This blog was originally published on February 12, 2021, and updated on March 12, 2025, with new information. When families are looking for a new child care center, their first stop is often Google. To make sure your daycare gets noticed, it’s important to understand search engine optimization, better known as SEO! Let’s look at how daycare SEO can connect potential customers to your early childhood education program.
What is SEO?
SEO is what helps search engines understand your website’s content and connect it with users by delivering relevant, valuable results based on their search queries, according to Search Engine Land.
Do you ever wonder why certain websites make the first page of Google, while others languish in obscurity? Google isn’t playing favorites. It’s simply using its sophisticated algorithm to showcase content it believes its users are looking for.
Why does any of this matter to you, a child care provider? Because your customers use search engines like Google to research child care costs, reviews, location, services, amenities and more.
If your website appears in these search results, you’ll drive a steady stream of traffic to it, connect with more parents and make your child care business more profitable.
And most ECE programs use a website, so it’s important to make yours stand out. The 2025 Procare Solutions Child Care Business Report showed that about three-quarters of child care organizations use a website in their marketing:
How to Please Google
Google uses automated software known as a web crawler, or Googlebot, that searches for new or recently updated webpages, according to SEO Power Suite.
Note: most of the tips and techniques below will work for other search engines, too. But since Google accounts for about 79% of the global search market, we’ll focus on it.
1. Know Your Audience
This is where all good marketing starts. If you don’t know who your audience is, you won’t be able to speak to them effectively.
Your customers are parents and caregivers in your area, of course, but what else do you know about them? Try to pinpoint details like their age, occupation, marital status, income level and anything else that might be relevant to your business.
There are a few ways to find this kind of information:
- Ask: To learn less personal information, just ask your customers. You’d be surprised how much they’re willing to share — especially if they know it will help you out.
- Listen: By talking with your customers and listening to their answers, you’ll be able to learn more about them in a natural way.
- Guess: Lastly, do a little detective work. For example, if you notice that one of your customers drives a luxury car, you can probably assume that they reside in a higher income bracket.
2. Choose the Right Keywords
A keyword is any word, phrase or question that internet users type into search engines. “Best Netflix shows” is the example I used earlier in this post. Examples related to your business might be “child care in [Your City]” or “how to choose a daycare.”
These are the terms that parents in your area will Google when searching for child care options. You want your website to appear in the search results!
The question is, how do you know which keywords to use? The answer is that you do a little keyword research:
- Use Your Intuition: You run a child care business. As such, you probably have a good sense for keywords related to your industry. Take a few minutes to brainstorm terms. Then write them down in a Word or Google doc to save for later.
- Invest in a Keyword Tool: These days, there’s software for just about everything, including keyword research. Some of these tools cost a pretty penny, others are free. One of the best free options is Ubersuggest. Visit the website and type in the terms you came up with in the previous step to learn more about them.
- Analyze the Results: Ubersuggest will tell you a lot of information about your keywords. You’ll be able to learn how often they’re searched for, how competitive they are (i.e. how many other websites are trying to rank for them) and similar keywords.
The key is to find keywords that have high search volumes and low competition levels. This means you’ll need to focus on long tail keywords.
A long tail keyword is longer with more specific keyword phrases that visitors are more likely to use when they’re closer to a point-of-purchase or when they’re using voice search, according to WordStream.
“Best daycare in Denver, CO” is a good example. While these terms aren’t searched for as often, they’re much more specific, easier to rank for and will drive higher quality traffic to your site.
3. Create Great Content
Now that you know who your audience is and the specific terms they’re typing into Google, you can create content to match on your website copy, blog posts, social media updates, live videos and more.
The trick is to add your keywords to these pieces of content in strategic areas such as page titles, body copy, meta descriptions and URLs.
Pro Tip: Write content for humans, not robots. In other words, make sure your web copy and blog posts sound natural. Many businesses try to over-optimize their sites with too many keywords. This is called keyword stuffing and it will hurt your Google ranking.
Once you’ve created great content, it’s important to take additional steps to make sure it gets seen. Remember that there’s already so much stuff on the internet. So you need to give your web pages and blogs a little boost via link building. That way, they have a chance to get found by your target audience.
There are two types of links to be aware of:
- Internal Links: These links connect one page on your site to another. They help Google understand what your site is about. They also help engage readers and keep them on your site for longer, which is good for SEO.
- Backlinks: These are links on websites other than your own that go back to a page on your website. Backlinks are incredibly important for SEO because they build trust. When Google sees a backlink pointing to your site, it thinks, “hey, if other sites are linking to this one, it must be full of good information.”
So how do you get these links?
Securing internal links is easy. When creating content, link to other relevant web pages and blog posts that live on your website.
Building a backlink portfolio is more difficult. The best way to secure backlinks is to create great content and then share it with those in your industry. If they like what you’ve made, there’s a chance they’ll link to it in their own content.
4. Use Google My Business
No blog post on SEO for child care is complete without mentioning Google My Business.
Google My Business will allow you to create a listing for your child care business on Google that includes hours of operation, contact and location details, daycare cost and images.
When people search for local businesses on Google, Google My Business listings appear at the top of the search results. Because of this, Google My Business is absolutely essential for every daycare center. Fortunately, it’s easy to use:
- Claim your Google My Business listing
- Enter all relevant details about your daycare
- Add as many high-quality photos as possible
Don’t skip the last step! Google listings with 100+ images get 1,065% more clicks.
Boost Your Daycare With SEO
Opening and operating a daycare can be a lot of work. A proper SEO strategy will ensure your efforts are rewarded by driving a steady stream of high-quality traffic to your website.
Want to take your marketing further? An integration between Procare Solutions and and IntelliKid Systems, a leading provider of child care enrollment and marketing software, offers a suite of marketing tools to connect time-strapped early childhood education centers with families searching for high-quality child care.
Procare Solutions’ customers have the option to integrate with IntelliKid Systems to do the following:
- Collect and organize more inquiries and schedule more tours with IntelliKid Systems’ embeddable landing pages so information doesn’t get lost or forgotten
- Sync family data between IntelliKid Systems and Procare eliminating time-consuming data entry
- Integrate with Facebook Messenger
- Capture and record phone calls without any additional hardware or change in provider
- Automate ongoing, personalized communications tailored to each stage of a family’s engagement with the child care center
- Schedule on-site or virtual tours, family orientations and open houses and sync seamlessly with both center and parent calendars
- Track ROI from advertising efforts from inquiry all the way to registration and beyond
Learn more about how this integration can help your child care business grow and prosper!
