Questions nursery owners ask us

Charges for meals, consumables and activities must be voluntary, parents must be able to opt out, no deposit or registration fee can be a condition of a funded place, and your charges should be published clearly on your website or via the local authority. We build the fees page to that guidance using the DfE chargeable extras template.

If your most recent inspection graded you Good or Outstanding you may use the official logo until your next inspection, which will not give an overall grade. After that it must come down. We build the Ofsted section so the report card replaces it without a redesign.

Yes, with recorded permission from a parent for each child and a way to withdraw it. Photos used for promotion are personal data under UK GDPR. We set up the consent form and a register with you before any image goes live.

The EYFS requires you to make policies and the complaints procedure available to parents, not to publish them online. Most settings do publish the main ones because parents ask for them, and it saves the office time. We build a policies page you can update yourself.

We build the foundations, and location pages for the districts you draw from, but nobody can promise a ranking and we do not. What we can show is the search demand in your town, which is published on your area page, and what an optional retainer would work on.

When a parent asks ChatGPT, Google's AI Overview or another assistant for nurseries near them, those systems read web pages and cite the ones that answer plainly. Answer-first writing, structured data and clear facts make a page citable. It is the same work as search, on the same pages, which is why we sell it as one service.

No. The case for the website is that a good local page earns what those clicks cost. If you want ads we will say so honestly and point you elsewhere.

For a small UK business, a freelance build is typically £800 to £3,000 and an agency build £2,500 to £10,000 (Duport, June 2026). A fair price is one quoted as a fixed figure in advance, with the page list written down, the revision rounds stated, and the files yours at the end. Anything quoted only after a phone call usually varies by who is asking.

Yes. A domain is roughly £10 to £20 a year, hosting £50 to £200 a year, and updates and security either your own time or a care plan. Ours is £50 a month and covers the domain, hosting, backups, security monitoring, one mailbox and one minor change a year. It is optional and you can leave with 30 days notice.

Answer the questions a parent asks before they enquire, on pages they can find. Fees and funded hours, ages per room, opening hours, what a day looks like, how far you are from the station. Settings that publish those plainly get fewer time-wasting calls and more show-arounds booked. Word of mouth still fills most rooms; your website is where word of mouth goes to check you.

Most enquiries start with a parent searching for childcare near a place they already know: a station, a school, a high street. In practical order that means a page for each district you draw from, a Google Business Profile kept current, real reviews from current parents, a fees page a parent can read at 10pm without ringing you, and listings on the directories parents actually use. Paid ads work but are rented: "nursery chelmsford" costs £4.43 a click.

On-page (what your pages say and how they are structured), technical (speed, crawlability, structured data), off-page (links and citations from other sites), and local (your Google Business Profile, district pages and reviews). For a nursery, local does most of the work, because almost every search a parent makes has a place in it.

Expect movement on district phrases in two to three months and on the harder town-level phrases in four to six. A new domain takes two to six weeks just to be indexed properly. We report position by phrase every month from the first month, including the months where nothing moved.

Margins in UK early years are thin and depend heavily on occupancy and the gap between the funded rate and your cost per hour. That is why the website matters commercially: the difference between 82 per cent and 92 per cent occupancy is usually a handful of enquiries a month, and those enquiries start with a search. We are not accountants and this is not financial advice.

No. If you use Famly, Ovivio, eyworks or Nursery in a Box we embed their enquiry form so leads are tracked from the first click. If you use none of them, the form emails the enquiry straight to your inbox and nothing else is needed. Plenty of settings run happily on the second option.