For many online coaches, getting their business more impressions (or found) online is a massive factor in their overall success. While there are many ways to drive traffic and grow customers, we will discuss three digital marketing-relatedareas you can enhance to help boost your online coaching brand’s visibility.

Understanding Your Target Coaching Clients

Before we get into the meat and potatoes of this blog topic, we first need to identify who exactly you are trying to capture in order to understand “how.” 

Do you have your target audience defined? If not, don’t worry; many people don’t—and the ones who “do” might not have it as well defined as they think. A target audience is the people a business is marketing/selling its products or services, as they are the most likely to want/purchase it.

While this definition may seem straightforward, there is still much to unpack. For instance, when defining users of goods or services, factors that go into that tend to include interests, values, specific pain points/needs, income, geographic location, and even social routines.

Determining the specifics of your ideal client type based on target audience classifiers can help you drive your marketing and sales efforts in the short and long term. This enhancement in growth comes from better understanding, alignment, and positioning of your brand/business’s values, benefits, and points of distinction with your target audience. Removing the friction of “selling” and replacing it with messaging of “solving” in your marketing becomes a game changer in message penetration, reception, and interest.

Now that we have that tiny detail out of the way let’s get into the three areas of visibility enhancement!

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The first topic we will discuss is search engine optimization (SEO) or getting found on Google. Before we get too far into this one, let’s recognize the fact that everyone always talks about SEO as something you can simply implement and move on - it’s not like that at all. Successful SEO (i.e., getting to the top search results on specific keywords and phrases) requires continuous work, tracking, and monitoring of your competition. But we don’t want to scare you away; you can make beneficial progress in this area without being a total techie on this topic.

Most times in business, it’s best to know the market landscape regarding competition, and SEO is no different. Uncovering the keywords and phrases your customers use to find coaching like yours is critical. Then, studying the results for those words and reviewing their work can help you understand what goes into them ranking so high for that word/phrase. Additionally, doing further research on those businesses (as well as your own) for keywords, traffic, etc., on websites like Spyfu.com and then leveraging keyword research tools, like Google’s Keyword Planner, can help you get a better hold of keyword strategy.

Once you have the words and phrases you want to rank for, you must build your website's authority and relevancy on those designated terms. 

Let’s focus on relevancy first since that is what you will find in most online articles and discussions. Sometimes referred to as on-page SEO, relevancy is the craft of building your keywords into your website’s content at critical areas in a way that doesn’t come across as spammy but helps page crawling bots and indexers understand what your page is about and keywords to associate it with.

Many like to utilize the focused keyword(s) in the title tag, H1/H2 headers, body text, meta description, image alt-text, and URL path name for optimized keyword relevancy or topical authority. The relevancy of your keywords will mostly come from these points as well as referring link anchor text, which will bring us to our next point.

Authority is the other driving factor of SEO—some may even say it is the leading driver. Oddly, what many assume authority to be and what search engines view it as are sometimes misaligned. While most assume authority looks like a PHD, decades of experience, or some similar type of credential, web directories work a little differently. Search engines, like Google, view website/domain authority as a measurement of accumulated credible and authoritative links pointing back toward your own website, passing along link juice.

While there is no precise calculation for measuring site authority yourself (each search engine algorithm is proprietary), many speculate that result rankings are computed predominantly through referring domain authority, anchor text, and the total quantity of backlinks.

Advertisements for Online Health and Wellness Coaches

Running ads is probably one of the most favored pieces of advice conveyed to businesses looking to grow their brand’s visibility and website traffic. That said, advertisements can be a powerful tool to take your online coaching business to the next level; however, they can also be a sinkhole for money to flow into. 

Before signing up for an ad program or boosting social media posts, it is wise to establish an online coaching marketing campaign for your business. This structure will again ensure you know your target audience, understand your growth goals, and stay within the allocated budget. Building a proper campaign will help you refine the channels you want to utilize ads within, design your ad copy, and test/optimize your pieces. 

Further, understanding how your marketing campaign ties into your online coaching sales funnel is critical to capturing leads and driving conversions. Making sure your landing pages are appealing, your call-to-actions are strong, and self-serving information or automated follow-ups are enabled will be key to transitioning a healthy flow of leads successfully into clients.

Social Media, Forums, and Indexing Sites

Last but not least, employing other sites to help drive awareness, interest, and traffic. These websites or platforms can really include anything that your target audience would ideally find you on. From social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram to apps like Nextdoor and Apple Maps, you can work to get your business listed and positioned favorably to your audience.

Similar to working on your website’s SEO, properly setting up your business account and profile will be vital. Accurately listing your category, qualifications, specialties, and other defining factors can help separate your business from the rest.

Other sites you can work to implement in your favor are forum-based sites like Reddit or index websites like Yelp. Even leveraging other programs, like certified trainer look-up pages from certifying bodies, can help drive additional lead streams for your business. 

Like running ads, focus on your messaging and have it align with your audience in a way that resonates or drives engagement. Make sure your call-to-action aligns appropriately with the channel and stage of the lead’s buyer journey they may be in. Further, find what works with your unique audience regarding impressions, engagement, and conversions and create campaigns for each, leveraging these types of channels where you can.

Wrap Up

Marketing plays a huge part in online coaching businesses getting increased traffic, engagement, leads, and conversions. Building a proper marketing campaign and focusing on the foundational elements of target audience, budget, and goals can help substantially improve your results when looking to grow your online coaching business. Additionally, developing your points of distinction and honing in on your ideal client attributes can improve clarity when deciding where, when, and how-based questions of your marketing efforts later.