Education marketing agency: websites and search planned around the rules a school follows

What does an education marketing agency do?

An education marketing agency plans and runs how a school or college is found and chosen online: the website, search results, the Google Business Profile, and the forms and calendars that take an inquiry or book a visit. Ours has three parts. We build the website, with pages for admissions, programs, news and the calendar. We run search, including the school’s Business Profile, and we check each month how often AI answers mention the school. And we would build the office side: sending each inquiry to the person who answers it, and letting a family book a tour from the open times the school sets.

Some work stays outside it. We don’t manage paid search or social ads, so if a school runs them, its own staff or an ads agency keeps them going. We scope a school the way we scope any other client: a 15-minute call, then a written proposal. No school is among the sites we’ve built, so this page says what we would build.

Which rules does a school follow when it publishes online?

Three federal rules shape this page: FERPA, the ADA Title II web rule and COPPA. Each one belongs to the school, and the school’s counsel decides how it applies. We plan pages around them. Nothing we build is a finding that a school meets any of them.

FERPA: names, photos and the opt-out list

FERPA is the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, 20 U.S.C. 1232g. Its statute says an institution making public directory information “shall give public notice of the categories of information which it has designated” and “shall allow a reasonable period of time” for a parent to say that any or all of it should not be released without the parent’s prior consent. The regulation’s list of directory information, in 34 CFR 99.3, includes a student’s name, address, email address and “photograph”, along with grade level, dates of attendance and participation in officially recognized activities and sports.

34 CFR 99.37 sets the conditions. A school may disclose directory information if it has given public notice of the types it has designated, of a parent’s or eligible student’s right to refuse, and of the time allowed to refuse in writing. A refusal made while a student was in attendance still stands for a former student unless the student rescinds it. If the notice limits disclosure to specific parties or purposes, the school must keep to that limit.

On a website, that becomes a working list. We would build the photo and name workflow around the school’s own list: every image and name on a page traces to a decision the school made, the opt-out list decides what appears, and a removal request reaches us so the image comes off every page it sits on. Whether a photo is directory information or needs consent is the school’s call, with its counsel.

The ADA Title II web rule: WCAG 2.1 Level AA, by population

28 CFR 35.200(b) sets the standard and the dates. Beginning April 26, 2027, a public entity “other than a special district government” with a total population of 50,000 or more must make its web content and mobile apps meet “Level A and Level AA success criteria and conformance requirements specified in WCAG 2.1”. For a public entity under 50,000, or a special district government, the date is April 26, 2028. ADA.gov says an interim final rule the Federal Register published on April 20, 2026 extended both compliance dates to those. The rule lets an entity show that compliance would mean “a fundamental alteration in the nature of a service, program, or activity” or “undue financial and administrative burdens”.

On scope, ADA.gov says the rule applies to “all state and local governments” and lists “Public schools, community colleges, and public universities” among its examples. Which date a school district falls under is set out in the FAQ above. Whether your school is a public entity is a question for your counsel. The regulation defines the term in 28 CFR 35.104 as “Any State or local government” and “Any department, agency, special purpose district, or other instrumentality of a State or States or local government”.

Three parts of the rule reach beyond the pages a school writes itself:

• Vendor tools: 35.200(a) covers web content a public entity provides or makes available “directly or through contractual, licensing, or other arrangements”. ADA.gov’s example is a public university that links to a third-party tuition payment page: it “needs to make sure it picks a third-party tuition payment website that is accessible.”
• Web vendors: ADA.gov says that if a government “uses a company to design, manage, or update its website, the content the company posts for the government would not fall under the exception”. A web agency that designs or updates a school’s site is the kind of company that sentence names, so ask any web vendor how it builds and checks to this level.
• Documents: 35.201(b) exempts conventional electronic documents available before the compliance date, “unless such documents are currently used to apply for, gain access to, or participate in the public entity’s services, programs, or activities”. Which handbooks and forms fall on which side is a question for counsel.

What we would do is build and check each page against WCAG 2.1 Level AA, the level the rule names, and audit the school’s vendor tools against it. That is our design target. It isn’t a promise about what the rule requires of your school.

COPPA: sites directed to children under 13

COPPA’s rule is 16 CFR part 312, and its 312.2 defines a child as “an individual under the age of 13”. Under 312.3, it is unlawful for an operator of a website or online service “directed to children”, or one with actual knowledge that it collects personal information from a child, to collect that information in a way that violates the rule. In 312.2, a website or online service directed to children is “a commercial website or online service, or portion thereof, that is targeted to children”. The rule’s definition of an operator covers a site “operated for commercial purposes involving commerce among the several States or with one or more foreign nations”, among other cases of commerce, and it “does not include any nonprofit entity that would otherwise be exempt from coverage under Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act”.

Two items on the rule’s list of personal information matter to a website: “A photograph, video, or audio file where such file contains a child’s image or voice”, and a persistent identifier such as “a customer number held in a cookie” or an Internet Protocol (IP) address. To decide whether a site is directed to children, the FTC says it will consider factors that include its subject matter, visual content, animated characters, child-oriented activities, music and the age of models.

Whether the rule reaches your school, one of its programs or a vendor’s tool is a question for counsel. For any page aimed at children under 13, we would put no form, sign-in or uploaded photo on it, and we would set up analytics only after counsel has decided how.

What do those rules change on each part of the site?

A school publishes many kinds of content, and each kind meets a different rule. The table shows what we would build for each and who runs it.

What should a school website show?

It should settle what a family or student wants to know before they contact you. That means the route into the school, whether that is admissions, enrollment or applying, with the next step on every page; a page for each program; the calendar; news; a staff directory; and a way to reach the office. Tuition and aid appear only as the school publishes them, with a link to the source. We write no claim about student outcomes or test scores unless the school gives us the figure, its date and where it’s published.

The page plan, the photo workflow and what a build involves are on school website design.

How does search work for a school or college?

Google says local results are mainly based on relevance, distance and popularity, and that there’s no way to request or pay for a better local ranking. A school is a place people visit, so it can have a Business Profile, but Google’s guidelines list schools and universities among the examples of businesses that shouldn’t provide hours. The same guidelines say departments within universities may have separate pages.

Pages for each program, translated pages and student photos in search results each have their own rules. The monthly work, how it’s reported and how a removed photo leaves Google are on education SEO.

Where do inquiries, tours and office systems fit?

Behind the website, the job is getting each inquiry to someone who can answer it. We would build routing that sends an admissions inquiry, a records request and a general question to different people, so none waits in the wrong queue. A family could book a tour from the open times the school sets. At a K-12 school, the form would ask for the parent or guardian’s contact details, and for a student’s name or birth date only if the admissions office needs it before a visit. At a college, the applicant is the person asking.

A school’s student information system, learning management system or admissions CRM already holds the records. We would leave them alone and connect the website to them only where the school asks. Tell us on the call what you run, so the plan starts from it.

What should you check before you hire an education marketing agency?

Start with the rules, because they reach every page. Ask how the agency ties student photos and names to your opt-out list, and how a removal request gets handled. Ask how it checks pages against WCAG 2.1 Level AA, and whether it looks at the calendar, portal and payment tools your school links to. Ask who decides which documents become pages.

Then the working basics. Ask whose name the domain is registered in; it should be yours. Ask what the monthly report shows first, and what the agency doesn’t do. Google’s guide to hiring an SEO adds a warning about firms that email you out of the blue, and a line worth remembering: “No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google.”

How do you measure what school marketing brings in?

Start with inquiries and tour requests, then look at visits. The counts live in the website: forms sent, tours booked, and how many people reached the apply page. Applications themselves finish in the school’s admissions system, so the school keeps that count and matches it to what the website reports.

On a site we build, Google Analytics 4, Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools connect at launch, except on pages for young children, as above. What a website costs is on website design cost, and what monthly search work costs is on SEO pricing.

How does working with us start?

With a 15-minute call. You talk with Nicolas Perez or Noah Alvarez, our co-founders, about the school, who decides and what is slowing enrollment inquiries down. Bring the address of your current site, the list of tools it links to and whether the school is public, charter or private. A written proposal follows.

Formed in 2023, Midnite Systems works with businesses across the US from our office in Valencia. Book a 15-minute call when you’re ready.