Parents now start in ChatGPT and Google's AI answers before they open a school website. We start with two hours on campus, then work a fixed number of hours a month against the audit. No long contract, no rebuild.
The audit found the problems. It could not see three things that change the order and the cost of fixing them, and all three are visible in two hours on campus.
You are rebuilding in HubSpot in-house and holding the launch. If we add structured data and heading fixes to the current site and you then launch the new one, that work goes in the bin unless the new templates inherit it. We need to look at the build before we touch anything, and we need your target launch date.
You told us the form is slow, long, and gives parents no confirmation that they submitted. You removed the "how did you hear about us" field because families reported never getting a response, and it turned out they had submitted into silence. That is a leak we can only size by walking a real parent through it on a real phone.
Your FAQ and programs pages say 12 students is the maximum per class. Your admissions page says "Maximum Classroom Size: 13 to 1." Whether you publish a student-teacher ratio at all depends on how you count small-group and support staff, and only your team can answer that. Every directory correction downstream waits on it.
Visions in Education came to us certain they needed AI voice agents calling families to book intake appointments. We mapped the process first. The return was in three email automations and the phone build never had to happen. They spent a fraction of what they had budgeted. You made the Visions comparison yourself on our call, and it holds.
Page views down about 20% year over year, inquiries down 20 to 30%, and organic sessions at roughly 858 against 1,100 last year. Zero structured data on any of the ten pages we checked. Niche, PrivateSchoolReview and GreatSchools each publish a different tuition figure, none of which is yours. A competitor's blog post currently ranks for the Orange County query and describes your grade range incorrectly.
Tuition is $38,250 for grades 1 to 6 and $39,500 for grades 7 to 8. Niche says $34,750. That gap arrives at your admissions call as a false expectation.
The discovery session is already on the calendar. Everything after it runs as a fixed monthly block, so you know the number before each month starts and you can stop at any point.
Two hours. Justin and Bree on site, Brian remote. We review the in-progress build, walk the inquiry form on a phone, settle the class-size number, and set the launch date the work schedules against.
15 hours a month against the audit, in priority order. You see the plan for the month at the start of it and the report at the end. Nothing starts without your sign-off on what it is.
Month to month with 30 days' notice. Unused hours roll forward one month. If a month has nothing worth doing, we say so and skip the invoice rather than filling the time.
| Session | Who | Where | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Discovery: build review, form walkthrough, class-size decision | Janeé and team | On campus | 2 hrs |
| Monthly plan, sent for approval | Janeé | Read only | |
| Working check-in, every other week | Janeé | Remote | 30 min |
| Monthly review: visibility, inquiries, what shipped | Janeé and whoever else | Remote | 60 min |
| Your team's time, per month after discovery | 2 hrs |
Meetings come out of the block, not on top of it. Two hours of standing meetings a month leaves 13 hours of build time, and that is the number the sequence in Section 03 is planned against. We would rather tell you that up front than have you discover it in month three.
Owns the structured data design, the map of how inquiry data moves between HubSpot and FACTS, and the decisions that are expensive to reverse later. On site for discovery.
Does the implementation inside your portal. Markup, headings, forms, workflows, tracking, QA on real devices. This is where most of the monthly hours land.
What we need from you: HubSpot portal access at the right permission level, the target launch date for the new site, your class-size decision, confirmation of the workflow allowance in the portal itself, and a contact at FACTS who can tell us whether an API exists.
The audit's findings in priority order, sized against 13 build hours a month. Order can change after discovery. What follows is our recommendation, and discovery may reorder it.
Structured data for School, FAQPage and tuition, built into the new templates before launch. Descriptive H1s on every page. Your 25 FAQ questions converted from styled divs into real headings a machine can lift. Sitemap rebuilt, Search Console wired, markup validated. This is the audit's number one finding, closed.
A native HubSpot inquiry form: short, mobile-first, and built for parents who are often dyslexic themselves. A confirmation page and email so nobody submits into silence again. Routing and follow-up workflows so an inquiry creates a task instead of sitting in an inbox. Source attribution so you finally know where inquiries come from.
Handoff from HubSpot to FACTS so parents do not re-enter what they already typed. Then Google Ads: conversion tracking, keyword and negative keyword build, campaign structure, and two diagnosis-specific landing pages for dyslexia and ADHD. Search only. Tight geography. No display.
Ads management, monthly tracking of the audit's prompt set across ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Mode, quarterly directory checks, and small site work as it comes up. Once ads are live they take roughly half the monthly block, so this is the point to decide whether 15 hours is still the right number.
The first stage is about 38 hours of work, which is three months at this rate. If your launch is sooner than that, 15 hours a month will not get the markup in before you go live. Two ways to fix it: front-load the first two months at a larger block, or launch on schedule and retrofit after. We will pick one with you at discovery once we know the date.
Traffic is down 20% and inquiries are down 20 to 30%. That gap is the form. The AEO work brings more parents to the top of the funnel, and the form work makes sure they arrive somewhere that works. Doing the second one is what makes the first one worth paying for.
Our 2026 ACH rates are $150 an hour for design and web engineering and $250 for solutions architecture. The blended rate on this scope is about $162. At $2,000 for 15 hours you are paying $133, so the monthly block runs roughly 18% under our standard pricing. We are pricing it that way deliberately and we are telling you rather than hiding it in a bigger number.
For comparison, and because your board may prefer to see it this way. The same three bodies of work quoted as one-time fixed scopes at our standard rates.
Ten months on the monthly engagement comes to $20,000, plus the $500 discovery. So the monthly route is not meaningfully cheaper than the fixed quote. What it buys you is a spread across the school year, a smaller first approval, and the ability to stop after any month without having paid for scope you never got.
Google Ads media. Recommend $2,000 a month, paid directly to Google, starting when ads go live. One new enrollment is $38,250 in first-year tuition, which covers a full year of media and our management. Two makes it clearly worth doing.
HubSpot. You mentioned Marketing Hub Professional includes 300 workflows. If the portal confirms it, nothing here needs a subscription upgrade. Worth checking in the portal rather than with the chat assistant.
A real share of the audit needs a decision-maker and a few afternoons, not an agency. It is listed here so nobody pays us for something you can do better and faster yourselves.
Tuition, grades, city, enrollment and class size on Niche, PrivateSchoolReview and GreatSchools. All three take school-submitted updates. Fill the empty About and Courses sections while you are in there. Start this week, whatever else happens.
One internal page holding every published number. It becomes what we mark up and what you correct the directories against. An hour of work that prevents the next three years of drift.
The reviews from families denied enrollment or exited from the program. We walked through the basis on our call.
Nine schools are on it, including Westmark, Charles Armstrong, Chartwell and Athena. You are WASC accredited, a CAIS member and a founding member of the Association of Learning Disability Schools. You meet the same bar.
Founding year, founder, mission, accreditations, leadership. Then one post a month answering one real parent question. Your December 2024 run was exactly right and it stopped. Nobody outside the school writes this credibly.
You put the higher-stakes admissions FAQ language in your own column. Keep the policy decision, give us the wording on the autism question. Once we add FAQ markup, an AI assistant quotes that answer faster and more often than it does today. Same words, wider audience. We will draft a version that explains the reasoning behind the boundary, and you approve or reject it. Included in the first month at no extra charge.
| Step | Owner | When |
|---|---|---|
| Approve this scope | Janeé | This week |
| Start the directory corrections | Janeé | This week |
| Confirm the target launch date | Janeé | Before October 5 |
| Discovery session on campus | Justin, Bree, Brian | October 5, 9 to 11am |
| Month one plan sent for approval | FYC | Week of October 6 |
| First working block begins | FYC | On approval |