SEO for coaches: a plain-English guide to being found

SEO for coaches means getting your pages shown on Google when the people you help search for their problem. In practice it's six jobs: find the searches your buyers really type, write one page for each question, put the answer first, link your pages together, set up a Google Business Profile if you see people locally, and make sure the page they arrive on makes sense.

None of that needs a developer. It does need patience, because it's slow, and the numbers you'll be chasing are smaller than you might expect. I'll be straight with you about both further down.

What is SEO for coaches, in plain English?

Search engine optimisation is just making it easy for Google to understand what a page is about, so it shows that page to people who'd find it useful. For a coach, it means having pages on your site that match what your buyers type when they're worried about something at 11pm.

I did SEO for driving schools for years, from 2007 to 2019, and the thing I kept coming back to was this. The schools that did well online weren't the ones with clever tricks. They were the ones with pages that answered what learners and parents were actually asking.

A lot of the SEO advice coaches get is about the technical stuff, like site speed, plugins and audits. When we scored 10,954 live coaching websites, technical health averaged 9 out of 10. The build is fine. Where coaches lose out is what the pages say, and that's something you can fix yourself.

Job 1: find the searches your buyers really type

This is the job everything else hangs on, and it costs nothing.

Start with Google itself. Go to Google, start typing the problem your buyer has, and stop before you finish. The suggestions that drop down are called autocomplete, and Google says on its own help page that autocomplete predictions reflect real searches that have been done on Google. So you're looking at the words real people used.

Let's take a made-up coach called Lisa. She's a divorce coach in Leeds. She types "how to cope with divorce" and stops. Then she tries "divorce at 50", "how to tell the kids about divorce", "life after divorce for women". She writes down every suggestion that sounds like something her clients would say. Then she scrolls to the bottom of the results page and writes down the related searches there too, and the questions in the "People also ask" box.

Twenty minutes later she's got a list of about thirty searches, all in the words buyers use. Not one of them says "divorce coach". That's normal. People search for their problem first, long before they search for someone to help.

The second free tool is Google Search Console. Once your site has been live a while, the Performance report shows you the searches your site appeared for, how many times it was shown and how many times someone clicked. Google's help page on the Search Console Performance report explains it, and by default it shows the last three months. It's really useful, because it tells you what Google already thinks you're about.

The third source is your own calls. Write down the exact words clients use when they describe their problem. If three people say "I feel like I've lost myself", that phrase belongs on your site.

Job 2: write one page for each question

Here's where a lot of coaching websites go wrong. They've got a home page, an about page, a services page and a contact page, and nothing else. Four pages can't answer thirty questions.

So Lisa picks her best five searches to start with, the ones that sound closest to someone who might hire her. "How to tell the kids about divorce" gets its own page. "Life after divorce at 50" gets its own page. Each page is about one thing, with the search phrase in the title and in the first paragraph.

Don't cram three questions onto one page because it feels tidier. Google wants to show the page that answers the question best, and a page about everything answers nothing well. If you want ideas for what to write and how often, content marketing for coaches goes into it properly.

Job 3: put the answer first

Someone searching "how to tell the kids about divorce" wants to know how to tell the kids. They don't want three paragraphs about your own divorce first.

So answer the question in the first two or three sentences, plainly, then give the detail underneath. Google's own SEO starter guide tells site owners to think about the words a user might search for to find a piece of content, and that beginners and experts often phrase things differently. Your buyer is the beginner. Write in their words, not your training manual's.

Once you've answered, then you can bring yourself in. A line about how you help people with exactly this, and a link to your page about working with you. By then they've had something useful from you, so you've earned the mention.

Job 4: link your pages together

Google finds pages mainly by following links. The starter guide says Google primarily finds pages through links from other pages it already crawled. So a page that nothing links to is hard for Google to find, and hard for a reader to find too.

When Lisa writes her page about telling the kids, she links to it from her page about life after divorce, and the other way round. Both pages link to her page about working with her. Use the name of the page as the link words, like "how to tell the kids about divorce", not "click here". It tells Google and the reader what's on the other side.

Job 5: set up a Google Business Profile, if you're local

If you meet clients face to face in a town, a Google Business Profile can get you shown on the map when someone searches nearby. It's free.

Be careful though, because not every coach qualifies. Google's guidelines for representing your business say a business can have a profile if it either has a physical location customers can visit or travels to customers where they are. If you only coach on video, you don't fit that, and you shouldn't make up an address to get one.

Lisa sees some clients in a room she rents in Leeds, so she qualifies. If you travel to clients but don't want your home address shown, Google lets you hide your address and set a service area instead.

Job 6: fix the page they arrive on

This is the job coaches skip, and in my opinion it's the one that does the biggest damage. All the SEO in the world just brings a stranger to your page. What they do next is down to the page.

When we scored those 10,954 coaching websites, 86% couldn't be understood by a stranger in five seconds. So imagine Lisa does everything above, and someone finds her page about telling the kids, likes it, and clicks through to her homepage. If the homepage says "Empowering you to rediscover yourself" with a photo of a beach, that person is gone. All that work, wasted at the last step.

The five second test shows how to check yours, and what to put on a coaching homepage shows what to put there instead.

How long does SEO take for a coach?

Longer than you'd like. Google's starter guide says some changes might take effect in a few hours and others could take several months. In my experience with the driving schools, it was a long game. You write the pages, you wait, you check Search Console, you improve what's working.

I'd say the same about SEO as I do about ads. Coaches need a long-term view. If you need clients next month, SEO won't get them for you, and you'll want to be having real conversations with people at the same time. If you can keep writing one good page at a time for a year, it adds up, and the pages keep working while you're asleep.

Are small search numbers normal?

Yes, and don't let them put you off. If you look up how many people search "how to tell the kids about divorce" in a month, it might look tiny next to "life coach". But think about who's typing each one.

Someone typing "life coach" could want anything. They could be a student doing homework or another coach checking out the competition. Someone typing "how to tell the kids about divorce" has a real problem, right now, and that's exactly who Lisa helps. Thirty of those people a month is worth more to her than thousands of the other lot.

A coach doesn't need huge traffic. You need a few of the right people every month, and a page that makes sense to them.

Does business coach SEO work the same way?

Yes. The jobs are the same, only the searches change. A business coach's buyers don't search "business coach" much at the start either. They search things like "how to hire my first employee" or "how to raise my prices without losing clients". Find those with autocomplete, give each one a page, answer first, link them up.

The one difference is that business owners are often a bit further along. They might be comparing a few options already, so proof on the page carries even more weight. About two thirds of coaching websites show no proof at all, so a couple of real results from real clients will put you ahead of plenty of others.

If you want to see how SEO fits with everything else you could be doing, marketing for coaches puts it all in order. And before you spend months bringing people to your site, check what they'll find there with the free website check.

Questions coaches ask about this

The figures here come from our own corpus of 10,954 scored coaching websites and 918 mapped coaching markets. How we built and scored it.

Read next

• Content marketing for coaches, and what to write about
• The five second test 86% of coaching websites fail
• What to put on a coaching homepage, in the right order