How To Build A Piano Teacher or Music School Website in 2024
Does a music teacher need a website?
As a music teacher, you need a website that can:
Earn relevant traffic from interested people in your area
“Convert” those website visitors into leads
So is a free Weebly site enough? Can you patch together a one-page website and expect students to start pouring in?
Sadly, no. This guide will explain how to structure a piano studio website, how to “optimize” your site for Google, the importance of beauty, and which content management system (CMS) you should consider using.
If you’d rather skip the guide and get started with a high performance website, or if you want to chat about piano lesson advertising (or other instruments), send me an email. I’d love to hear from you.
Pages & Content Your Music Teacher Website Needs
Your Home Page
Your homepage should either serve as the most important organic landing page on your website, or it should serve as a hub from which you link out to other, more important pages on your site. Three different scenarios:
A Business Offering Only One Service in One Location
Let’s say you only offer piano lessons in Minneapolis. No other instruments, no other cities. In this case, I recommend that you write your homepage in such a way that it will rank on Google for your money phrase, “piano lessons in Minneapolis.”
Teachers or Businesses Offering One Service in Multiple Locations
I have a client who is a traveling in-home piano teacher serving several towns and counties. In this case, I recommend keeping the homepage as a generic hub with an “areas served” section. From that section, you’ll link out to the individual pages for each region you serve.
Music Schools Offering Multiple Instruments
Music schools should write and design their homepage in such a way that it ranks on Google for the phrase, “music lessons [insert town],” and have a section entitled “Lesson Options” or something that links out to the individual pages for each instrument.
Your Services Page
This part is simple. Each instrument you teach should have its own page on your website, linked to from a dropdown menu in the main navigation of your website. An exception might be something that’s relatively low-demand, like tuba or euphonium. You could combine all low brass instruments into one page on your website.
The same principle applies to multiple geographic locations. If you serve several areas, structure your site’s hierarchy like this:
Informational Pages
Ideally, you should have an “about” page, a “testimonials” page if possible, and a contact page all linked in the main navigation. Site visitors really do read this material.
I also believe you give visitors the best experience if you display your rates online. You don’t have a competitive advantage by hiding your rates - these are music lessons, not B2B SaaS products. It will save you from having to answer hundreds of emails inquiring about rates. If you charge significantly more than other teachers in your area, then it might be better for you to save the conversation about pricing until after you’ve had a chance to sell yourself to your leads.
How to Optimize Your Music Teacher Web Design for Google
Mobile-Friendliness
Firstly, if you want your website to rank well on Google, it has to be mobile-friendly. This is obvious at this point, and note that Google actually indexes the mobile, not desktop, version of your website first these days. Make sure you test your website on Android, iPhone, iPad, Chrome, Safari, etc. - you never know when your website will render strangely on a different device.
Speed
For every extra second it takes your website to load, you’ve probably lost another frustrated website visitor who may have become a lead. Google realizes how frustrating slow websites are, so speed is actually a ranking factor in the search algorithm. I can build you a fast, clean site that will rank well and be easy for visitors to use.
Good User Experience (UX)
Mobile-friendliness and speed certainly fit in this category as well, but there’s more to it. Are you making it easy for visitors to navigate through your site? Is your phone number easily accessible? Do you have strategically placed buttons and contact forms? Make it as easy as possible for visitors to contact you, and Google will appreciate that user experience as well.
Proper On-Site Signals
Did you write search engine optimized page titles, meta descriptions, image alt text, and page copy? Are you utilizing internal links? Is your name, address, and phone number (NAP) prominently displayed on your site and in your footer? Your new website will have to communicate to Google exactly what you do if you want to rank well in the search engine results pages.
Free of Technical Errors
After you launch your new website, you’ll want to run an additional crawl to scan the site for broken pages (404 errors), broken external links, SSL certificate errors, redirects loops, slow pages, and more. Technical errors (even ones that users won’t see) can hurt your rankings.
Are you interested in building a website from scratch, or is just time for a creative refresh?
These days, for a website to rank well on Google in a competitive niche or area, it needs to be mobile-friendly, fast, and user-friendly. If your website is out of date or hard to use, get in touch; we can use your existing CMS to refresh your current site or build you a new one.
Your Website Must Look Beautiful and Authoritative
Investing in a website that actually looks high end will pay dividends for you over and over. Website visitors are *mostly* humans, and they will be attracted to, or repulsed by, your brand as if they were encountering an apparel or vehicle brand.
Pay For Real Photos
Music lesson shoppers love to see professionally edited photos of:
You (both headshots and candid)
Your teaching space (dress it up with plants etc. - folks love a nice looking teaching space)
Your other teachers
Your storefront or building, if you have one
Get plenty of photos, and add them throughout every page on your website. You really can’t show web visitors too much about your studio.
You Need An Attractive Music School Web Design
Your fonts, banners, headings, background colors, and everything else should be carefully planned. It’s best if you work with a web developer who can give you an idea (or better yet, an actual mockup) of what your website will look like before it’s built.
The point is, music lesson shoppers are either parents interested in quality, or adults who appreciate the arts. Both buckets of individuals will be more likely to email you if your website is attractive.
Which Content Management System (CMS) Should You Use?
Firstly, I want to shamelessly plug the fact that you’re probably better off just emailing me rather than spending 25+ hours struggling through your own website build. Unless it’s a skill that you plan to use repeatedly in the future, you’d probably get a better value paying a professional.
That said, the three main players you should consider are Wordpress, Wix, and Squarespace.
Wordpress for Music Teachers
If you’re a technical person, or if you’re familiar with web design, you could probably pull off creating a decent Wordpress site from a template. There are so many templates to choose from, there’s a plugin for almost everything (although plugins will slow your site down), and you have full access to the site’s source code. You can directly edit the footer.php, header.php, etc. all from the dashboard if you so choose.
Unfortunately, it’s not user friendly for those who simply want a drag-and-drop website, although it is fully customizable for an expert. You may want to contact a professional for a WordPress site.
Squarespace for Music Teachers
I love Squarespace. Of all the popular CMS options, it has the most stunning designs (in my opinion), and you can customize the look quite a bit in the out-of-the-box settings and through custom CSS. You can’t do much to optimize site speed other than minimize your images, but Squarespace sites are generally fast and lean.
Most importantly, you’re able to edit page titles, metas, and other SEO-related material on the site - although you may need some advanced knowledge to do this.
Overall, this is my favorite pick for music teachers who need a beautiful, high-converting website. If you need ecommerce functionality, I may suggest another platform.
Wix for Music Schools
Wix is a perfectly good CMS for music teachers, and you’ll have lots of templates to choose from (more than Squarespace). You can’t do much customization once you choose a theme, but that probably won’t be a problem for you.
Another bonus - the Wix SEO Wiz. Wix helps you find ways to optimize your site for Google, and if you’re building the site on your own, that’s important.
Let’s Talk About Your Music School Website
I’ve helped large music schools and private music teachers alike get found on Google through excellent web design and search engine optimization, and I’d enjoy working with you on your project. Send me a note - it’s always free to chat.