Surprising SEO insights for life coaches
To attract potential clients to your life coaching business through your website content, you need to focus on three things. Firstly the obvious – what do you offer that your potential coaching clients need? Next, what do potential clients typically type into a search bar when they research their problem or look for a solution? Finally, how can you persuade search engine like Google that your content is the most likely to meet those searchers’ needs?
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Make data driven decisions
Your own coaching website data offers the most useful insights when you’re starting or refreshing your digital marketing content strategy. The numbers of visitors, how long they stay and the most popular pages provide valuable information. However, if you have a new site or low traffic numbers, it can be hard to know where to start.
If that’s you, here are some quick insights into Irish search behaviour and website performance to get you thinking. They are drawn from a range of coaching keyword, SEO and performance analytics data collated from Google and other analytical software. I have focussed in on searcher behaviour in Ireland in relation to smaller-sized websites of Irish businesses in the coaching and wellness sectors.
Where there is sufficient data, the findings relate specifically to coaching. In cases where coaching data is too limited, a broader data range has been incorporated to provide indicative clues.
Given the competitiveness of the keyword term, you will need a well-structured content plan to outrank the competition. Your content will need to be well organised and of good quality to stand apart from many similar offers. On an optimistic note though, strong SEO is less common in this sector than some others!
Best life coaching keywords
There are many, many longtail keywords and seed terms relevent to the coaching sector. As with any business sector, the more valuable the search term, the more competitive it is. The best way to find SEO keywords for your coaching business is to leverage a keyword tool such as Google’s own keyword planner or Ubersuggest’s keyword finder. These tools will give you a good insight into the search terms that people most frequently use and how difficult it might be to target a particular keyword for SEO purposes. Try to choose a tool that offers information on the Irish search market; Irish search market behaviours and competition can be markedly different and irrelevant data will almost certainly mislead you.
There are numerous niche subsets of practice within the coaching industry and these keywords will generally be easier to target. It’s worth noting however that the broad search term ‘life coach’ has the highest search volumes in the Irish market by far; it’s also where many high intent searchers start their research when they are looking for a coach. Consider including the broad search term in your coaching keyword strategy, even as a longer term goal.
Niching down may have some quick wins – but in this sector, their potential is relatively confined. Covering niche topics in your blog is still a good way to extend your reach and build up website traffic; it’s just unlikely to make a significant difference on its own unless you throw some serious research and marketing resources at it.
Niching is generally a good strategy to achieve quick wins; however, many niche search terms for life coach have very low search values and are informational in nature. Some are useful for your SEO strategy, but avoid putting effort into many low value terms with very limited return.
Searcher behaviour and demographics
Analysis of typical search behaviour in Ireland indicates that almost half of searchers for ‘life coach’ select an organic result; this compares to an estimated 6% that click on a paid ad. Strong SEO and page ranking are essential if you want to be in with a chance of capturing that traffic.
But how do you make the leap from being seen, to getting an actual click? Firstly, make sure you’re always striving for a ranking in the top 5 places; secondly, make the meta description of your page content (the bit that appears below your page link in the search results) appeals directly to the audience you’re targetting and includes a compelling call to action.
Competitors' search engine optimisation
You can learn a lot by studying your most successful online coaching business competitors; they may target the broader term keyword search ‘life coach’ and related terms, but they will usually strengthen their content with clusters of related or niche content.
You can get small quick wins with geographically localised search terms related to the Irish life coach sector; but do your research – traffic numbers and keyword ranking difficulty can vary between different regions and geographically related terms such as ‘Munster’ or ‘Kerry’.
For life coaches in particular, it’s important to understand what you’re going to compete for and why. The coach training sector and ‘celebrity’ coaching sectors are pretty saturated; avoid putting a huge amount of effort into life coaching terms that overlap those sectors – progress will be hard work and is unlikely to yield high conversion rates.
Leverage offsite assets
Improve your search prospects and jump the queue locally by leveraging a strong Google My Business profile. Reflect your keyword research when you are completing your profile, business information and post updates. A strong Google My Business presence will help you to leapfrog your competitors in local search results! Google reviews can also help, especially if your reviewers happen to mention your most relevant keyword in their review. (Don’t overdo this!)
Popular content from life coaches
There are many ways to attract visitors to websites; common content that Irish life coaches use most successfully to attract non-paying visitors are broadly divided between informational content such as blog articles, and lead generating content like templates or interactive quizzes.
It’s important to distinguish the purpose of each content type though. Informational posts and similar helpful content are generally geared towards brand awareness and authority building; lead magnets will consist of more valuable (and higher effort!) content that attracts searchers at a later stage of buying journey. They will be fewer in number, but more likely to convert once you get them.
Benchmarking your site's performance
When you’re just starting out, it can be hard to know what you should be aiming for or expecting in terms of search traffic. There is no right answer to this; it really depends on the size of your market, the ferocity of the competition and how well developed your website is. First and foremost, make sure that you have set up your analytics software so that you are collecting real data as early as possible.
If you are using Google Analytics, make sure you have linked it to Google’s Search Console – this will give you really valuable and specific information about your search traffic. If your website is new, or you are only just starting the process of driving organic traffic you will want to be analysing basic metrics around basic visitor numbers and bounce rates.
As your traffic increases, you will want to focus increasingly on engagement metrics such as dwell time and number of pages visited per user. Just remember that if you want to identify the results of your SEO efforts, you need to be focussing specifically on your organic analytics data and excluding traffic that comes from sources such as social media.
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