The enrollment funnel begins at your Google listing

In April 2025, Google removed reviews and ratings from Google Business Profile listings for K–12 general education schools — elementary, middle, and high schools — citing an effort to reduce low-quality and irrelevant feedback. Preschools, childcare centers, and early education providers were explicitly exempted. Montessori programs listed with a primary GBP category of “Preschool” or “Montessori School” can still receive and display reviews. Most of the programs that should know this haven’t checked their category.

That’s the specific situation: one side of the early childhood market can still be evaluated by searching parents; the other side now has nothing. For a Montessori school competing for a family also considering neighborhood public options, that gap is visible in a five-second search. There’s a version of this that runs in the wrong direction. A Montessori program serving K–6 that has “Elementary School” set as its primary GBP category lost its reviews in April 2025 and won’t receive new ones until the category is corrected.

The first thing to do this week: log into Google Business Profile and confirm the primary category is not “Elementary School.” For most Montessori toddler and primary programs, the correct category is “Preschool” or “Montessori School.” For programs that span toddler through lower elementary, “Preschool” as the primary category preserves review capability while accurately representing the scope of the program. The correction takes three minutes.

Why the Google listing functions as the first page of every tour

The BrightLocal 2025 Local Consumer Review Survey found that 83% of consumers use Google to read reviews for local businesses. For a Montessori program in a specific geography, where the relevant audience is a small number of families within a ten-mile radius, the Google Business Profile is often where the enrollment decision begins: before the website, before the tour, and before the school has any direct contact with the family.

The Google listing panel appears above organic search results and alongside the Google Maps block. What a parent sees before they click anything: the school name and category, the star rating and review count, photos, and hours. Most parents scan this before they scan the website. On mobile, where the majority of local searches now happen, the listing panel fills the above-the-fold view. The website link is present, but often below the scroll threshold.

Schools spend meaningful effort on website design, admissions language, and social content. Almost none of that effort goes toward the listing that decides whether a parent clicks through to the website at all.

What to fix, in order

Hours and contact information. Wrong hours create quiet attrition. A parent who calls on a Monday listed as “closed” doesn’t leave a message and try again Tuesday. They move to the next option. School hours change for holidays, summer schedules, and program adjustments, and GBP hours frequently don’t change with them. Update GBP hours at the same time you send families a calendar change. Review the name, address, phone number, and website URL for consistency with what appears on the school’s own site; discrepancies reduce the listing’s local search ranking over time, and a phone number that doesn’t match the website is a trust problem before a tour is ever scheduled.

Photos. Most school GBP listings have one of three photo problems: no photos, stock images, or the same posed group shot that appears on the enrollment page. The photos that perform best on local listings for Montessori programs are the same ones that work best on tours: a child concentrating on individual work, hands engaged with something specific, the classroom environment visible in the background but not the subject. Photos of the physical space itself (classroom interior, outdoor area) are the next-best category. Posed group photos and anything that reads as staged perform the worst both in ranking signals and in parent response.

Shoot five to eight new photos each school year and upload them quarterly. The goal is a listing that looks current and specific rather than stale and generic. A parent scrolling through the photos should be able to form a mental image of what Tuesday at the school actually looks like.

Review response. The BrightLocal 2025 survey found that 88% of consumers would use a business that replies to all of its reviews, compared to 47% who would use a business that doesn’t respond at all. That gap (88% versus 47%) is larger than almost any other local marketing variable measured in the study, and it’s a gap that most schools are sitting on the wrong side of.

Most school GBP listings have reviews that have never received a response. Some have negative reviews sitting unanswered since 2022. From the perspective of a parent scanning the listing, the response behavior communicates more than the review content does: a school that acknowledges every family’s feedback, including critical feedback, is a school that pays attention to parents. A school with unanswered negative reviews looks like nobody’s managing it.

The target is a response within one week of each new review. A response to a positive review should name something specific from the review: one sentence that proves a person read it, not a template thank-you. A response to a negative review should be brief, acknowledge the concern without defending in detail, and move the conversation offline. The parent reading the exchange is not the one who wrote the review; the response is for them.

When to ask for reviews

The moment most schools request reviews is the wrong moment.

Welcome emails, new family onboarding packets, and post-tour follow-ups generate requests from parents who have been enrolled for days or weeks. Those parents write reviews about the enrollment process, the responsiveness of the admissions team, and the ease of scheduling a tour. Those are not the reviews that convert a searching parent into a tour inquiry. The review that converts describes what a year there was like: what the child grew into, what the family learned to expect, what was surprising and what was consistently good.

The parent who just re-enrolled is the right candidate. They’ve completed a full school year, made a deliberate decision to return, and committed financially for another year. Their review will be specific, will reference the child’s experience rather than the admissions process, and will carry the implicit endorsement of a family that chose to stay.

Build a review request into the re-enrollment workflow at the moment the signed contract returns. A short note from the head of school (not an automated message) arriving that week, thanking the family for returning and asking whether they’d be willing to share their experience with other families looking at the school. That’s the moment when trust between the school and the family is highest, and the response rate reflects it.

Don’t send review requests in the new-family welcome sequence. Those families will write about the tour, not the school.

The 30-minute weekly habit

Maintaining a current GBP takes about 30 minutes per week, and most weeks less than that.

The routine: log in, check for new reviews and respond, confirm that the listing information is still accurate, add a photo if something recent is worth documenting. At the close of each school year, audit the full listing: hours for the coming year, categories, photo set, and whether any information has drifted from what’s on the website.

The category check isn’t a weekly task. It’s a one-time correction with ongoing consequences. But it’s the most consequential item on this list for any Montessori program that serves children above preschool age. If the primary category is “Elementary School” and it hasn’t been corrected, the school has been absent from the review dimension of local search since April 2025.