Simple SEO for Coaches, Course Creators and Service Providers

Essential simple SEO techniques for coaches, course creators and service providers who want to get off the Social Media hamster wheel to gain visibility and get more website visitors. It’s called SEO and as an introvert – it’s your biggest weapon.

Introduction

In this article, I will explain three main ideas of simple SEO for coaches, course creators and service providers.

But with a focus on only 2 of them because those are the ones you can really leverage if you’re more introverted in your marketing and those are the ones which which make sense for online businesses so you can reach your target audience.

So I’m going to concentrate only on the ones I think are important for you and your style of business.

Now… I know reading that you’re probably thinking “but my niche is competitive“… well yeh, on Socials maybe – but very few have got the grit to throw themselves into SEO tech and writing good articles which deliver massive value to their fans.

If you’re like me, you’ve probably had enough of social media’s endless parade of selfies and hashtags. I mean, who has the energy to keep up with all that when you could be doing something productive? Like, I don’t know, climbing Mount Everest or learning to speak Klingon or even just lying on the couch with a big bag of cheesy puffs and watching the latest Zombie flick. Styling your hair for the latest live seems such a pointless waste of time and energy when the bottom line is – you want more website visitors + more sales.

SEO Solution: SEO Revolution

But fear not, my socially reserved friends; there’s a way to grow your online coaching services empire without selling your soul to Instagram. Step into the easy world of SEO, supported by great SEO tools. Here, keywords, knowledge, and hard work matter most. This way, your website can climb to the top of search results.

It’s all about INBOUND MARKETING – which means bringing the clients directly to you because you’re talking their language.

Not because you know dance moves.

*I swear to G-d – I went to a step class once. Everyone else was going clockwise, I was going anti-clockwise. I am not a natural when it comes to choreographing my feet!

Technical SEO: The Hidden Backbone of Your Online Empire

Technical SEO is the unsung hero of all our efforts. Think of it as the backstage crew at a rock concert. You might not see them, but without them, the show would be an utter disaster – I’m thinking sound systems not set up and you sat in the dark wishing you had the night vision of a cat to actually see your hero up there on stage.

Leaping into creating content, writing brilliant and informative articles is running before you can walk. And all your witty nitty-gritty writing will go to waste if you’re not set up on your SEO journey to ensure your website is technically set up to allow Google to actually see it and index it. It also needs to deliver a great user experience – because we’re not in Kansas anymore Dorothy and we’re not ‘selling in the DMs’ 🤮.

Site Speed

Well we’ve come a long way since then baby with high-speed internet but it’s still possible to run into a slow site and the overwhelming majority of users will hit that back button faster than a homeless dude who falls in love and needs a place to stay.

I’ve personally lost a lot of business with a site I was running Facebook ads to (oy vey! back in the day when I was still courting social algorithms…) an offer which was selling really well – if the buyers could be bothered to wait for the page to load. Thank you, thank you to everyone who waiting for that damned page to eventually load. *cries in hindsight*

Google themselves have made it very easy for you to test your page speed so that you know whether you need to make changes or not. It is one of their ranking factors – so ignore it at your peril – like I did and lose money! – or, figure out which steps you want to take to improve your speed – and your rankings.

You can test your site speed here: https://pagespeed.web.dev/

The best ways to ensure your site runs like a bullet train are:-

Hosting

Shared hosting with the big providers seems the most financially viable way for start-ups and those not familiar with the technical side of things. However, this is shooting yourself in the foot because when you’re sharing resources (or a server) with dozens of other sites then you have no control over the load being placed on the server at any given time. It’s like going to a buffet at a French ski resort and being horrified at the lack of queue etiquette!

Do yourself a favour and pay a few extra bucks a month and get some dedicated cloud hosting. *My recommendation is over on the Recommended for Coaches Tech Stack page.

Optimising images

Everyone wants to use beautiful images on their sites – and the big stock photography sites allow you to download them in absolutely huge files which are great for being put in magazines for example, but when it’s just being used for a small picture which will be viewed on a mobile phone, you need to resize it so that it’s a sensible compromise between quality and size.

Your website theme should tell you the optimal size for images to be used in any placemat area. You can use your laptop to resize these with a native package or use any number of online tools – this should bring the file-size down from 6MB to a few hundred kb and that makes an enormous difference in terms of loading time.

Use a CDN

Using a CDN (Content Delivery Network) allows your site to be mirrored globally so that a cached version is send to the geographically adjacent. Phew! That’s kind of a fancy way of saying that if your customer is in England – they’ll be shown your site from a London server rather than your location in New England.

It’s a bit of an overkill I think if you’re not getting huge volumes of traffic, however if you’re struggling with the overall speed of your site it’s definitely worth looking in to and you can buy these either independently or through your host.

Mobile-friendliness

It’s not often these days you’ll come across a website which has been coded 20+ years ago and you need to hold the phone 3″ from your face and scroll and scroll and scroll until you can read stuff. So it’s likely that your website theme has already been coded to be mobile friendly – but just give it a check.

Oh how I envy those of you who are not going through life paying $$$ for varifocals just so you can walk from one side of the room to the other without bumping into things, can navigate steps without causing injury – and who can read an ever so beautifully designed website written in a ‘handscript font’ designed for carrot-addicted rabbits.

Yes, it’s beautiful. No, I can’t read it and I’m leaving your site – no matter how informative or brilliant you might be!

Secure Connections (hello, HTTPS!)

A secure connection shows the padlock sign in your browser bar – and, if you don’t have an SSL (secure socket layer) certificate installed – Chrome (owned by Google) is going to throw up a grey screen and tell your buyers that your site is unsafe.

I don’t really need to say much more about that because I know you’ll have stumbled across sites like that before – and the last thing you’re going to do is whack your creditcard details in.

The SSL certificate means that your customer’s connection to your website is secure and private and not being observed by those with less than good intentions.

It’s particularly important when it comes to payment processing – although all the ‘legal stuff’ which we must comply to as online business owners is handled by the payment processors themselves – so don’t go getting yourself in a knot about being compliant with all those laws.

Sitemaps

These are basically the index of your website, the SEO-friendly architecture around how it’s structured and how all the pages relate to each other.

It’s simply a way of telling Google that e.g., my Home Page links to my Services, About, Contact, etc. pages and my blog articles are all found under the Blog Page and are categorised by ‘Topic 1, Topic 2, Topic 3’.

You wouldn’t go into a library and find the books all stacked higgledy-piggledy and it’s exactly the same with your website. It’s organised and you’re just giving directions to Google (and the other search engines) about what they can find – and where.

Once you’ve created these – and they’ll look something like this:

• yoursite.com/sitemap.xml
• yoursite.com/sitemap_index.xml

then you can go ahead and submit them to Google via your Google Console.

These technical elements might seem mundane compared to designing a gorgeous homepage you want to show the entire world – or, at least your ever patient cat! – or writing killer blog posts, but trust me – they’re crucial for the next stage of your SEO journey.

On-Page SEO: The Art of Wooing Google

Now that we’ve got the technical stuff out of the way, let’s chat about on-page SEO -the Casanova of search engine optimisation and the bit which for you – as an introvert who doesn’t want to play the Social Media game – is the bit you are going to love.

It’s all about charming both Google and your audience with compelling content that’s optimised for the relevant keywords they’re searching for.

Google call it “people-focused content” – and this is what we need to deliver. Copy and articles that your buyers love to read.

Remember: Scrollers use Social Media – buyers use Google!

Keyword Research: She said What now?

First things first: keyword research. This is where you figure out what phrases people are typing into Google when they’re searching for services like yours. Once you’ve got those magic words, sprinkle them throughout your content like confetti at a party – but don’t overdo it! Keyword stuffing is like trying too hard at karaoke night; no one wants to hear it – and the clever machines over at Google know what you’re playing at – and they will penalise your site for trying to trick them.

Keyword is a bit of a misnomer – it’s not a ‘word’ as such, but instead a phrase which relates to your niche or industry and would be just the sort of words that your customer is going to tap into Google when they want to know more. Because it’s a phrase rather than a singular word – we’d call it a ‘long-tailed keyword’.

So you – as an expert in your field – already knows the types of keywords you should be looking at – e.g., there’s no point trying to use the keyword “life coach” when actually your specialism is high-conflict divorce and you would do better to use something like “high-conflict divorce is driving me crazy” – see what I mean? Give the search engines what real people are thinking and you’re on to a winner.

Headlines: Stop the press

Next up is crafting irresistible headlines that grab attention faster than free pizza in an office break room.

Power words:

Use power words and numbers to entice readers while keeping those precious keywords in mind.

What we mean by “Power Words” are words that have a psychological pull – so much like when you’re writing your Sales Page – you need to tug on those emotional strings a bit and make that personal connection. They are descriptive and emotive.

It takes practice – and I’ll be the first to admit that my earlier writings were ‘dry’ and more in tune with a washing machine manual than actually imparting advice to real people!

Power numbers:

Power Numbers are lists type content. For example “7 ways to bath your cat without a trip to the ER” or “15 genius ways to make your child eat vegetables”. People like a list of “top tips” and it’s an easy way to deliver content to both your audience and the search engines.

And let’s not forget meta descriptions—the little snippets that appear below your link in search results. Think of them as elevator pitches for each page on your site: brief yet captivating summaries designed to entice clicks.

Meta descriptions: The one where you tell Google how it’s going down

It’s not often we get to tell the big boys exactly how we want our business to be highlighted – but by utilising the meta descriptions feature – this is exactly what we get to do – and they take OUR words, not create their own image of what they think is going on.

Unless you explicitly tell Google what you want them to put there – then they’re going to scrape some text from that page and it’s probably just going to be the first words they come across rather than a sentence designed to hook your clients in.

Page Structure: Headings & Table of Contents

At the top of this page, you can see I’ve put a clickable table of contents. This means that you can jump straight to the portion of the article you want to know more about – and it also gives Google a quick overview of what the article is going to contain.

Best of all? When Google summarises a topic in answer to someone’s question – this is a great opportunity to get your article seen as Google can see you cover the topic in detail and answer all the points in question.

Links: And if you liked that, there’s more…

There are 2 types of links you can have on your site: inbound and outbound.

Inbound Links: Show me more like this

Inbound links are the ones within your own website pointing to other parts of your website. In their simplest form it would be a link on your Home Page to your Contact Page to send you a message, or a link to your Services page to find out how they can work with you.

But – when we start getting more serious about our SEO and leveraging the search engines, then we want to start linking more internally. This could mean for example that within a blog post where you’re talking about one activity – you also link to 3 more within the text which delve deeper into the particular topic you’re talking about and give context to your current article.

The more internal links you have – the more gravitas and experience Google assume you to have around the topic in its entirety.

Outbound Links: Look over there a minute

Outbound links are like the ones I posted earlier in this article taking you to the Google PageSpeed tool.

I suppose it’s a form of Google ensuring that you’re not just navel-gazing – and are willing to send customers away from your site if you feel it’s important information they need to know.

Optimise URLs: Bucket Lists for Websites

When you choose the name of your page then your page builder will usually incorporate that as part of your URL. That’s why it’s important to give your page names extra SEO juice otherwise you’re going to drown in a sea of “services” URLs. This is a great opportunity for you to be structuring your URL as divorcecoach.com/getting-even-without-going-broke rather than just divorcecoach.com/about

It might seem like a small thing to be nit-picking about – but when we’re wanting to use Google to grow our audience, it helps us to give them as much information as we possibly can.

Blog Categories: Fill my buckets with expertise

When you’re wanting to feed the Google machine and get your site up there in the rankings – the best way to do this is to create your content and ‘file’ it under categories.

Your blog will allow you to assign each article to a category you define yourself using the ‘Category’ option.

It’s probably true that you’re an expert on 10, 20, 30 different things within your niche. But – to get started, it’s best to start creating content for just one category – and then build up to a maximum of 5 over time.

You don’t pick up a gardening magazine expecting an article on the best lipstick from a beauty counter.

Until your site is getting good views and your’e getting the kind of audience you want – you need to stick to your original categories and go ‘all-in’.

To take advantage of the category blog structure – and again tell Google ‘hey you! I’m over here and I’m a fucking genius when it comes to xxx’ – go into your permalinks structure in your WordPress settings and update the structure to be:

What happens now is that the category name becomes part of that URL structure – which makes no difference to your user at all – but it lets Google know a little bit more about what you’re doing.

Off-Page SEO: Building Your Online Reputation

Last but certainly not least is off-page SEO – and this is the part I think is perhaps less useful for those who aren’t doing the whole ‘social thing’ – but we’ll take a quick look anyway.

It involves anything you do away from your own website. Probably the stuff you’d rather chew off your own arm than be forced to do again.

Firstly it’s about putting yourself out there – whether that means networking in person and handing out your business card – the dreaded Socials.

Secondly, it’s about getting other sites to link back to you.

Backlinks aren’t as important as they were 15 years ago when various underhand SEO techniques used what they called ‘black hat methods’ – just don’t even bother going to find out what that’s all about. Google put the kybosh on that years ago and in a nutshell – it means shady practices!

What can do however is building credibility through backlinks from other reputable websites – and one of the easiest ways to do this is to comment on other blogs and sites with useful input so that where you put your site in the comment box with your name, that site will link back to yours.

You will also want to hope that your audience are the sharing on Socials types and that they will want to share your content which again brings in more links to you.

Another strategy involves reaching out directly via email or social media platforms (yes folks – even introverts need human interaction sometimes) asking industry influencers if they’d be willing to feature or mention your work.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly – remember patience truly is virtue when dealing with off-page efforts since results often take time before showing any significant impact upon rankings themselves!

Conclusion: Embrace Your Inner Simple SEO Nerd

So there you have it – a crash course in conquering technical SEO challenges alongside mastering both Technical and On-Page tactics necessary to once and for all ditch the Social Media likes + shares game.

Some of the technical terminology may be new to you – however, if you’ve been in this business 6+ months then you probably already know your way around technology far better than you ever thought was possible – so don’t let any thought of “I don’t know how” hold you back.

There’s a lot of chatter out there about how AI can do this, that and the other. But AI is only a baby right now and it gets a lot of things wrong. Furthermore, it’ll never have the nuance and experience a human does – and, so you can absolutely leverage SEO to your own business’s advantage in a way AI will never be able to.

It’s hard work that you’re totally in control of and can do in your baggy grey old sweats sat on the couch. No make-up, ring light or big dollop of confidence required.