You know your setting. What I do is the part that happens before a parent has ever heard of you: making sure that when somebody nearby starts looking, you’re one of the ones they find and then visit.
This page is about what I’d check, what it costs, and how to work out whether it’s worth doing.
Choosing a nursery isn’t a same-day decision
A parent looking for childcare isn’t behaving like somebody who needs a plumber this afternoon. The search starts earlier, runs longer, and usually ends with a visit rather than a phone call.
That has two consequences worth planning around. The first is that people look more than once, often over weeks, so being findable on one search on one day matters less than being findable across the whole run of them. The second is that the website has a job most local sites don’t: it has to survive being compared with three or four others, in detail, by somebody who is nervous and being careful.
What that usually means in practice is that photographs, staff information and the practical answers matter more than word count.
What I’d want to know before saying anything useful
Occupancy is the number that matters to you, so it’s the one I’d start from.
Are you full with a waiting list, full in some rooms and empty in others, or short across the board? Those are three different problems and only one of them is a search problem. A setting that’s full for pre-school and empty for babies doesn’t need more visibility, it needs the right parents finding the right page.
I’d also want to know where your current families actually came from. If most arrive by word of mouth or through a workplace, the search work is about catching the ones who don’t, and that’s a smaller, more specific job than a general campaign.
Your Google Business Profile is the first thing a parent sees
For “nursery near me” and anything like it, the map listing sits above the ordinary results.
Google says local results depend mainly on relevance, distance and prominence. Distance you can’t change, and for childcare it does a lot of the deciding, because a setting has to be on the way to somewhere. Relevance is whether your categories and services describe what you actually offer. Prominence is where reviews sit.
Reviews carry weight here. A parent choosing childcare will read what other parents wrote before they read anything you wrote.
Worth doing yourself before you spend anything: search your town plus nursery on a phone, off your own wifi, and look at who appears, what their photographs look like and how many reviews they have against yours.
Where you are changes the answer
I’ve run live checks on search results in a number of North West towns, and the picture differs enough between them that the advice changes.
In Ormskirk the question is whether the surrounding villages deserve their own pages or whether one clear service area page does more, which matters if your families travel in from outside the town. In Prescot the established businesses hold large review counts, so a review habit is the thing that closes the gap. In Southport the town is long enough that distance separates one end from the other, and two parents searching from different parts may not see the same settings at all.
Your town may behave like none of those. The rest are on the locations page.
What I’d look at first
The sequence depends on what’s already broken. If the site can’t be indexed, the enquiry form fails, or nobody can tell which visits came from search, that comes first.
After that, roughly:
- Which rooms or sessions you need to fill. Everything else follows from that.
- The Google Business Profile, with the details right, current photographs, and a habit of asking parents for reviews.
- The pages a parent compares you on, which usually means the practical questions they ask on a visit, written down where they can find them first.
- The measurement, so a change in visibility can be tied to a change in enquiries and show-arounds.
That isn’t a fixed package. If parents are enquiring but not visiting, the problem is further down the journey than search, and I’d say so.
Would Google Ads help?
Sometimes, particularly where you need places filled for a specific term or room instead of generally. Ads can be turned up and down, which content can’t.
Before spending, I’d want to know what a place is worth to you over a year and whether enquiries are being recorded properly. Otherwise you’re buying clicks and guessing. My Google Ads service covers how I approach that.
What about AI answers?
Parents do ask assistants for help choosing, and what comes back is assembled from whatever those systems can read about you.
It costs nothing to check. Ask a couple of them how somebody would choose a nursery in your town, run it more than once over a few days, and note whether you appear and whether what’s said is accurate. Where a setting is missing, it’s usually because nothing online states plainly what it offers, for which ages, and where it is. That’s the same job as everything above it, not a separate invoice. There’s more under AI search visibility.
Who this suits
Independent nurseries and pre-schools competing locally with chains and with other independents, where the map listing and reviews carry a lot of the decision.
Settings with rooms or sessions to fill, where the problem is specific and the content should be too.
Childminders and smaller settings, where the profile often does almost all the work and the website is a single page that needs to answer more than it does.
If you’re full with a waiting list, more visibility isn’t your problem, and I’d say so rather than sell you something.
What does it cost to work together?
Pricing this from a sector name would be guesswork. It depends on the site, what’s wrong with it, and whether you need every room filled or one. I’d look at that, at your Search Console if you can share it, and at the settings parents are comparing you with. Then I’d tell you the first thing I’d do and what it costs.
Most of it happens remotely, though a visit is sometimes worth it for a setting, since photographs and what a parent actually sees on the day are part of the job.
Questions people ask
We’re full. Is there any point doing this?
Probably not for visibility. If you’re full with a waiting list, the useful work is usually about the quality of enquiries, not the number, and I’d rather tell you that than take the money.
How much does the website matter against the profile?
The profile usually gets you found and the website usually gets you visited, because a parent compares settings in detail before committing. Which one is costing you more is something I’d look at rather than assume.
Do reviews really carry that much weight?
They’re part of what Google calls prominence, and they’re the part you can influence. Beyond the ranking effect, a parent choosing childcare reads them closely. How much they’re holding you back is visible in a couple of minutes by comparing your listing with the ones above you.
Should we have pages for nearby villages or suburbs?
Only where you can say something real about families travelling in from there. Near-identical pages with the place names swapped tend to weaken each other, which is covered on the town pages.
Do you work with nurseries outside the North West?
Yes. Almost all of it is remote and most clients are nowhere near me. This page is about nurseries because the search behaviour is its own thing, not because you need to be nearby.
Start with an assessment
Tell me which rooms or sessions you need to fill and where your families currently come from. I’ll look at the site, your profile and what parents see when they search near you. Then I’ll tell you whether this is a visibility problem at all, because sometimes it isn’t. Request a free assessment, or get in touch. Other sectors are on the industries page.