Be the school they see first

Where the order shows up

Someone who has decided to get licensed opens the nail school page for their city, maybe taps a program, and calls the first school with a price they can see. A working tech looking for instructor training does the same on the program page. Being first on those lists is the difference between getting that call and not, and the same order is used on all of them.

• The city page, with its Programs filter. Filtering narrows the list to the schools tagged with that program; it never reorders what's left.
• The program pages, one per program per city, with state and national roll-ups. Only schools tagged with the program appear, in the same order.

So there are two jobs. Be on the page at all, and then be near the top of it, which is the rest of this guide.

Three tiers, before anything is counted

Before a single factor is weighed, every school lands in one of three tiers. The tiers never mix. The lowest claimed school in a city still sits above the highest unclaimed one, no matter how good the unclaimed listing looks.

That is why claiming is the single biggest move on this page. It is free, it takes a three-minute phone call, and it moves a school past every unclaimed listing in its city before a single program is counted. Here is how claiming works.

Inside a tier, four things decide the order

Once two schools sit in the same tier, four factors set their positions. Each one is something the school controls from the dashboard, and none of them can be bought.

A note on how they combine. Completeness is the base: what a listing is worth when nothing else is happening. Freshness scales that base, so a full listing nobody has touched in a year is worth less than the same listing updated last week. Response and the post-claim lift are added on top. In practice the order inside a tier is usually set by completeness and freshness, with response deciding between schools that have both.

What completeness counts for a school

Completeness is the factor schools ask about most, and it is scored differently for a school than for a salon: programs and tuition matter, a service menu doesn't. Here is the full list of what the directory looks for on a school listing, roughly in order of weight.

1. 01Programs listed, with tuition on at least one of them. Listing any program earns a large amount; tuition on any of them earns almost as much again. Together, the largest item by far.
2. 02Accreditations and approvals. Any one of the five earns the full amount.
3. 03Photos of the school. Two or more earns the full amount; one earns part.
4. 04A description of at least a sentence or two. A few words earns less.
5. 05A phone number.
6. 06A state board pass rate or a job placement rate. Either one earns the amount, whatever the number is.
7. 07Hours. Either set or not.

Your website, specialties, graduation rate, kit cost, and financial aid options show on the page but are not in the score. Nothing on this list needs a designer or a photographer. A phone and fifteen minutes at the front desk covers most of it. Claim your school to see your score and what is still missing.

Getting onto the program pages

A program page is the shortest path from a student to your front desk: "esthetics programs in Garden Grove" lists only the schools there tagged with esthetics. There is one for every program in every city that has three schools tagged with it, with state and national pages above and a program index over all of them.

The program pages and the city page's Programs filter run on program tags the directory keeps for each listing. The programs you list in the editor show on your own page with their hours, tuition, and kit cost, and count toward completeness. If your school teaches a program and is missing from its page in your city, email support@polishperfect.co with the school name and the program, and the tag is added by hand.

How unclaimed schools are ordered

Unclaimed listings have nobody looking after them, so most are thin: an address, a phone number, maybe hours. They sit below every claimed school and, among themselves, are ordered by how complete the listing is, plus a small bonus for how many people view it. There is no freshness or response factor for an unclaimed school, because nobody is maintaining it.

If your school is unclaimed, this is the tier you are in today, and the only way out of it is to claim.

What doesn't move you

A few things schools expect to matter are left out on purpose.

• Featured is its own spot. A Featured school sits at the top of the page in its own labeled space, above the list. The organic order below it comes only from the factors on this page, and the visitors Featured brings count toward your response like any others.
• Star ratings, here or anywhere else. We don't import ratings from Google or Yelp, and a rating isn't a ranking input, including the student reviews on your own page. A rating on your listing doesn't reorder the list.
• How good your numbers are. A listed pass rate counts toward completeness; a higher pass rate does not count more than a lower one, and tuition is not compared between schools. Put the real numbers on the page.
• How long you've been listed, or how big you are. An old listing has no head start, and a chain of campuses has none over a single school. A school claimed yesterday with a full page outranks one that has sat empty for years, the same day.
• Which language the visitor reads in. The English and Vietnamese pages for a city show the same schools in the same order.

Featured: the top of the page, today

Everything above takes a few weeks to build. A Featured spot skips the wait: your school sits at the top of your city page, above the list, marked Featured, from the day you turn it on, in your own city and in cities you choose.

Boost starts at five dollars, you set the most you'll spend, and every claimed school starts with free credit that covers the first clicks. Billing is once a month, with no plan and no renewal.

Featured works alongside your organic position rather than replacing it. The visitors it brings who call, tap for directions, or open your website count toward your response factor like any other visitor, so a Featured spot on a complete listing lifts both at once.

Why a school drops

A school that was near the top and slipped almost always hit one of three things.

1. 01Freshness faded. Nothing on the listing has changed in months, so its base is worth less than it was. Updating a tuition figure or adding one photo resets it.
2. 02The post-claim lift wore off. Newly claimed schools get a lift for the first couple of months, and it fades on its own. The listing didn't get worse. The head start ended.
3. 03Someone else moved. Another school in the city claimed and completed its listing and went past you. The fix is the same checklist below.

How fast a change shows up

A new or newly claimed listing takes its place within a day. Directory pages refresh on a schedule rather than on every edit, so a change made this morning shows by tomorrow at the latest. Position is recalculated from the current factors every time a page refreshes. Nothing is carried over from last month.

The checklist, in order of effect

Everything above, as a list. Start at the top; each item is worth more than the one under it.

This page covers the nail school list. Polish Perfect also keeps directories of nail salons and nail supply stores, and every school in the nail school directory is ranked by the rules above.