Do Online Coaches and Consultants Need SEO?

Let’s answer this one straight off the bat: SEO can make a massive difference to your online coaching or consulting business. Whether you’re a life coach, trader, or business consultant, if you’re selling your services and knowledge as an expert, a good SEO strategy can give you an edge.

Using SEO to Promote a Coaching or Consulting Business

For consultants, local SEO is one of the biggest difference makers, while online coaches can use SEO to target highly specific sectors. It might not be as simple as launching a Meta Ads campaign and selecting your target location and audience, but in the long run, it’s much cheaper and more effective.

Local SEO for Consultants

SEO is often seen as a blanket marketing method. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Google users across the US will see similar search results for general terms, but they’ll also be shown local options. Search engines use location targeting to recommend specific businesses with the searcher’s local area, whether that be a restaurant, taxi service, or hotel.

For a consultant, this could be the ticket to working with clients that need the experience of a local.

Competition among consultants is fierce, and major keywords are highly competitive as a result.

That changes at a local level.

There are fewer companies and individuals competing for the same keywords, and as some of them are working on limited budgets or with limited experience, getting to the top of the rankings will be much quicker and easier.

Using SEO to Target Specific Industries as an Online Coach

Google values relevancy, and its algorithm is very effective at pinpointing what a company does and what kind of individuals it targets.

By building an SEO strategy around industry-specific content, you can show Google that you’re an expert in that field and get a boost as a result.

It’s also much easier to rank for specific terms than general ones. By focusing on your specific skill set and not trying to cast your net too wide (such as “small online business coaching” as opposed to “business coaching”), you’ll get faster results.

You’ll still have a large pool of potential clients to tap, but won’t need to compete with big agencies driven by bottomless marketing budgets.

What SEO Can Do For Coaches and Consultants

General and local SEO can provide a number of benefits for online coaches and consultants, including:

It Drives Targeted Traffic

A thousand targeted visitors are worth more than a million general ones. By focusing on relevant content, you’ll only attract people searching for the services that you provide.

It Builds Credibility

High search engine rankings are considered a sign of authority. Even if you mainly drive traffic through social media, many of those users will search for your business, and if you have little to no presence and rank poorly for relevant keywords, they may look elsewhere.

It’s Cheaper in the Long-Term

Struggling to maintain a good return on advertising spend (ROAS)? There’s no benefit to getting $1 million in annual sales if it costs you six figures to attract them. It’s not cost-effective, and it’s not sustainable.

If you’re sitting at the top of Google’s ranking, though, you’re not paying for every impression or click, so each sale improves your return on investment (ROI).

Unless you’re creating the content yourself, there will be an initial outlay. But it’s all relative. Big brands work with huge SEO agencies and churn out vast amounts of content and exposure. Smaller companies and self-employed coaches/consultants can adopt a narrower focus and work with much smaller budgets.

It’s Proof That You Know What You’re Talking About

Businesses don’t want to hire consultants who talk a good game but don’t prove their worth, and the same goes for anyone seeking the services of a coach.

SEO forces you to show the world that you know what you’re talking about via helpful guides and blogs, and that builds confidence among potential customers.

A potential client can click a link and read a blog seeking advice, only to find your CTA at the bottom of the article and realize you have the expertise they seek.

What SEO Can’t Do For Coaches and Consultants

Everyone uses the internet to search for products and services. And if they’re not doing it to buy, they’re doing it to confirm legitimacy. So, even if your business primarily targets hyper-specific and extremely localized groups, a good SEO strategy is still beneficial.

That doesn’t mean you need to invest the same money and time that you would with a more wide-reaching business, but it should still be considered.

What SEO can’t do, however, is deliver rapid results.

It takes time to plan, prepare, create, and publish. More importantly, it takes time for all of that content to cement itself in the Google algorithm.

To Google, time is trust. The longer you’re actively producing content, the more likely you are to be a legitimate operation that has something worthwhile to say, and the longer your content has to be shared, linked, and reposted.

It can take anywhere from 6 to 12 months for a well-executed strategy to properly take effect. You may notice some results before then, especially if you’re focusing primarily on local SEO, but if you need a flood of customers right now, this is not the solution.

Instead, work with a reputable SEO agency and let them lay the foundations while you focus on social media marketing, ad networks, commercials, and other avenues that can deliver rapid—albeit less cost-effective—results.

Summary: SEO for Online Coaches and Consultants

Search engine optimization (SEO) is often considered to be the reserve of e-commerce sites and service providers. Coaches and consultants invest more of their marketing budgets into social media and targeted ads. But if you run a business that targets online users, you need SEO.

It doesn’t matter what you sell or how you sell it; a good SEO strategy can help you increase exposure and get more sales. Contact us below to discover how much difference a targeted/local SEO strategy can make to your coaching or consulting business.