Serving your audience and achieving financial independence through life coaching is much easier with a successful website. It can help you rank organically on Google for valuable keywords, convert leads into happy customers, and even manage the day-to-day of your business with a scheduling plugin.
But building a website is not the easiest thing in the world. You’ll need a platform for development, a strong brand, and a lot of work to rank on Google for the keywords you’re interested in.
In this article, we’ll explain the process of starting a life coaching website step by step.
Hosting And Domains
The first thing you’ll need to start a life coaching website is web hosting. Companies like Siteground or Hostgator have servers set-up that you can use, for a price, to host your site there.
Once you decide on a hosting provider, you’ll also need a domain name. Domain names are like your online address, and you can purchase them in a variety of ways. You can either get them directly from a registrar, or add a domain name to your cart when you purchase hosting. The latter is the easiest way to secure a domain name, but it might not be available everywhere.
In that case, you’ll need to buy your domain from a registrar. Just make sure the hosting you have supports the domain type you buy separately. For example, some hosting services from the US won’t accept .co.uk or .de domains, so you’ll need a different hosting provider.
In general, if you want a localized domain (so not a .com or .org domain), it’s best to buy hosting from the country of your domain registrar. If you want a .de domain, you’ll need a hosting provider from Germany, and so on.
The Website Development Tools
Most hosting services have cPanel enabled for all sites, which means you’ll have access to WordPress. This is by far the best way to develop your site if you’re a beginner. While tools like Wix or SquareSpace may look appealing because they’re slightly easier to use, they don’t offer the same versatility and SEO-friendliness as WordPress.
With WordPress active, you’ll then need to decide on a theme and a page builder. OceanWP is a decent theme. Elementor is a safe page builder to get started with, since it has a strong free version, and it’s relatively easy to use.
If you want a seamless experience however, and a much faster website, we recommend GeneratePress as a theme, and GenerateBlocks as a development alternative. It fits perfectly into WordPress’ interface, and it’s an affordable alternative.
It can take a while for you to master WordPress and page builders. However, it’s not impossible, even if you have no website development experience. The internet is brimming with tutorials for everything WordPress. Whatever theme and builder you choose, you’re always one Google search away from the tutorial you need to build a site.
While we’re at it, make sure you also install other online marketing tools. You’ll need things like a mailing list manager, or a pop-up maker.
Driving Traffic To Your Site
With a functional website, you can now start acquiring an audience and utilizing it to its full potential. There’s usually two ways to go about it – organic traffic through SEO optimizations, or paid ads.
You can, of course, send traffic to your site with a strong social media presence, or from the communities you’re active in. But SEO and paid ads are the most reliable ways to acquire traffic.
Paid Advertisement
If you have some funds saved up, you can invest them in paid advertisement for a consistent source of traffic to your site. The cost of this will depend a lot on what platform you use (Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Linkedin Ads), but it can range from anywhere in between $200 and thousands of dollars each month.
The good thing about paid ads is that it can be an automated source of traffic. If you target the right people with your ads, and invest enough money over time, the algorithms of advertising platforms will fine tune who sees your ads to the point that you only have to check the campaigns once a day.
The downside is that it can be costly. Sure, you can get a good return on investment, especially considering that life coaching services can have a generous profit margin. But it’s still a big chunk of your income spent every month on this.
If you think paid advertisement is the right choice for your company, consider also hiring a PPC agency.
Platforms like Google Ads might have you think that starting a campaign is easy.
While that’s true, running a successful campaign is very hard. You need to get the right targeting, use the right keywords, modify the amounts you spend on particular queries, and a ton of other details. You can learn all of it, of course. But it’d be easier to contract an agency for this.
Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is another viable way to get consistent traffic to your life coaching website. It might be a bit trickier to pull off, but it doesn’t require any recurrent investment. You put a lot of work in at the beginning, and then you reap the rewards in time.
However, SEO is a complex medium. It requires a lot of learning and practice. One article like the one you’re reading now will never be enough to help you understand everything it takes to rank on Google.
But to get started, here’s a short overview of what you’ll need to do:
- Identify the keywords people use to find information about life coaching. This can be as intuitive as “where to find life coaching” or even something like “how to find happiness in hard times”. Anyone searching for those keywords will benefit from your expertise. To identify these keywords, you’ll need to use a tool like Ubersuggest or Ahrefs. It’s a software that tells you what people are searching for on Google.
- Create valuable content addressing those keywords. For example, if the keywords mentioned above are used by people who might be in your target audience, write an article about how to find happiness in hard times. Rinse and repeat for new keywords periodically.
- Optimize your articles for SEO. Make sure you use the keyword targeted at a natural cadence in your blog post, use lots of images and good formatting.
- Promote that content to other sites in the coaching niche. This step’s purpose is to net you backlinks (links from other sites to your articles). It’s a crucial step if you want to rank, because it’s the metric by which Google decides whether or not to trust you.
Again, this is an over-simplification of the process, Each step requires a lot of learning and practice to get right. But if you manage to go through this entire process with one article, you’re on the right path.
Add Conversion Elements On Your Site
The content you write should educate people for free. But that’s not your end goal with a life coaching website. You want more leads for your business.
In order to achieve that, you should aim to convert the traffic you get. That’s why you need a strong brand, and clear benefits as to why your target audience would choose to work with you. Let that seep into your pages and blog posts.
On top, use conversion-oriented elements on your pages. This includes buttons, calls to action, benefits list, and a scheduling system for people to sign-up to a session (if that’s something you’d offer to new clients).
In Conclusion
Starting a life coaching website can take some work. It’s a tricky process, and each step we covered today has dozens of details we couldn’t ever hope to explore in a single guest post.
But we hope this article can act as a good starting step for your journey to a successful website. If you want to expand your business as a life coach even more, consider the benefits of NLP. It can help you deliver better results for your clients, and convert more leads.
