5 Steps to Building Search Visibility for Your Coaching Website
If you want to reach out to a huge sea of potential clients, build a large email list, and sell a lot of products, then harnessing the power of the Web is a smart move.
One very important factor in attaining this goal is building visibility on search engines.
Here are the basic steps to high search-engine visibility:
1. Make You Website “Search Engine Friendly”
A website is “search engine friendly” if it enables search engines to easily access the content (primarily written content) on the website.
There are essentially two key components to doing this right:
The first component is page coding. This is the programming code that is responsible for presenting information properly on your web page.
This code must be simple enough for search engines to understand so they can easily access the information on your pages.
Unfortunately, many websites are invisible to search engines because the coding is too complex. These websites don’t get found by searchers.
Secondly, the linking between pages of a website must be easy for search engines to follow. Search engines need to jump from page to page within your website to grab all the content.
Many websites do not use links that are easy for search engines to follow, and those pages don’t get picked up by search engines.
Make sure your web designer or web design software has considered search engine friendliness when building your website. Otherwise, people won’t find you when searching.
2. Create Keyword-Rich Pages
In order for search engines to associate your pages with the phrases people are searching for, search engines need to know what
your page is about. To do that, search engines look at the phrases that appear most often on your pages.
For example, if you are a health coach who works with overweight teens, you’ll want to use the terms on your website, such as “weight-loss coach for teens” or “how to lose weight as a teenager.”
Here’s a good strategy for creating a keyword-rich page. Write an article centered around one challenge your audience faces.
For example, “Eating Tips for Teens to Lose Weight and Grow Strong.” As you write this article, be sure to include lots of keywords related to the subject.
One good tool for brainstorming effective keywords is Google’s “Keyword Tool.” It gives you keyword suggestions and an indication of how popular those phrases are. This will help you discover new keywords as well as keywords that people are actually searching for.
3. Get High-Quality Inbound Links
There are two types of links:
- “outbound links” which TAKE VISITORS AWAY from your website to other websites, and
- “inbound links” which BRING VISITORS to your website from other websites
The second type of link, an inbound link, is the kind you want to seek out. They are more valuable than outbound links in the eyes of search engines.
The reason is that an inbound link implies your website is worthwhile to link to. It’s a vote of confidence for your website –from another website–. At the same time, an outbound link doesn’t say much about the value of your website.
At the same time, you also need to make sure that your inbound links are coming from -quality- websites. If the websites that link to yours are unrelated, have lots of useless content, and are hard to use, then your ranking won’t improve much.
Great links include websites that your target audience often visits.
For example, if your target audience includes dentists, then links from websites that discuss building a dental business would be great.
4. Write Good Page Tags
Page tags are snippets of code that are hidden in your website. They clue search engines on what your web pages are about.
Well-written page tags help search engines evaluate your pages, as well as help searchers know what your website is about before they click on it.
The four top tags to focus on are the Title Tag, the title of your page; the Description Tag, which describes the page in more detail; the Keywords Tag, which indicates the main keywords on the page; and the Alt Tag, which is used to describe images.
To write the tags well, make sure the tags relate directly to your web pages and use your keywords where possible.
For example, if you help professional men lose weight, then the title of your home page could be “Health Coaching for Overweight Professional Men.” This is directly related to what you do and includes various related keywords.
5. Check Your Stats to Win
In your statistics, you can find a whole host of information – vital stuff to know if you’re actually doing things right.
A good starting point when looking at stats is to see:
- how many people are visiting your website
- from which websites your visitors are coming from
- What keywords are people using to find your website?
- Which pages are they looking at
- if there are pages not being visited
Here are two examples of how checking your stats can improve your website.
Example 1: When looking at your stats, you may discover that one of your pages has never been visited. You should contact your designer to make sure there are no technical errors.
Example 2: In your stats, you may find that almost every visitor who goes to a specific page ends up calling you for a free coaching session. Consider making this page more prominent.
A good statistics tool is Google Analytics. It has a lot of information and is easier to understand than many other stat programs. And it’s free.
Here are Those 5 Keys in a Nutshell
- Make your website search engine friendly
- Get good keywords into your pages
- Getting quality inbound links
- Write good page tags
- Checking your stats to improve
With more traffic to your website, you can grow your coaching business with more clients, more email list subscribers, and more product sales.