Struggling with your website’s traffic and conversion rates on your coaching website?

You’re not alone.

With the increasing number of coaches online, getting noticed is tough!

This guide will break it all down to help you get high-quality, consistent traffic from Google.

Ready to transform your coaching business with SEO?

Let’s get started.

Is SEO right for my niche?

SEO is one of the most rewarding marketing strategies for coaches as it offers sustainable, evergreen traffic without the ongoing costs of paid channels.

However, it’s essential to consider if SEO is the ideal option for your niche.

In highly competitive niches, like weight loss, numerous reputable websites dominate the search results. Competing with these well-established health websites can be incredibly challenging, making a blogging-centric approach less effective.

In such cases, you might need to explore alternative channels where you can create content unique and engaging content.

On the other hand, if you are into a specific micro-niche, such as a subfield within artificial intelligence, where there is a lack of high-quality content online, focusing on SEO can yield excellent results.

Targeting a niche with less competition can lead to higher search engine rankings and make it easier to attract your ideal clients.

Your personal strengths and preferences also play a crucial role.

For example, if you are an extrovert who enjoys engaging with audiences directly, creating podcasts and videos might be more suitable for you than writing blog posts.

You can then repurpose these videos into blog content with the help of a content editor and AI tools to optimize for SEO.

Ultimately, understanding your niche and your personal style will help you determine if SEO is the best strategy for you.

Know your audience

It’s crucial to know your audience, not just for SEO purposes but for your entire coaching business.

Start by identifying the specific problems your audience is facing.

Understanding these pain points lets you create targeted blog posts or YouTube videos that directly address the right audience. This approach ensures that your content resonates with potential clients who need your coaching services.

By focusing on their needs and challenges, you build trust and authority, setting the foundation for a successful coaching practice.

In this aspect, Reddit and participating with various niche-specific communities is important.

For example, if you’re planning a course about weight loss for new moms, you can utilize Reddit to gain insight into the challenges they may encounter.

Let’s consider a scenario where you are a fitness coach, and your target audience is people who are into marathons. In such cases, you can use the Semrush Market Explorer tool.

You simply need to search for a popular brand in your niche. For instance, let’s say Nike.

Once you enter Nike.com in the tool, it provides an overview of the audience associated with the brand. It displays key details about their demographics, economics, and behaviors.

Moreover, you can delve deeper into specifics like their income level and employment status.

Having access to this kind of data can be incredibly beneficial. You can use it to create your ideal customer avatar when designing your coaching product.

If you’re interested in getting an exclusive trial to Semrush, refer this blog post

Find the right keywords

When creating your SEO blog posts, it’s crucial to select the competitive keywords for driving organic traffic.

Basically, you need to focus on keywords with a high search volume but low competition. This SEO strategy ensures that your content stands out and attracts more visitors.

Start by researching both purely informative and commercial topics.

💡 Informative keywords address your audience’s specific questions and pain points, while commercial keywords are more aligned with purchasing decisions.

For example, commercial keywords might include phrases like “best life coaching courses,” “top coaches near [location],” or “best consultants for [specific topic].”

Ask yourself what keywords people search for before considering your service.

A combination of both types of keywords will help you reach a wider audience and cater to different stages of the buyer’s journey.

Using keyword tools like Semrush or Ahrefs can significantly enhance your keyword research and competitive analysis by identifying high-volume keywords and analyzing your competitors’ performance.

👉 You can get 14-days free access to Semrush by signing up through this link.

However, remember that these tools rely on historical data and might not capture the latest search trends. To identify emerging trends and new keywords, turn to Google Trends.

If you’re targeting more traffic from a specific country, such as the US, use a VPN extension to change your location to the US.

Then, type niche-related keywords into Google and note the autocomplete suggestions. These often highlight popular and trending searches, providing valuable insights into what people are currently looking for.

👉 You can also install extensions like Keyword Surfer or KeywordsEverywhere to enrich Google Suggest keywords with such volume metrics.

Additionally, manually analyze the competition for these suggested target keywords.

Let me consider a keyword that is “Freelancing for students” and type it in Google Trends.

If you notice a lack of quality content for certain suggestions, that’s an opportunity for you to create content that meets this demand.

By combining these insights with Google Trends data, you’ll get a clearer picture of keyword popularity over time.

Targeting both established and emerging keywords can ensure that your piece of content remains relevant and attracts the right audience.

This balanced approach will help you attract potential coaching clients who are actively seeking your solutions and services.

Create high-quality content

When it comes to crafting high-quality content, it’s essential to follow a specific structure for your blog post.

Regardless of the structure you choose, your first step should be to research what exactly people are expecting to find in the blog post.

Understanding the intent of the SEO keywords you’re targeting in the blog post is crucial so you can address them effectively.

It’s also vital to remember there’s a concept called ‘searcher task accomplishment.’ This refers to the idea that if a searcher’s problem or task is successfully completed through your blog post and if your blog post helps them achieve their goal, then they are less likely to return to Google’s search engine results page to click on another result.

This behavior signals to Google that the user has found what they were looking for and shows satisfaction.

This is a key component of all high-quality content, in addition to basic grammar and keyword optimization for SEO.

Improve page speed

I have noticed that many technical coaches have websites that are filled with a lot of unwanted features, which decreases their page speed.

Here are some tips for improving page speed.

• Reduce plugins: First, minimize the number of plugins you use, especially if you’re using WordPress.
• Optimized web hosting: Choose a web hosting solution rather than shared hosting hosting like Bluehost or HostGator.
• Tidy website: Keep your website tidy by avoiding a lot of scripts, pop-ups, and elements.
• Image compression and resizing: Make sure to properly compress and resize the images that you upload. Aim to keep images under 1500 pixels and use tools like RIOT for Windows or ImageOptim for Mac.

💡 If you’re using WordPress, consider using the ShortPixel plugin, which automatically compresses and resizes images to save you time.

Improve topical authority

When it comes to SEO, topical authority is a key concept.

It’s simple: the more articles you have on your blog related to a specific topic, the higher the chances of Google treating you as an expert in that topic.

To improve the topical authority on your website:

• Plan your content structure: First, you need to plan out the structure of content on your website.
• Implement silo structure: Implement silo structure by listing all the sub-niches and micro-niches that you’re going to cover on your blog for your target audience.
• Find relevant keywords: Use keyword research tools or Google Suggest to find relevant keywords for each niche. The more relevant keywords, the better.
• Create and link content: Create content for each keyword and link your articles together to show Google your expertise in those specific topics.

It’s now revealed that Google has a concept of authorship. It means, it tracks the content creator when it comes to various topics and accordingly ranks their content.

So, you need to improve your authority when it comes to various topics, by publishing more content on them.

EEAT

There’s a concept in SEO known as EEAT, which stands for Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness.

• Experience: You need to prove to Google that you are well-versed in your niche. This involves active engagement with the topics you cover on your blog, which signifies experience.
• Expertise: You need to be a recognized expert in a specific topic. For instance, if you’re in the health niche, having a degree or certification related to your practice can significantly impact your Google ranking.
• Authority and trustworthiness: These often come with time and experience. As authority grows, so does the trust you’ll receive. Therefore, it’s essential to ensure that your brand maintains a strong reputation on and off your blog or website.

This might involve getting featured in various YouTube interviews, receiving testimonials from other experts in your industry, or getting brand mentions.

These factors reinforce your brand’s presence beyond your blog. The stronger your presence, the more authority and trust signals your brand will receive from Google.

If you are interested in learning more about this, refer to this guide.

Build backlinks

Essentially, backlinks are links you get from other websites.

When other websites believe your content is valuable, they tend to link back to your blog.

However, people started abusing the system by buying links from other websites! They do so for their poor quality content and complain that backlinks no longer are effective.

But I still believe they hold value.

Nonetheless, Google has learned the art of neglecting the backlinks that are built just for ranking purposes!

So the best approach to build backlinks is to create something called ‘link magnets‘.

These are research-driven or data-driven articles that contain unique data and research so that other people can use our statistics and cite back to our blog. These would be high-quality backlinks.

💡 You can also use HARO to provide original insights to various news publications and get PR or PR mentions on these websites.

While buying links also works in 2024, the effectiveness largely depends on the source website and the context, or else Google will just neglect the backlink.

Own the audience

One crucial aspect of blogging is that you’ll be entirely reliant on Google’s updates.

Therefore, as a coach, you need to view blogging as an entry point in your funnel. This means you need to own your audience.

How can you achieve this?

Well, you can start by converting your blog visitors to email newsletter subscribers.

Then, invite them to a webinar or start a community on any community-building platform. Finally, nurture them down your funnel.

Establishing your audience is important because it allows you to further nurture them, build that personal connection, and acquire more clients for your coaching business.

However, you shouldn’t overlook the significance of having a solid system for value addition and nurturing your audience.

It doesn’t matter how many leads you may get. If you have a weak backend system to convert them, it’s like having a leaky bucket. You constantly add leads, but they won’t sustain.

Wrapping up

I hope this guide has provided you with a plethora of ideas for SEO as a coach.

Remember, SEO is just one of the sources to bring traffic, but the results are not immediate.

So, you need to have a more proactive lead generation system running alongside SEO.

Focus on creating content in areas with less competition and understand your strengths- whether you are skilled in writing or excel in video marketing.

Whether you choose YouTube or blogging, you can always repurpose the content to get more exposure.