10 Ways to Make Your Coaching Website Work Harder for You

Are you getting as many clients as you want through your coaching website?

Here are 10 ways to turn it into a marketing powerhouse that works hard for you—so you’ll get more high-quality inquiries, and more new clients.

1. Speak directly to just one person

That’s right. Just one. Your website’s most important job is to make a connection with your ideal client, and it’ll be harder to do this if your messaging isn’t super-focused.

The first thing you’ll want to do, if you haven’t already done so, is create a well-defined client persona. This is just a detailed profile—an archetype—of your ideal client, based on what you know about them through your research and experience.

Things like gender, age, income level, personality traits, goals, challenges, pain points… the more detailed you can get, the better!

Then, design your website and craft your messaging around this one person.

It’ll feel highly relevant and engaging to the person you want as a client.

Now, this can often be a little more art than science, because while your ideal clients will fit within an exclusive niche, they obviously won’t all be exactly alike—for instance, you might want to work with both women and men—in which case you won’t want a website that feels overtly feminine or masculine.

Strike a balance that suits the aesthetic and language they’ll both resonate with.

Engaging your people with a highly revelant website experience will draw the right ones in and increase the quality of your leads.

2. Tell your story to build a connection

What’s your own personal struggle and ensuing victory that led you onto the path of becoming a life coach? Do you have a story that your ideal clients will connect with on a personal, emotional level?

Tell that story on your website!

The fact that it’s so deeply interwoven with what you do means it’s a story that your people will find inspiring and relatable. Not only because it’s a quintessentially human story, but also because it touches on what they themselves are struggling with—including the victory they want to experience for themselves.

We all feel a strong emotional response to good storytelling… it’s just intrinsic to who we are. The more you reveal the heart and soul of your coaching business on your website, the more powerfully you’ll inspire your potential clients to take the action you want them to.

3. Say bye-bye to buzzwords and jargon

Being empowered. Getting unstuck. Reclaiming your true self. Achieving success.

And the ever-present… transformation.

No matter how good these phrases sound to you, they won’t excite your people—because they’ve already seen and heard them so often that they come across as generic, if not completely meaningless.

I know, it’s a bummer.

Don’t beat yourself up if you’ve adopted these common coaching phrases into your brand, though!

As business owners, we’re often too close to what we do to realize how our messaging is perceived on the outside.

Coming up with ways to communicate the power of our work can be super challenging, because it forces us to see it objectively—and that’s tough to do!

Good news: you can get your people truly engaged and inspired by meeting them where they are—with messaging that speaks to the outcome they’re hungry for.

When considering this outcome, ask yourself 3 questions:

1. Is it specific?
2. Is it tangible?
3. Is it meaningful to them?

If you have a good, solid answer for all 3 of these questions, you’ll know you have a fantastic outcome that will resonate with your people.

As an added benefit, you’ll stand out among all the coaches in your field who are still using messaging laden with buzzwords and jargon.

By the way, the best way to communicate these outcomes is to…

4. Focus on their deeper wants and needs

Your website may be describing all the wonderful services you offer in your coaching work, and the goals you help your clients achieve—but y’know what will really get their engines firing?

Painting a mental picture of the ways their lives can be changed through achieving those goals… creating a vision that speaks to their deeper wants and needs.

Why? Because while we all want to achieve our big goals, it’s the specific ways we imagine our lives will look and feel through achieving them that truly excites and motivates us.

It’s the difference between wanting to be a more organized, productive person (goal), and wanting to enjoy the feelings of being more in control, more reliable, and having a calmer, more tranquil mind (the underlying wants and needs fueling the desire to reach that goal).

To do this, go beyond the immediate results you can help them achieve—like discovering their purpose, or getting healthier, or becoming more successful—and uncover the more fundamental, emotionally-driven desires leading them to wanting these results.

A few examples to get your wheels turning:

• Your people may want to discover their calling and their purpose, but what they really want is to feel fulfilled… to feel worthy of love and other good things… to know that they have a place in the world… to be in control of their destiny.

• They may want to be more successful, but what they really want is to feel admired and respected… to enjoy the lifestyle, security, and legacy that success can afford them.

• They may want to get healthier, but what they really want is to feel more confident and secure in their own skin… to feel more accepted by others… to do and experience more of the things they want.

With website messaging that touches the deeper desires beneath the outcomes your people want, they’ll see a higher level of value in your coaching—leading to more warmed-up, ready-to-be clients.

5. Soothe common objections

While the above techniques will go a long way in forging an emotional connection with your potential clients, they’ll still have built-in objections that may keep them from scheduling that first call with you.

There are 2 tried-and-true methods for soothing these objections:

1. Address them directly. Are your people worried about feeling judged while working with a coach? Let them know that you create an uncommonly safe and caring space for your clients. Have they already tried and failed to achieve their goal a hundred times? Show them why your method results in success, no matter how many times they’ve failed before.

Be aware of all the barriers that might be coming between them and making a decision, and give them every reason to take a chance with you.

2. Provide social proof. Glowing reviews and success stories from past clients will give your website some serious va-va-voom. Our opinions are influenced by what our peers say, and that’s why testimonials are so powerful.

Include them in your website to get your people wanting to work with you.

And while we’re on the topic of testimonials:

Don’t put ’em all on a separate page of your website, because you don’t want your potential clients to have to seek them out—or worse, never see them at all.

Instead, place them liberally throughout your site. Get those testimonials front and center, impossible to miss. I’m talkin’ every single page.

Include bright, smiling photos of your clients, if possible. Don’t let your website visitors go very long without seeing someone else raving about their beneficial experience with you, and don’t be shy about including more than one at a time if you have lots to share.

Doing this will position you as a worthwhile expert who helps their clients achieve real results. Cha-ching!

6. Write meaningful headlines

Your homepage headline is the first chance you have to make a powerful emotional connection—don’t waste it with something lukewarm like “Welcome” or a matter-of-fact description of what you do.

A headline’s job is to immediately intrigue your visitor and get them excited to read more.

So, get their attention with an inspiring statement, an intriguing question, or a bold promise.

Think of the first thing you want your people to feel… how you want to set the tone for their journey into your unique brand of coaching. Write your homepage headline around that.

Continue reinforcing this connection in the headlines of your other pages. Avoid the usual, dime-a-dozen headers like “Coaching Packages”, “About Me”, and “Contact Me”—think of how you can evoke an emotional response in every headline with an inspiring statement, an intriguing question, or a bold promise.

This will make your website more engaging, which will lead to more of your people taking the action you want them to take.

7. Use fresh, striking images

Y’know that photo of the person standing on the mountain top, arms raised in victory?

Or the photo of the zen garden rocks, stacked 3 or 4 high?

How about the silhouette of the person standing in tree pose on the beach at sunset?

Yeah, it’s time to retire those. Sure, they’re meant to evoke feelings of freedom, success, balance, and well-being… but they’re everywhere. They have no oomph anymore.

You can do better!

If you want to convey freedom in your images, think about what freedom looks like for your clients. Choose relevant, high-quality images that speak to your people on a more personalized level.

Never think of your website images purely as decoration. They’re right up there in importance with your messaging, so make ’em count.

The best images will be the ones that evoke the feelings your people want to feel—meeting them where they are mentally and emotionally, while inspiring them with a vision of where they want to be.

Selecting uncommon, visually striking images will help you to stand out and be memorable.

8. Include a strong call to action on every page

You don’t want your people wandering aimlessly around your website, getting to the bottom of a page and then having to guess at what they’re supposed to do next.

An effective, well-designed website has a sense of direction and flow.

Give them a specific action to take at every stopping point in your copy. Use enticing call-to-action buttons below your copy to guide them to where you want them to go.

And instead of using call-to-action phrases like Click Here, make them want to click (or tap) with more decisive wording, like:

• Learn More
• How it Works
• I’m Ready
• Work With Me
  
• Schedule a Call

Strong calls-to-action create a more focused experience for your website visitors, making them more likely to see the content you want them to see—and take the action you want them to take.

9. Spice up your opt-in form

Setting up a way to keep your people interested in you, even if they’re not ready to become clients just yet, is a fantastic way to nurture them into future clients.

But if your opt-in form isn’t persuasive enough, you run the risk of losing them forever.

Avoid opt-ins with vague, uninspiring headlines like Subscribe to My Newsletter or Get the Latest Updates, because these don’t convert very well.

Instead, entice them with a “quick win” if they sign up—something they’ll find useful, like a worksheet or a how-to resource.

Tell them what they’re getting, and how it can help them.

Having an email funnel in place that nurtures them with timed, automatic emails will build interest and keep you in their heads without any extra effort on your part—this is a powerful way to turn your website into a mighty marketing machine for you.

10. Make your page titles SEO-fabulous

Page titles (not to be confused with your page headlines) are those lines of text that appear way up in the browser tab on every page of your site.

Way too often, they’re the most neglected part of a website, despite serving 3 very important functions:

1. If someone bookmarks a page, the page title is what appears in the bookmark text.
2. Search engines use them to determine how relevant your page is for a search, and
3. The page title appears as the headline in search results.

Now, there are a few common mistakes people make when creating their page titles:

Mistake #1: Not making them descriptive enough or using vital keywords.

If you have a page title that merely says “Services”, it won’t show up in search results when someone searches for the specific kind of coaching you offer.

It’ll also mean if someone bookmarks your page, they may not remember why they saved it later on when all they see is “Services” in their bookmarks—so they may never come back to your website.

Mistake #2: Just using your business name and tagline.

This is OK if your tagline contains important keywords, or if you don’t care about showing up in search results, but if your tagline is something like Live on Purpose then it won’t help your search engine visibility.

Mistake #3: Putting the name of your business first, with descriptive keywords after.

Google only shows the first 55 characters or so of your page title in search results, so if you put your business name first—which may not be as relevant to your people as the keywords describing your coaching services—the more important part of your page title may get cut off, which means they won’t see the keywords they’re looking for, and may not click on it.

Note: Unfortunately, Wordpress automatically puts the name of your business first in the page title of every page on your website. You can fix this by installing the Yoast plugin, which allows you to customize how your page titles are formatted.

Here’s the best way to style your page titles:

Put a descriptive statement of your page first—including important keywords that your people will be searching for—with your business name afterward, like this:

Coaching for Spiritual Entrepreneurs | Veronica Q. Coach

Use different page titles for each of your pages to increase your search engine visibility—use the example above as a template for your homepage, and then create descriptive, keyword-rich variations specific to the other pages of your website.

Pro-Tip: Do a few searches related to the coaching services you offer, and see what websites show up first in the results (after the ads, of course). This will give you some insight on keywords you might want to focus on, including ways you can write your page titles to stand out. It’ll give you an idea of how competitive your keywords are, too.

Is your website working hard for you?

At the end of the day, as a coach, you need a website that’s more than just an online business card or brochure.

Your website should be generating leads and heavily pre-selling your would-be clients, making your consultation calls easier and more fruitful.

If it isn’t doing this work on your behalf 24/7, turning your visitors into believers and giving you a steady stream of warmed-up, ready-to-be clients, then it’s not doing its job!

Implementing the methods I’ve outlined in this article will help.

Need more help?

Hate dealing with tech? Don’t have time to give your website and messaging the TLC it needs to bring more clients in? Let me handle the heavy lifting for you.

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