How do you feel about your piano studio website? Is it excellent, or only ok? Do you keep telling yourself you’ll spruce it up one day?
In this internet-centric world, Google is the first port of call for most people. We go there when we want to find a new hairdresser, doctor or brand of washing up liquid for our sensitive hands.
Why would piano teaching be any different?
Your web presence is the cornerstone of your marketing and studio brand. You want to make the best impression you can online.
The good news is that there are some key rules of a great website that are really very simple to follow – and they have nothing to do with code or anything remotely “techie”.
Golden Piano Studio Website Rule 1: White Space
If you haven’t heard that term before it might sound a bit mysterious.
But it’s actually exactly what it sounds like.
White space is the empty space on your page. And on a website we create white space using two very fancy tools:
- The return key
- Bullet points (like these!)
Take a moment to look through the article you’re reading right now, without reading it. Just look at the shape of the words and paragraphs.
It’s not something you will have consciously noticed before but there’s a lot of white space.
And I keep starting new paragraphs.
Like this one.
If you handed in an essay or paper in school that looked like this…well let’s just say you wouldn’t.
But this is how writing works best on the internet. Short punchy sentences and paragraphs, bullet points and white space all help people concentrate a little better on reading when Facebook is pinging away and emails are flooding in.
Start paying attention to white space on websites you visit. You’ll notice that those without it feel claustrophobic and look like hard work.
You do not want your piano studio website to look like hard work. So hit that return key liberally as you write your website content!
Golden Piano Studio Website Rule 2: Simple Language
This goes hand in hand with adding white space to your writing. If you’re going to write short sentences and use bullet points, your writing is not going to be formal.
All the writing on your piano studio website should be friendly and completely and utterly free of jargon.
Remember, your reader is not a college professor of harmony and counterpoint. They are an average person, possibly with no music education at all – and you want them to feel welcome.
Write clearly and concisely at all times. Use words that anyone can understand and always read it back with piano parent goggles on.
Golden Piano Studio Website Rule 3: Great Images
Let’s get one thing straight: great images does not mean stock images.
I repeat, stock images are NOT the best choice for your piano studio website.
Prospective piano parents want to be able to imagine their own child taking lessons with you. What will that feel like? Will their child have a fun and enriching experience in your studio?
It’s easier for them to be sure that the answers to those questions are “yes and yes” if they see kids just like their child having fun in their lessons.
Every page on your website should have a smiling child playing in a recital or giggling through a group lesson or proudly holding up a certificate.
Every. Single. Page.
Golden Piano Studio Website Rule 4: Natural Keywords
You may have heard of “keywords” discussed when it comes to search engine optimisation (i.e. getting your website to show up in search results).
Put simply, a keyword is something people might search for, e.g. “piano lessons in Dublin” or “fun music classes”.
Make yourself a simple list of these types of phrases and you’ll be off to a great start. You can now start adding these to your website.
But wait!
This is where the natural part comes in. The way you add these keywords to your website should be as part of a normal human sentence.
- Do NOT just throw it on your website a bunch of times willy nilly, no matter what anyone tells you.
- Do NOT add the keyword to the alt description of every single image, unless this is actually what is in the image. (If you’ve no idea what an alt description is, don’t even worry about this one.)
In other words, the people visiting your piano studio website are your first priority. Just use the keywords when you can, never at the expense of how a visitor would interact with your content.
For example this sentence:
I provide high quality piano lessons in Dublin. My piano lessons in Dublin are the best around!
Looks super weird. I mean, who would write that?
If a sentence makes you double-take or feel a bit icky, lose the keyword and go back to writing like a human. 🙂
Golden Piano Studio Website Rule 5: Professional Domain
If you’re just getting started with your piano studio website and you have to ditch one of the rules on this list, I guess it would be this one. I’d really prefer you didn’t though.
Why might you ditch this rule? What does it even mean?
Well, when you sign up to some free or low-cost web hosting, they might give you a free subdomain, something like: colourfulkeys.siteground.com
This is ok to get started, but your really want your own domain name. It’s not expensive and it just looks so much more professional and official to have yourpianostudio.com as your website address.
Golden Piano Studio Website Rule 6: Clear Calls to Action
This is basically the most important rule for a great piano studio website. A call to action is where you tell people what to do.
You can do this best with buttons and links that say things like:
- Call today
- Click here to book a consultation lesson
- Find out more
- Add your details to our waiting list
You should pick one main action for your entire website – one thing you want visitors to do. Once you know what that action is, call them to it!
When someone lands on your site, the CTA should be the first thing that catches a visitor’s eye and it should be unambiguous and direct.
Make sure you have a call to action clearly visible on every page of your site (often two or three calls to action can be a good idea).
Did any of these rules surprise you?
Are all these things in place on your website already or are there some you think you need to work on?
Tell me what you think in the comments or in the Vibrant Music Studio Teachers group on Facebook.
If your website is already following all these rules, then you might need some more marketing ideas. Check out this article for a whole slew of them!
Thanks for all this helpful info; I’ve been wanting to have a website. What do I use to create it or how do I find a responsible party to create it? Thanks so much for all your help.
What I recommend is creating a self-hosted WordPress website. It’s not as hard as it sounds and you can find lots of great tutorials online for how to do it. 🙂
But if you don’t want to do it yourself I can recommend Janna at studiorocketwebdesign.com – she’s a teacher as well so she knows what we need!
I have my website through Better Practice App because it is not very expensive to add it to the monthly fee I already pay for the BPA. They told me, and it seems to be true, that the most important positioning and largest font must be my location. I don’t like the way it reads and looks, but my name does come up first on web searches for “piano teacher near me.”
I am re-working the other elements you mention and hope for a more welcoming look. Don’t look at it yet!