Keyword Strategy for Coaches

The 12 Months in Business Wake-up Call

If you’ve been in the online business world more than a year you’re probably at the stage everyone gets to where you’re thinking you could use more coaching clients – AKA “where the fuckety fuck are my clients? I should be making big moolah by now“.

It’s completely normal. Everyone starts with a ton of enthusiasm thinking that they’re going to be making big dollars within a few months, 6 at the most – yet here you are, 12 months in and pickings are still lean with few coaching clients and fewer potential clients.

You have the choice at this stage to either keep going on with your socials in the hope it’ll bring those clients in when you magically achieve Social Stardom [tm] – or, you can start working on your Keyword Strategy on your own website and woo Google to rank higher so that your ideal clients come to you.

And this is the strategy most online businesses are ignoring – so when you implement it, you get to leapfrog all of those still on the Social Media Hamster Wheel!

Remember, serious clients are Googling solutions – they’re not scrolling the socials looking for a magic bullet. You should also be seeking a quality of clients – not just scrollers!

What is Keyword Strategy?

Your Keyword Strategy is essentially telling Google what you’re all about in words your clients use so that they can easily find you when they fire up their browser to find the answer to their problem.

It’s an Inbound Marketing strategy meaning that by clever use of copy, you bring clients direct to you rather than selling your soul on socials.

Being 12 months into your business you will have by now figured out your niche. Sounds obvious right? But, how many weeks or months did you market yourself as a ‘life coach’ or a ‘business coach’ before you figured out that your niche marketing had to really drill down to the bit you’re really an expert in.

This is the bit when you went from ‘business coach’ to ‘Marketing Funnel Expert’. It’s an extremely important part of your evolutionary journey as an online business owner – and until you’ve really figured this out then the Keyword Strategy isn’t ready for you. If you’ve not figured out yet what your distinct niche is – then you need to come back when you have.

In terms of Keyword Strategy – it’s the difference between telling Google you’re a ‘life coach’ and telling Google you can teach someone to plan a full and varied recipe collection for a neurodiverse household without cooking 3 different dinners!

Keyword Research for Course Creators

It’s all about INBOUND MARKETING – which means bringing the clients directly to you because you’re talking their language rather than hoping they’ll go looking for the solution to their problems when they’re waiting in the Starbucks line and idly scrolling…

Nobody, but nobody outside of the ‘Life Coaching industry’ types the words ‘life coach’ into Google – because it means nothing to them.

Keyword Research is about discovering what words and phrases your customers are typing into Google when they want more information about a topic or a problem that’s bothering them. Then, you go ahead and write articles (blog posts) and pages (sales pages are great for this) which answer those questions – which brings those people direct to you from Google by weaving in what we call “long-tailed keywords” (expressions) on your page SEO which are related to your industry and expertise.

It’s really easy to think you know what you are all about – but by using some Keyword Research tools you can figure out what people are talking about ‘around’ the topic – and, perhaps more importantly – the competition – and how difficult Google thinks it’s going to be for you to rank in those areas within Google searches.

Competitor Analysis

I know, it’s really not much fun taking a really long hard look at your competitors. It often ends in feelings of self-doubt and wondering how they got to be so successful when you’re struggling. I can tell you right now that a lot of it depends how long they’ve been in business – and the strength of their marketing strategy – or those advising them.

When it’s time to look at your competitors then there are 2 areas we’re really interested in looking at in terms of how we want to go into Google battle! 😉

• domain overview
• organic keywords ranking
• keyword weighting

Domain Overview

There are various clever companies which track domains and figure out whether they’re rising or falling in the rankings, how often they’ve been going, whether they’re ‘spammy’, what they’re doing with organic marketing and if they’ve got any backlinks – and if yes, are they coming from reputable sites or just a dozen spam bot sites in Rusia.

If you’ve got a low number here, it’s likely because you’ve only just started your SEO journey and it takes some time for the big ranking companies to see what you’re doing. You can turn that shit around over at Google HQ within hours though – so don’t let that put you off starting – and, realistically if you’re just starting your Keyword Strategy right now then don’t go worrying about your Domain Overview for at least 3 months because it won’t be reflecting a true picture of your site and its value. Yet.

Organic Keyword Ranking

You can start doing your own Keyword Research over at Google Adwords to get an idea of what people are searching for, or there’s a variety of other tools which you can try for free (obviously they’re limited in capability and will only allow you to do a few searches a day) such as Ubersuggest, Moz and Ahrefs – all three are big, trusted names and a great place to get you off the starting blocks.

My caveat with any of these tools would be to bear in mind you still need to run any suggestions through your own filter to decide whether it’s really a useful suggestion for your business – or just a computer throwing up crap! 😉 You will always know your business better than a computer. Many of these tools now lean on AI which of course can be very useful – but, don’t rely on it to do all the clever thinking for you – a lot of its results are going to come from scraping other websites in your niche and they might not be having such clever ideas as you yourself! If they’ve not nailed down their niche and don’t know how to speak in your client’s language and terminology… then you’re just mimicking bad results!

Keyword Weighting

When you’re doing your keyword research, you’ll quickly discover that it’s going to be harder to rank for some terms than for others. This often comes down to the fact that they’ve either been in business longer than you and ‘dominate the market’ (think owning a book shop and going up against Amazon!) – or the phrase is so over-used in your niche or industry that there’s a huge amount of competition.

So the art here is finding your keyword phrase that:

• is relevant to your industry
• is relevant to your customers
• doesn’t have too much competition
• has a search volume worth creating for

What this boils down to and what it actually means is; you need to find a phrase which your customers are tapping into Google… and that not too many of your competitors are using. I suggest you go after any keywords with a ‘medium’ weighting when you begin your inbound marketing and keyword strategy so that you’re not trying to do the impossible and rank high against multiple sites with huge authority, multiple content creators churning out multiple articles in their content buckets.

With a sensible and pragmatic approach – and being sure to choose your keywords carefully, you can quickly rank your site high on Google by following this systematic approach.

OK, maybe it’s not as ‘sexy’ as going viral on the ‘gram – but it’s a whole lot more sustainable when you can apply logic and work to abide by Google’s rules and expectations. Human nature is a fickle beast – machines not so much!