I am wanting to create a website that sells products to school parents but it is the schools I need to advertise to sign-up.  The website will need 2 sections, one for the schools to find out about the service with the aim to sign them up to use us.  The second section is once a school has signed up, the parents (and care-givers) will order through our website.  I don't need to sell to the parents as such as we will be exclusive to the school. I just need to make it as easy as possible as the parents who will have the option of using us or not bothering. I need the URL for the parents to be very easy as they will be getting printed info with links (which they have to type) rather than electronic links.  I don't want it to be www.mysite.com/parents, just www.mysite.com.  All the SEO and advertising though should be for the school section as they're the ones I need to sign up.

So, my question is how I go about setting this up.  Do I have 2 separate websites? Or do I have one website with the index simply having 2 friendly buttons taking the user to each of the 2 sections?  I'm a bit concerned two websites would dilute the SEO and confuse things.  I am also worried that if I have one website and  the first page everyone sees requires a click to get to relevant content it will be poor practice.

Hope this makes sense and thanks in advance.

 

 

How do you plan to market to the schools?

Google ads and phone calls. Then ideally organic searches. Ads are easy as I’ll link to the relevant section. Phone calls will be harder but presumably I end up emailing link to section. Not sure how organic searches will ultimately work. 

Edited November 9, 20205 yr by PPMark

Neither of these will work. Schools are inundated with marketing material. It almost all goes in the bin.

What is the benefit to the school for signing up? Assuming it’s some sort of financial incentive is it going to be worth their time and effort?

Sorry to be all doom and gloom but this sort of venture needs big money behind it. I recall being shown a website for maths educational material. They offered the school 25% of each sale. I think in the first year they got just over £100. Parents just weren’t interested.

2 hours ago, fisicx said:

How do you plan to market to the schools?

Oh it's a service that the majority of schools around here already do for fund raising and typically 50% of the parents use. We'll be offering double the financial incentive for the first year of schools who switch to - parents pay the same, school makes double the income.  We're working also quite hard on making the admin the schools encounter less than the competitors.

The ordering process is all ready to go (it's an adapted version of our various other B2C services we've been offering for many years).  We've already signed up a handful of provisional schools for testing.  It's now the best way to proceed with creating the website structure for SEO and Google really.

Edited November 9, 20205 yr by PPMark

You only need one site to sell your products, display all your products as normal but require a login to buy anything.