Choosing a school is rarely about one thing. Facilities certainly matter, and parents will want to know about classrooms, sports pitches, theatres, boarding houses and laboratories. An impressive campus can help create confidence, but buildings alone rarely explain why one school feels right and another does not. Families are trying...

AI search has moved the front door to your website, and nobody sent a change of address card! Someone asks ChatGPT which consultancy to shortlist, or types a question into Google and gets an AI-generated answer with three cited sources. Your brand is either in that answer or it isn’t....

Few marketing phrases manage to sound as important and say as little as “thought leadership”. Professional services firms are routinely told they need more of it. Partners should become thought leaders. The website needs thought leadership content. LinkedIn needs a thought leadership strategy. Before long, somebody is suggesting a quarterly...

A parent looking for a school used to begin with a fairly predictable Google search. They might type “independent schools near Oxford”, open several websites and gradually build a shortlist. Increasingly, there is another option. They can ask an AI system a much more specific question. “Which independent girls’ schools...

LinkedIn can create a slightly misleading impression of what business development looks like. Open the feed and there is no shortage of activity. Firms announce new hires, congratulate colleagues, share awards, publish articles, celebrate office anniversaries and occasionally reveal that the entire team spent Friday afternoon building a raft for...

For independent schools, visibility is often local before it is anything else. Here’s how to make sure your school appears when nearby families start searching. For many parents, the search for a school begins before they know the name of the school they are looking for. They are searching for...

Getting more people to your website is usually treated as a good thing, and in most cases it is. SEO is working, campaigns are generating clicks, people are finding the business and the traffic graph is moving in the right direction. The problem comes when none of those visitors actually...

A prospective parent arrives on your website for the first time. They may have found you through Google, followed a recommendation, clicked through from an advert or opened your site alongside four other schools they are considering. Within a few moments, they are already forming an impression. They probably have...

For years, the deal with Google was fairly straightforward. Somebody searched for something, Google showed them a list of websites and they clicked one of the blue links to find the answer. That journey still happens, but not as often as it used to. Google now answers many questions directly...

Selling a professional service is a slightly strange transaction. The client is being asked to pay for something they cannot examine beforehand, take home in a box or return because it looked better on the website. They cannot test a solicitor’s judgement, inspect an accountant’s advice or ask a consultant...