As a self-employed service entrepreneur looking to market your businesses online, you will inevitably encounter SEO and might wonder: Do I need SEO for my website? We’ve considered how to thoroughly answer this question so that you, as a coach or consultant, can understand your options and make an informed decision. Like with other marketing tools, it’s important to understand what really determines success in SEO. We’ve identified three areas to explore: search demand, industry, and growth phase.
SEO for coaches is important because it attracts free traffic to your website and generates leads for your business. But it’s also important for another reason: These are two common challenges that many service entrepreneurs face. SEO helps you make the most out of the time you invest in your marketing. As an independent coach, you’re already creating content, and all you need to do is simply adjust it according to one of our SEO templates!
This article is for coaches, consultants, and service entrepreneurs considering SEO and wanting to know if it makes sense for them and what their chances are of experiencing organic growth after implementing SEO strategies. This guide will help you better understand the requirements to make the most out of SEO.
The foundations: What differentiates SEO for coaches from other industries anyways?
To decide whether to invest in SEO, it’s crucial first to understand what exactly SEO for coaches, consultants, and service entrepreneurs is, what makes it unique, and why it requires a tailored approach.
SEO is often used for e-commerce businesses, which serves as a helpful comparison to explain what makes SEO particularly special for coaches.
Purchase intention and determination: One of the main differences lies in purchase intention. We often search for products with the intent to order them online or compare them online, planning to buy them from a trusted shop in the next step. This represents a high buying interest and determination to spend the necessary money.
Fewer impulsive purchase decisions and lower urgency: Consumers are often more cautious when spending money on services that aren’t urgently needed in daily life. Coaching services aim to optimize one’s lifestyle or business and aren’t consumer goods needed for survival, such as food or clothing.
Guiding thought: We need to adjust the fundamental SEO strategies for use in online coaching by better understanding how users purchase services!
Principle 1: It depends on your goals
Whether you as a coach or consultant need SEO primarily depends on your marketing goals. So, at the outset, ask yourself what you want to achieve in the marketing context for your business. Naturally, everyone wants more clients. However, the steps toward this goal include:
- raising awareness about your services
- building followers
- establishing trust
- and finally, making sales.
You should have a clear understanding of where you currently stand in your business growth journey and what your next steps should be. Besides SEO, there are many other ways to market your business. Some coaches build their businesses using Facebook ads, others market themselves successfully on LinkedIn, and some use their websites.
It might be more practical at this point to reframe the question and consider what sets SEO apart from other marketing channels. In SEO, you don’t use ads but receive free site traffic. More importantly, this isn’t just any traffic; it’s targeted traffic from users actively searching and therefore already interested in your topic. I specifically say ‘topic’ and not ‘offer’ because, unlike in e-commerce, the threshold for purchasing services is higher. You can’t universally say that everyone searching for “building a business” wants to buy coaching. They might be soft prospects who would prefer to first explore your virtual space. They may not immediately buy a high-priced product but might happily take a flyer in the form of a webinar or another freebie.
One of the questions we often face in optimizing SEO for coaching services is to ask what users should actually do when they land on your page. It’s not just about providing pure entertainment but doing so in a way that also makes business sense for you.
It’s important that in your virtual space, you also offer something to those who are just browsing initially. This could be a freebie like a newsletter, a checklist, an online course, or other free to low-cost formats.
Relying solely on SEO to increase your visibility for online coaches carries risks, especially when search algorithms are updated – which can happen several times a year.
Requirement 1: You have a clear understanding of your SEO marketing goals and have defined what organic growth specifically means for you.
Principle 2: It depends on the search volume and your niche
How can you be sure that as a coach, trainer, speaker, or service entrepreneur, you will benefit from SEO? The key to this answer lies in understanding what search demand is and how it can impact your business.
- Low search demand industry: The success of your SEO efforts largely depends on the niche you’re operating in. For your business to generate revenue from organic traffic, there must be a steady and ongoing search demand. Unlike social media, where fleeting trends can briefly boost visibility, SEO requires focusing on topics with enduring interest. A low search demand is disadvantageous, and a reputable SEO provider should alert you to this at the outset to help set realistic expectations. However, you might now be thinking that your offer is so unique that although there’s little demand, there’s also little competition. If those who are searching for your service need it urgently, perhaps it still makes sense to invest in SEO. The point here isn’t to discourage you or to recommend one option over another but rather to help you assess for yourself how you can best benefit from SEO.
- Operating in a high-interest field: When you’re in a field with significant interest, you’ll find that there are many topics and keywords that align with what your business does. High search volumes around these topics and keywords are an ideal condition because they indicate a substantial number of online users are interested in them. Ultimately, we want to ensure that an investment in SEO generates a return. However, there isn’t a specific number for which we can definitively say that SEO makes sense, for example, from 1,000 or 10,000 searches per month. That is because too much search volume can also be disadvantageous. With greater demand comes stiffer competition, which can make securing good rankings on the first page more challenging.
To give you a sense of the figures: 10 monthly searches are very low if we assume that 1% of visitors to your page will genuinely be interested in your offer. However, even this isn’t a hard rule, since search volume metrics provided by keyword tools are often country-specific, yet, particularly in the English-speaking world, your content may reach an international audience. As a rule of thumb: the higher the search volume, the better the potential for successful engagement, although this varies based on specific circumstances and competition levels.
Requirement 2: A decent monthly search volume in your language area (not just your country) is essential for driving traffic to your site and benefiting from SEO.
Principle 3: It depends on your growth stage
- Ideation phase: At this stage, you’re just starting and don’t have a website or landing page yet. You could also be thinking about your market positioning and which channels to use for your marketing. This initial phase is important for getting some early ideas about your content. The focus now is less about creating the perfect strategy and more on establishing a solid foundation for your business. It’s essential to have clarity on who you are, what you do, what your target audience is, and the best ways to reach them. This understanding will act as a blueprint for all your future actions. And with that, let’s move on to stage 2.
- Go-to-market phase: This next stage is about creating a virtual space where you establish your online presence, showcase your expertise, and present your services. We refer to it as a “virtual space” rather than a website to highlight its role as a one-pager for your business during the go-to-market phase. Many coaches and experts initially bypass SEO and do not launch their business with a full-fledged website. They rather use marketing tools such as podcasts or social media platforms like Instagram and LinkedIn. What these coaches and experts have in common at this early stage, however, is the need for a landing page. This is your virtual business card—just one page where you present your product or service. You can run ads on Facebook or promote this page in other ways without using ads.
- Growth phase: Once you’ve established a business that generates regular income, you might consider investing in a website with an SEO strategy. While it’s tempting to prioritize this step initially, it’s important based on our experience not to rely solely on SEO, especially at the start. First, creating a comprehensive website is a significant investment, typically ranging from €/$10,000 to €/$15,000. Second, SEO requires time to become effective. This includes the time needed to create long-form content and lead magnets, achieve good rankings, and start generating leads through your website.
Don’t be swayed by claims that you don’t need a website to be found for your name. Indeed, if someone searches for you, they might find your profiles on popular social media platforms. However, remember that your name and your brand fall under “brand marketing,” which is different from the organic growth that results from effective SEO work!
Requirement 3: If you’re looking to leverage SEO for online coaching, a website with multiple subpages will serve you better than a landing page. This is because having more subpages creates more opportunities to rank and be discovered online! You should have a blog on your website or plan to start one.
Conclusion 1: Online Coaches and Consultants need SEO – but not exclusively as the only way to grow their business.
SEO is one of the many tools available in your marketing toolkit. While it provides the advantage of free traffic and leads, a downside is that results can take time to materialize. Unlike Facebook ads, there’s no switch you can flip to instantly increase your reach at the press of a button. Your reach still depends on search volume, and unlike paid ads, you cannot use your marketing budget to quickly amplify your presence.
- SEO tip for consultants and coaches: At Studio for Digital Growth, we don’t recommend relying solely on SEO as a marketing tool but implementing it alongside your other marketing activities. These could include ads or social media activities.
Conclusion 2: Here’s why you are missing out if you don’t try SEO:
Marketing your online business requires consistent content creation, whether it’s for social media, newsletters, or e-books. While you’re at it, why not implement SEO best practices? This approach not only enriches your content but also maximizes the opportunity to attract free, qualified traffic to your online site.
Sooner or later you will need a professional website to promote your brand and serve as your marketing hub – so why not extend your marketing efforts and give SEO a try?
- SEO Tip for Consultants and Coaches: Don’t just create content; optimize it. Embrace and apply SEO best practices specifically tailored for coaches and consultants to ensure your content effectively supports your business goals.
FAQ: Do I need an SEO Specialist to help me or can I do it myself?
Question: In the era of generative AI, a common question that arises is whether you need an SEO expert or you can teach yourself and refine your skills with tools like ChatGPT.
Answer: As SEO experts, we have the skills and experience to quickly assess your website and identify which SEO issues are critical and which are less impactful on your rankings. We continuously update our knowledge each month and keep up with the latest trends to maintain our expertise. This level of expertise is challenging to achieve without dedicating yourself to the field full-time. SEO is a broad field, encompassing technical SEO and aspects such as user experience and design. But don’t worry, this doesn’t mean you’ll need an SEO expert for life. In our coaching, we guide you through the process and explain the optimization steps so that you can manage them on your own in the future!
After relocating to Ireland in 2022, she was featured in an interview by German WirtschaftsWoche discussing her life and work on the “green island.” In 2023, she contributed an article to OMT Magazine about blog monetization. B2B Insider published her article on how to communicate USPs more effectively in 2020. In 2019, she made her debut with a LinkedIn online article about the benefits of approaching life with more curiosity and the advantages of asking more questions.
