SEO stands for search engine optimization and SEO for coaches is the process of optimizing your coaching website to show up on Google in front of your target audience.
It is one of the most powerful marketing strategies, especially for coaching businesses.
The power of SEO is in the type of traffic it can send to your website
Any website visitor that lands on your website after searching for a particular keyword on Google is more likely to be a perfect fit for your services than a lead randomly scrolling on social media.
Google is the largest search engine in the world with millions of unique search queries every single second.
People searching on Google have a problem and are in search of Solutions.
In this guide, you are going to learn how to optimize your website to show up on Google in front of your target audience.
Before that let’s quickly look at the benefits of SEO for coaches.
Importance of SEO for coaches
1. High-Quality traffic
As I said earlier, the type of traffic Google sends is highly targeted.
Unless you’re creating content that is irrelevant to your niche, most of your website visitors should be people who would most likely benefit from your services.
This is because Google is a search engine and will only your content to people who have searched for it.
Hence, the more SEO traffic you’re able to get, the more quality leads you will have in your funnel.
And by high quality, I mean most likely to convert.
You don’t want to spend all the time generating leads for your coaching business only to have them not convert.
2. It’s Free and Scalable
Google SEO for coaches is totally free to implement. As long as you have your website all set up, you can start applying the steps outlined in this guide as soon as now for completely free.
And unlike social media, SEO obeys the principle of compounding.
This means that the more content you create for Google, the more opportunities you will have to show up on the search results.
3. The traffic is Evergreen
SEO is almost like a set-it-and-forget-it marketing strategy.
As opposed to Social Media, with SEO you just have to do the work once and reap the fruits time and time again.
That’s the sweetness of SEO traffic.
Without further ado, let’s quickly discuss how you could get started with executing SEO for coaches.
7 Easy Steps to SEO for Coaches
Step 1. Start with the basics of SEO for coaches
To be able to get a piece of the sweet SEO cake, here are some of the basic requirements you might need.
No 1: A Niche in mind
Your niche is a prerequisite for any marketing strategy you might be considering including SEO.
The worst type of business is one without a Niche.
You need to be able to pinpoint the target market you want to serve with your services as opposed to randomly trying to cater to a generic need.
Your niche is a section of a large market that houses your ideal client.
You want to be able to give a brief description of who you will be trying to reach with your SEO strategy.
With a clear image of your niche, you will be able to narrow all of your marketing efforts to deeply speak to that one group of people.
So the question now is: how do you find your niche?
Well, it’s simple: I have made a free 7-day crash course for any coach looking to launch or relaunch their coaching business from scratch.
On the first day of this free course, you will be able to nail your niche head-on using proven strategies, thereby setting you up for success in growing the coaching business of your dreams.
No 2: A highly functional website
It’s obvious, there’s no SEO without a website, and so to be able to enjoy that sweet SEO traffic, you need a website.
And not just any website, a highly functional one.
Your website should include elements that will allow you to convert your website visitors to sales.
Some of these elements include:
- A nicely written copy to compel your visitors of the value of your brand as a whole.
- A professional design to entice them and keep them Wowed
- A lead-capturing system to convert these visitors into leads for your coaching business.
If you are serious about creating a website that does the hard work of converting your visitors to sales on your behalf, then you should read this guide on website design for coaches.
Step 2. Map out your content strategy
Now that you have a brief understanding of who your target market is, the next step is to create your content strategy.
Your content strategy is an outline of how you plan on using content to get clients for your business.
It’s extremely powerful for helping you stay relevant with your content marketing efforts.
Without a content strategy, it is easy to start creating ineffective and irrelevant content pieces in the name of staying consistent.
Just like any strategy, your content strategy sets the pace for what you need to be doing to reap maximum fruits with your content
It should include:
- A couple of content buckets to draw content topics from
- A Content calendar with scheduled content topics to create content around
- Short and long-term goals for your content
- Tracking and ROI metrics to measure the effectiveness of your content.
If you are looking to get serious with your content marketing, you should definitely read our guide on content marketing for coaches to learn everything you need to know
At the end of this step: you should have a long list of probable blog post topics.
This list will help you stay consistent with creating helpful content for your niche.
Step 3. Do your keyword research:
As solopreneurs, it’s easy to want to skip the phase and get right into creating content but you shouldn’t.
Keyword research is extremely important for grouping out keywords to focus on with your SEO strategy or filter out entirely.
You want to avoid creating content on just any topic that comes to mind.
Rather you want to focus on maximizing your keyword research process to extract content ideas that are most likely to bring leads and sales to your business.
I use a free keyword tool called Google keyword planner for my keyword research process.
Here’s what I keep at the back of my mind when deciding on what keywords to write content for: {Not to worry, the Google keyword planner gives you info on these metrics clearly}
- Search Volume: Make sure the keywords you choose to go after have a reasonable search volume. Think about it, what’s the point of creating content when no one is even searching?
- Competition: You should also consider the competition rate of a keyword when trying to create content for it. SEO is all about authority and you need to make sure you can compete with content already available around a particular topic
Once you’ve narrowed down a list of keywords that meet these criteria, it’s time to start creating content.
Step 4. Content Creation
Frankly speaking every powerful SEO strategy starts with quality content.
The word quality sounds sort of abstract but keep this in mind.
If your content isn’t going to be better and unique compared to what already exists on the search results, why should Google rank yours above existing results.
Your new content needs to build on the value already existing on Google and give an up to date experience to readers.
So by this, the strategy of copy pasting other people’s outline and creating your content off of that won’t work.
Instead, you want to make sure you content is unique and relevant as this will increase your chances of converting them into super fans for your business.
As the expert that you are, this should be an easy string to pull.
You just need to go all in and focus on giving the best possible advice concerning the topic.
The key is to focus on creating quality content first then optimizing for SEO later.
Step 5. Optimization Proper:
At this point in time we have a piece of content to work with and optimise in the best way possible to show up on Google.
There are different aspects of SEO and each of these aspects needs to be catered to for the overall success of your SEO strategy.
Briefly, there are 3 types of SEO every coach needs to know:
No 1: Onpage SEO
On page SEO is part of optimising your website a blog post with the target keyword so Google understands what your content is about and ranks it for that particular search query.
Google is a bot and still struggles to understand text written content.
By adding your target keyword to the recommended places on your website and blog post, you will increase your chances of showing up on the search results.
So in a nutshell, On Page SEO is a process of helping Google understand your content better by adding keywords in the necessary places.
Let’s take the target keyword of this post for example: SEO for coaches.
To properly optimize your post for SEO, you should have this keyword in your
- Title
- Header tags i.e H1, H2 and H3
- Introduction
- Meta description
- URL
Having your keywords in the above areas will give Google a good idea on what your blog post is about.
No 2: OffPage SEO
Yes that you could rank on Google by stuffing in keywords using the on-page SEO strategy but that age is Long Gone.
Google’s algorithm is getting smarter and you’re going to need more than just the words to show up for your target search query.
This is where off page SEO comes in.
As you might have guessed decided, these are SEO activities you do outside of your website to give Google the signal it needs to rank you on the top of its results.
These signals will come from other websites and your social media profiles.
It works like a rating system.
The more websites you have talking about your website and linking to you or the more engagement signals Google gets from your profiles on your social media, the more highly Google begins to think of your website.
Anyone can create a website but not everyone can get traction from other websites and on social media
To the goal here is to get links to your website from authority website that Google sees you as valuable.
This is probably the hardest part of SEO as well as the most important part.
Nowadays it is so hard to get a website to link to you and transfer some authority to your website.
This difficulty in acquisition of backlinks is why Google rates offpage as a Top Ranking Factor.
One more thing, you need to focus on getting links from authority websites in your market as opposed to random websites.
One quality link from an authority website will do you a lot more good than hundreds of random links from low authority sites.
Think about it, who is Google most likely to take recommendations from?
An authority website that they already trust for a bunch of random websites.
Now the more quality links you can get, the faster you will be able to increase your domain authority.
The higher your domain authority, the easier and faster it will be to rank any post on Google including the ones that bring in clients.
No 3: Technical SEO
Another aspect of SEO, which is also as important is technical SEO.
Google’s goal with this ranking factor is to make sure that every website that shows up on its search result is highly optimised for an exceptional user experience.
Google loves its users and wants the best search experience for them.
Hence, Google will only show website that ensure a maximum overall experience its users.
If Google tracks a signal that your website provides an awful user experience, you start to lose all of your rankings.
To make sure your website checks the technical SEO box, you need to ensure that it
- Has a fast loading speed
- Is Mobile response
The easiest way to ascertain the technical state of your website is by using Google Page speed insight.
Check the state of your website and make sure you optimize it to have a good score of about 80-100.
Step 7. Start tracking and analysis:
Once you’re done with optimising your website for SEO, you will need stop tracking and analysing your efforts.
This might sound nerdy but by tracking your Analytics you will be able to know what’s working best on your website and double down on that.
Ypu will also be able to pinpoint what isn’t working so you could save time and focus on what is.
Google has made this so easy by providing us with its Analytics tool.
So make sure you connect your site to Google Analytics and Google search console so you will be able to see what’s happening with visitors on your website.
Conclusion
SEO for coaches is one of the most powerful ways to get leads and clients to your coaching business.
It most definitely takes a lot of time to see results but when the traffic starts creeping it only compounds from there.
SEO is just a piece of the entire puzzle.
If you’re looking to get serious with your digital marketing as a whole to take your coaching business to the next level, make sure you read our ultimate guide to digital marketing for coaches.
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