Search Engine Optimisation Tips for Life Coaches and Other People Working in Coaching

That's the question on everyone's lips: How do I get my website on page 1 of the search results? But what if I know nothing about SEO?

There are two ways to achieve this:

Pay Per Click (PPC) Advertising
Natural Listings

What's the difference? Open up a new browser and go to www.google.com, then type life coaching into the search box and hit 'Search the Web'.

Near the top of the screen, you'll see a light blue box with about three search results. Now look in the top right hand corner of that box and you'll see that it says 'Sponsored Links'.

Cast your eyes to the right hand panel of the page. What do you see right at the top? 'Sponsored Links'. This is PPC advertising. I'll explain how it works in a minute.

The rest of what you see on the screen is called Natural Listings. These are the sites that Google ranks as important - the ones that out of approximately 18.7 million sites, Google think you'll be most interested in.

How do the search engines work out which ones you're looking for?

There are lots of different ways that they work it out, but here are the two that you'll have the most control over:

Keywords
Links

Let's talk about Keywords first.

Essentially, these are the words that describe what the site's about. So if your site is all about telephone-based career coaching for women returning to work after a baby, you'd include very different keywords from a site that was about face-to-face small business coaching for accountants in Preston.

People are getting more savvy when it comes to searching for information on the internet and they are being more and more specific about the keywords they search for. And that's one of the reasons that I keep telling you about the importance of having a niche.

You know what, the only people I know who search for terms like 'coaching' or 'life coaching' are......coaches or people who want to train as coaches.

And if you go down the PPC route for top search engine positionings on these search terms, you'll just be paying for other coaches to visit your site. Typically, you need to pay over £1 per click to rank highly on Google's PPC advertising - called Google Adwords - for these terms, so this could be an expensive exercise.

If you try to compete on generic search terms, you'll struggle unless you've got the budget to invest in good Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) support.
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Your clients are more likely to search for more specific things like 'career coach Manchester', 'marketing advice for personal trainers' or 'Executive Coach Sales Director'.

It's much easier to niche your site and compete on the more targeted keywords.

For example, go to www.google.co.uk and put in 'career coach manchester' and see what happens.

Rather than competing with almost 19 million sites, there are now only 241,000 sites containing those keywords, so it shouldn't be too hard to get your site higher up the rankings.
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When you're putting your keywords into your site, you need to put them as early on in your page as you can. So for 'Career Coach Manchester' it should be in your page title, your first headline (h1) and in the content of your first paragraph. Then keep using the keywords throughout the site.

If you get the right keywords, the search engines will see the site as relevant to the search. But how do you get them to think that your site is important enough to rank highly?
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Your links.

The more relevant inbound links you can get to your site, the better. This is where other people's sites include your URL (e.g. www.yourwebsite.com) and description on their website.

In the search engines' eyes if other sites link to yours, then they must think it's a good site. So if lots of sites are telling their visitors about your site, it's more likely to be an important website.

The easiest way to get inbound links is through reciprocal linking. That's where you agree to swap links with another site - you'll put a link to their site on your website if they agree to do the same for you.

Or you can get your site listed on online directories - some are free and some are paid for. Usually this is on a reciprocal basis as well. If you want to be listed on their directory, you need to link back to their site.

Something to be aware of is that if a highly-ranked site links to yours, your site is regarded more highly than if the link came from a lower-ranked site.

How do you tell if a page is ranked highly?

Download the Google Toolbar, which will give you the Google Page Rank (PR) for each site you visit.

For example, www.marketinghelpforcoaches.com is ranked 4/10 by Google which is quite high for a coaching website. (Google's own page about their Toolbar is also ranked at 4/10).

OK, finally, PPC advertising.
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Does advertising work? Offline, the results can be patchy, but online, if you know what you're doing, it's ideal. Why? Because it's very targeted and you only pay when you get results.

Pay Per Click works on a bidding system, so you specify the maximum amount you're willing to pay each time someone clicks on your advert and you also specify your daily budget, i.e. what's the maximum you want to spend each day so that your spending doesn't get out of control.

The two main providers of PPC are Google Adwords and Overture.

They both work in the same way, but Google is a lot faster - you can have your advert up and running in about 15 minutes once your account is set up. Google is probably the best place to test your keywords and the effectiveness of your advert before rolling it out on Overture as well to pick up search engines like Lycos, Yahoo and MSN.

To explain the inner workings of these advertising methods is beyond the scope of this article. The best thing to do is to go in and have a play around as both have good help and tutorial functions.
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Hannah McNamara helps life coaches, business coaches and executive coaches to be more successful. She combines her 15 years Sales & Marketing experience with coaching techniques to make Marketing fun. Coaches can sign up for her FREE Marketing mini-course (delivered by e-mail) by visiting http://www.marketinghelpforcoaches.com

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