We write landing pages for coaches often – it is one of our most popular services. Recently, we have been getting questions for clients about whether our landing page copywriting includes SEO. It’s a perfectly valid question; SEOs have done a great job of making us think that everything needs to be optimised for search engines (they are marketers, after all.) However, landing pages don’t need SEO. In fact, worrying about landing page SEO can actually make your landing page less effective.
Why Coaching Program Landing Pages Don’t Need SEO
Landing pages for coaches have only 1 job: to convert interested prospects into coaching clients. Every element of your landing page should be chosen based on what will make your coaching program more enticing to your ideal coaching clients. That includes your landing page copy, images and graphics, and your landing page layout.
As a coach, your landing page is already working overtime to ensure that you sign up as many ideal coaching clients as possible. It’s selling and relationship building. Adding SEO to that mix means that your landing page is trying to do too many things at once. At times, the requirements for those 3 things may line up. However, at times, they are going to conflict. And that is why coaching program landing pages don’t need SEO.
The role of the landing page in your coaching program is to convert the people who land into paying coaching clients. When you start taking SEO into consideration too much, it affects the conversion rate. Keywords may weaken the sales messaging, the layout may fail to hold the prospect’s attention, or your use of internal and external links may navigate readers away from the landing page. Is that worth it for a little extra traffic?
We believe the measure of a landing page success is how well it converts the people who do land on the coaching program landing page – the conversion rate. Don’t make your landing pages pull double duty by making them bring their own traffic too!
SEO for Landing Pages
SEO absolutely plays a vital role in attracting your ideal coaching clients. However, SEO should be done higher up the sales funnel than on the landing page. If we look at a sales funnel, the landing page is the “Decision” stage of the sales funnel. SEO is most beneficial at the “Awareness” and “Interest” stage of the sales funnel.
What that means is that the SEO should be done in the content which drives traffic to your coaching program landing page. Your website, in general, your blog posts, webpages, and even YouTube videos, should all be search engine optimised to attract your ideal coaching clients. From there, you can drive those ideal coaching clients to your coaching program landing page.
This is a much more effective approach because you can create multiple pieces of SEO content that are targeted to the various problems that your coaching program solves for your ideal coaching clients. You can create an effective sales funnel where ideal coaching clients read free content to get to know you and see your expertise on the subject. Then, they are more receptive to your coaching program because they trust you.
If someone does a Google search to diagnose what is causing a problem they are facing and they get taken to a landing page, what do you think they’re going to do?
They’re going to go back to Google because they don’t want to be sold something they aren’t sure they need. They wanted to read content on the possible causes of the problem they are facing. In that way, focusing your SEO efforts on the content that links to your landing page is more effective. It allows you to nurture ideal coaching clients at different stages of problem awareness into traffic to your coaching program landing page.
People who are actively Googling for a solution to their problem might be able to be converted if your landing page shows up in the search results. However, it is important to remember that keywords that show a buying intention are high competition. You and every other coach in your niche are competing for that traffic.
If you want to optimise your landing page for those high-competition keywords, then you will need to work with an SEO and a copywriter long-term to ensure your landing page ranks on the first page of Google and continues to rank on the first page of Google.
How to Send Traffic to Your Landing Page
There are two ways you can send traffic to your coaching program landing page. The first is organic traffic, meaning traffic that you don’t pay for. The second is using ads to send traffic to your coaching program landing page.
Send Organic Traffic to Your Landing Page
Organic traffic is traffic that you don’t have to pay for. The most common forms of organic traffic are:
- Social media traffic (using content to drive traffic)
- Search engine traffic (SEO)
- Email traffic (putting links in your emails)
Organic traffic is highly desirable because it allows you to keep your costs low. It can take a little bit of time to build organic traffic, as you need to improve your website SEO or build a curated following of ideal coaching clients.
Send Traffic to Your Coaching Program Landing Page Using Ads
The quickest way to drive traffic to your landing page is to pay for the traffic. The most common forms of paid traffic for coaches are:
- PPC ads (pay per click ads, like you see on social media or Google)
- Affiliate ads (paying a related business or an influencer that shares your audience to advertise in exchange for a commission)
- Display advertising (paying an upfront fee for displaying an ad rather than per click)
Unless you have expertise in advertising, we recommend working with an expert in your desired type of advertising to maximise your ROI.
Need a Landing Page for Your Coaching Program?
Experience your most successful launch yet. We write high-converting coaching program landing pages for coaches for £800. Our landing pages for coaches come with a cheat sheet of the main benefits and sales messaging – perfect for creating content and ads to promote your coaching program. Learn more about our landing page for coaches service here.