff members’ time, distracts from more important topics, and can result in staff having to repeat themselves.
Writing about an event like a school trip or tour on your school blog, however, can allow you to take parents through exactly what happened, when, and how the students found it. Better still, it can allow you to inform all the parents at once, saving repetition and time.
If your school app and/or website has a newsfeed feature, you can use that to give parents immediate details. However, you can use a school blog to provide more in-depth information. In fact, if you have a ReachMoreParents website specially designed for your school, you can feed information from the newsfeed on your ReachMoreParents app through to your website’s blog, where you can expand on it for those parents who want to know more.
Particularly when pupils reach secondary school age, parents no longer have the same opportunities to interact with their child’s school at the school gates. This means that schools need to find other ways to bridge the gap between school and home. A parent communication app can be a great way to do this, but a school blog can also be incredibly useful.
That’s because there are a lot of different things you can do with a school blog, from the above ideas to getting your pupils to write their own blogs - perhaps about a day in the life at their school, top tips for new pupils, or about what they’ve been learning in class. All of these provide an opportunity for parents to gain an insight into what happens during the school day, what their child is learning, and to connect with the school on a deeper level.
Most importantly, your school’s blog is a marketing tool. Keeping your blog up to date with news and providing an idea of what life is like at your school is a great way to build and manage your school’s reputation. To do this more effectively, you can take care to make sure the culture you promote on your blog reflects your school’s core values.
But how does a school blog reach new people and draw in traffic to your website? By using Search Engine Optimisation, otherwise known as SEO. Good SEO practice makes use of the top keywords searched for by people looking for schools in your area by including them in website content such as blogs. When these keywords are used effectively, the content using them should rank highly in a Google search, meaning more potential visitors can discover your website and find out all about your school.
To make your school blog stand out, here are the key ingredients for a great blog:
Trying to create blogs off the cuff when you have no ideas is never ideal. Doing so can lead to ill thought out, dull blogs that don’t really achieve anything. Not only is this pointless but it’s also counterintuitive. If you want to use your blog to boost parent engagement, you can’t risk them reading a dud and not wanting to read another.
To make sure this doesn’t happen, you need to put a blog strategy in place. But how do you implement a successful blog strategy?
There’s no point creating a strategy to post a blog multiple times a week when, realistically, you know you have the capacity to blog once a month. If once a month is all you can manage, then that’s what you have to work with. It’s good to push yourself if you think you can realistically do more than that, but the aim should be to produce quality over quantity.
When it comes to education, there is so much to talk about – so much that it could even lead to decision paralysis. That’s why it’s important to do your research on current trending topics and create a list of ideas well ahead of time. Better still, make this list easily accessible so staff members can add to it whenever they think of something. That way, you’ll always have something to talk about.
Once you have your topics, the next step is to do keyword research in those areas. What terms and phrases are people interested in this topic using when they do a Google search? Once you have your top keywords, you can store them alongside your list of topics so that they’re easily accessible when the time comes to write another blog.
If there are questions that come up repeatedly, it makes sense to include them in a blog post. This can also help you integrate diversity into your content plan, with some blogs providing insight and other answering key questions.
Once you have all your ideas and keywords, all you need to do is create a schedule. When doing this in advance you can take important dates and events into account. So, if there’s a school trip one week, plan a blog post talking about that trip for two weeks afterwards. Or take into account important dates like International Women’s Day – perhaps you could plan a blog post that celebrates women in a particular subject such as history, science, or sport.
Once your blog is live and you’re staying on schedule, the next step is to monitor how successful your blog actually is. The best way to do this is with metrics such as views, bounce rate, and time spent on the page. For example, if there are a couple of blogs that have significantly more views than others, it’s important to note why that might be. Do they include a lot of links, a lot of keywords, or did you just advertise them well? When you know what works and what doesn’t, you can incorporate that into your content plan.
At ReachMoreParents, we can build you a website that comes with an inbuilt blog template connected to your WordPress account. But not only this, we can build you a website that allows you to pull through news and information from the newsfeed on your ReachMoreParents app to your website, including your blog page. Ensuring the process of creating your school’s blogs is seamless from start to finish.
Click here to find out how ReachMoreParents can help you build a new website for your primary school, secondary school, multi-academy trust, or independent school. Or click here to find out more about our custom branded apps for schools.
Alternatively, click here to book a discovery call at a time that suits you, drop us a line via our enquiry form, or give us a call at 01509 221 349.