The profile is what a prospective family sees before they decide whether to inquire. Get it right and inquiry conversion lands at 2-3% (the platform median); get it wrong and you'll sit at <1% regardless of how much traffic flows to your page.
This article walks through the 15-item profile completion checklist, the calls that actually matter (fees, photos, head-of- school bio), and the tier-specific advice on where to spend your optimization time.
The 15-item completion checklist
The profile completion widget on your dashboard tracks 15 items across three tiers. All items are equally weighted; "complete" means all 15 ticked.
Bronze tier (basics) — items 1-5
These are the floor. If any of these are missing, your profile doesn't even read as legitimate:
- School name — autofilled, always complete
- Logo uploaded — square, 512×512 minimum, transparent background ideal
- Description — at least 50 characters, but 200-400 is the sweet spot
- Contact email — what families use when they message you
- Contact phone — must be valid international format
If any of these is missing, your profile looks abandoned. Schools sometimes upload the logo and assume the rest is "done later" — don't. Finish bronze in the first sitting.
Silver tier (content) — items 6-10
These are what makes the profile useful to a family:
- At least 1 program — IB, Swiss Matura, A-Levels, etc. Programs are what makes you appear in filtered searches.
- At least 3 photos — gallery photos beyond the hero. Three is the floor; the actual sweet spot is 10-15.
- Hero image set — the full-bleed photo at the top of your profile. The single most important visual on your page.
- Website URL — your school's main website. Families verify you're a real institution by clicking through.
- Student-teacher ratio — a number families care about disproportionately. Display it; even "1:8" is enough.
Gold tier (engagement) — items 11-15
These move you from "real school" to "school worth seriously considering":
- Tuition range — fee minimum + maximum. See the fee section below for the trade-off.
- Short bio — a head-of-school or about-us narrative paragraph distinct from the description.
- Learning support declared — what learning differences / accommodations you offer. Families filtering for this won't see you otherwise.
- Address — at minimum the city and canton. Full address gets a green-pin on the public map.
- Head of school name — humanizing this drops the "anonymous institution" feeling.
The order matters. Schools that try to do gold-tier items before completing bronze + silver waste effort — a family won't care about your head-of-school bio if your description is empty.
The fee disclosure trade-off
Item 11 (tuition range) is the most-debated. Three options:
| | Disclose full range | "From CHF X" | Don't disclose | |---|---|---|---| | Inquiry volume | Highest | Medium | Lowest | | Qualification | Mixed | Better | Best | | Time-to-tour | Slowest | Medium | Fastest | | Operational load | Highest | Medium | Lowest |
There's no objectively right answer. Two patterns:
- Day schools + smaller boarding schools (CHF 30k–50k/yr): full disclosure usually wins. The fee range isn't shocking; the conversion uplift from being upfront beats the price-shoppers filtering out.
- High-end boarding schools (CHF 80k+/yr): "from CHF X" or on-request is the norm. The fee itself selects the audience, and reducing inquiry volume to the qualified subset saves significant admissions-team time.
What's NOT acceptable: leaving the field blank. Blank reads as "we don't have our act together," not as "we don't disclose strategically." Either disclose, or set it explicitly to "on request" so families see a deliberate choice.
Photo strategy
The platform allows 15 photos on Pro and 75 on Premium. The quality bar matters more than the count:
The hero (single most important visual)
The hero photo appears at the top of your profile and in every search-result card showing your school. It's the visual that families either pause on or scroll past.
What works:
- Campus shot in good light (golden hour, mid-morning sun)
- Students engaged in activity — class, debate, sports, music — not a posed group photo
- Architecture that telegraphs the school's character (historic manor, modern campus, mountain setting)
- A specific moment, not a stock-photo aesthetic
What doesn't:
- Smiling students looking at a laptop
- A logo on a beige background
- An aerial shot so far out you can't tell what the place is
- Anything that could appear on any school's website without changing meaning
The gallery
Below the hero, the gallery shows 10-15 photos that flesh out the school. The composition matters:
- 1-2 classroom shots — show that learning happens
- 1-2 boarding/common-room shots if you're a boarding school
- 1-2 outdoor / campus shots — grounds, sports fields, surroundings
- 1 dining hall — families care about this surprisingly often
- 1 library or study space
- 1-2 specialty facilities — your strongest selling points (theatre, art studio, science labs, climbing wall)
- 1 head of school / admissions team portrait — humanizes the inquiry experience
Photo categories
Each photo has a category (campus, facilities, students, events, other). Use them — the public profile groups photos by category on devices that benefit from grouping. Misusing categories (everything tagged "other") flattens the visual experience.
Trust badges
The platform shows up to 5 trust badges on your profile, all data-earned, not tier-bought:
- Verified — we've manually confirmed school identity (paperwork, real campus, accredited)
- Responsive — your average inquiry response time is <48h over the past 30 days
- Active — your profile has been updated in the past 30 days
- Complete profile — all 15 items on the checklist filled
- Recommended — >75% of post-tour feedback responses say "would recommend"
You can toggle which badges show in Settings → Trust badges. Defaults to showing whichever you've earned. The "complete profile" badge auto-shows when items 1-15 are all done — no manual action needed.
Worth knowing: schools showing all 5 badges convert ~25% higher than schools showing 0-1. The badges are the single strongest social-proof element on the profile. The work of earning them (filling everything in, replying fast, asking for feedback) is the work of being a good school operationally — the badges are the reward, not the goal.
Reviews (if enabled)
Reviews from post-tour feedback display on your public profile when Settings → Show reviews section is on (off by default — opt-in).
The display is read-only verbatim from the tour-feedback collection. You don't curate or moderate which reviews show.
Should you enable reviews?
- If you consistently get 4-5 star feedback: yes, enable. Social proof from real families beats marketing copy.
- If feedback is mixed: wait until you've fixed the underlying issues. A profile showing a couple of lukewarm 3-star reviews is worse than no reviews displayed.
- If you have low review volume (<5 over the past 6 months): wait until you have a critical mass. A profile showing one review reads as gimmicky.
What changes by tier
The profile-edit surface is the same on every tier (above Free). What differs is what families can DO from your profile:
- Free tier: profile is read-only listed in the directory. Inquiries land in our admin queue, not your inbox. The "Get in touch" CTA is the only conversion path.
- Pro tier: inquiry inbox is yours. The CTA becomes "Inquire" (routes to a form you can customize). No tour booking button.
- Premium tier: all CTAs available — Inquire, Book a tour, Apply. The booking button is what mostly determines tour-show rate; the apply button drives application start counts.
If you're on Pro and seeing strong inquiry volume but low conversion-to-tour, the friction is likely that families have to inquire → wait for a reply → schedule a tour by email. Upgrading to Premium for the self-service booking widget often pays for itself in a single admissions cycle.
Common mistakes
- Treating the description as marketing copy. "Excellence in education for the leaders of tomorrow" tells families nothing. Replace with: "180 students across Years 7-13, 60 boarders from 22 countries, IB and Swiss Matura tracks, mountain campus in Valais."
- Setting it and forgetting it. The "Active" badge requires monthly updates. Even small ones — a new photo, an updated head-of-school bio — count. Schools that touch the profile monthly rank higher in search.
- Photo grid that all look the same. Six interior classroom shots aren't six photos — they're one photo six times. Mix spaces, people, activities, scales.
- Ignoring the head-of-school field. This is one of the most- clicked elements on the profile. Families want to know "who runs this place." Fill in the name, role, and bio.
- Skipping the Learning Support field. Families with neurodiverse children explicitly filter for this. Empty = invisible to them. Even "We do not currently offer learning support" is better than blank — it's an honest filter.
A simple iteration loop
Don't treat the profile as a one-and-done. The 15-item completion is the floor. Above that, treat the profile as a living artifact:
- Monthly: check the Active badge. Make at least one update — even a photo swap.
- Quarterly: review the description. Has anything changed about the school in the past 90 days that should be reflected? New program, new staff, new accreditation, new facility?
- After each open-house cycle: add 1-3 new photos from the event. Recent visual content signals an active school.
- Annually: rewrite the description from scratch. Reading your own description with fresh eyes catches drift you wouldn't spot incrementally.
Where to invest first
If you're at 0% complete, start at item 1 and work down — no strategy needed.
If you're at 8-10/15, the highest-leverage items are usually:
- Hero image if it's a default or weak
- Fees (any disclosure beats blank)
- Head of school bio (humanizes more than any other field)
- At least 2 more photos if you're below 10 gallery photos
Each of those moves conversion by 2-5 percentage points in our data. Doing all four is the difference between 1% conversion and 3% conversion.
When to escalate to us
Email admin@swissprivate-schools.ch if:
- You want a profile review — we'll walk through it with you and give specific feedback, free of charge
- You think your profile is being penalized in search (rank dropping despite quality) — we'll check the ranking_score breakdown
- You want to verify your school for the Verified badge — submit accreditation paperwork and we'll review within 5 business days
- The Photo gallery is misbehaving (uploads failing, ordering weird) — we'll debug
We respond within 2 business days.