How to find and choose your life coach keywords (2024)

You’ve probably heard this many times, and I’m gonna put it on this page one more time (because it’s crucial when looking for those profitable life coach keywords)…

Before you attempt any form of marketing, make sure you understand the struggles you resolve and how your audience perceives this problem. If you can also describe your ideal client and their behaviors, you’re onto a strong start. But after all the assumptions, it’s time for a reality check.

And the only way to get real in coach marketing is Keyword Research.
There is literally no other way of getting real-time data when you’re starting out, other than Keyword Research.

Keyword research will tell you EXACTLY what people out there are looking for in relation to what you offer. It will show you what words they’re using and what they are looking to buy, what they think they need, and by what name they call what you offer.

Let’s dive into the 5 steps to find the best life coaching keywords for your practice:

Step 1. Pick a keyword research tool

There are many keyword research tools around and they will all give you similar results. My favorite tool is called Mangools’ Keyword Tool. I picked this one for the experience most tools will give you a free limited account (even the tool above does).

They are all comparable in terms of the results they give you. I picked this one because I have all the data on one simple screen and it makes it super easy to organize my keywords so I don’t have to use excel sheets. However, if you don’t have a budget for this, just find a free one or a free trial and work with that.

If you have a budget, you can spend as little as $40 for a month, get all your keyword research done, and then cancel your subscription. I highly recommend this as it will save you a lot of time. If you have more time than money, take your time to find a suitable free option.

You can use the tips below to understand the features you need to look for in the tool.

Step 2. Pick the first keyword to search

Pick your first keywords to search. You can start off with what people might actually call you, to understand how much demand there is for what you do. If you’re a life coach, you can look at those exact words but also keywords based on the outcome you promise.

Outcome-based keywords:

Title-based keywords:

Step 3. Pick the best keywords to work with

Picking the right keyword is not always easy because it depends on where you are in your business, how old your website is, what SEO stage you’re in. Is it your first content plan or do you have past data to take into consideration?

For the sake of this example, we’re going to assume you’re new to SEO and this is your first content plan.

You want to pick keywords that have some traffic, are easy to rank for, and show strong keyword intent. Keyword intent refers to the intention behind the keyword.

This is not an easy one to learn unless you have a natural intuition for it. It involves a little bit of psychology, you can check the SERP results (see below) to understand how Google views this keyword and what they think is the intention behind this keyword. Over time you will get better at predicting what the intention of the use might be and how Google might view it.

Done well this process will give you a lot of keywords to work with for your blog and also a number of ideas for your business. Claire, one of my clients, was a career coach struggling to set up during the Covid pandemic. She had a lot of experience and a more spiritual mindset approach than most. During her keyword research, we found out that most people were looking for help with their resumes. This gave Claire the idea of creating a $99 resume strategy session. The demand we knew was high and Claire soon started booking the calls.

Now I don’t usually recommend having a $99 service, because it will stop clients from buying bigger programs from you, especially if it’s hard for you to deliver value n 1 hour.

However, in Claire’s case, she could deliver a lot of value as well as strike a rapport with the new client and help them understand why they needed her larger packages.

This is just one small example to show you how keyword research can affect your business. Keep an eye out for clues while you pick keywords for your pages and blog.

Step 4. Pick the right keywords for your pages, blog, tags, and categories.

Not all keywords are created equal. Some are better used for your service pages, others make a great category, and others make the perfect blog article keyword.

Pages

The right keywords for your service pages are going to be keywords that focus on 1 of these 2 things:

– the type of coach you are

– the benefit/outcome they’re looking for

These two types of keywords will bring you people who are looking for a service like yours and people looking for the benefit you offer. For example, life coach online, mindset coach etc. all make good page keywords.

Blog

Your blog should ideally contain keywords that are relevant to the struggles mentioned in the consideration and awareness stages of the customer journey described in Chapter 9. These are keywords that will allow you to rank for what the prospect is searching and provide them with a valuable article to read. For example, a good keyword for this would be ‘social anxiety at work’.

This is a keyword that is struggle-based so it is natural to assume that a person searching this is looking to get insight and potentially find a solution for this. That makes it a perfect topic for an article.

Categories

Your categories are super important because they help search engines and people understand what your whole blog and website are about. Often this is also an indication of the kind of solutions you offer. For example take a look at the two examples below, each set of 3 categories would give you a different idea of what is actually being offered by the website owner and the approach taken in the articles provided…

1. Anxiety, depression, yoga

2. Anxiety, panic attacks, hypnotherapy

3. Anxiety, sadness, mindset

Now think about what 3 categories might describe what you do most accurately and head over to the keyword research tool to find keywords that have good traffic. Your categories should always have reasonably high traffic. (That’s ideally over 1,200 a month).

Tags

If you have a WordPress website, you’re going to be faced with the tag question. Do I use tags? are they outdated? Here’s my two cents.

In 2020 I deleted all my tags and my website ranking improved. Tags create category pages and these can look like ‘thin’ pages to Google if they don’t have 15 or more articles tagged with each tag (meaning pages with little content).

Therefore the best approach is to pick 2 or 3 keywords that you would have liked to pick as categories but they were of secondary importance, though still kinda important but perhaps more niche than your main categories. For example, if your categories are anxiety, depression and yoga then your tags might be sleepless due to anxiety, natural depression solutions, yoga for 40+.

Once you have the right keywords you want to learn how these should be used on your website and in your copy to generate traffic. If you’re looking for support with this, let’s talk Book your free call here

————————About the Author: Stephanie Fiteni

Hi, I’m Stephanie, a Digital Marketing Strategist and Business Mentor for Coaches. I’m the creator of the Profitable Content Marketing Method and help coaches generate more leads and clients through their blogs and websites whilst helping them build a business that makes good money with ease. My clients get fully booked with just 2 – 3 hours of enjoyable marketing per week!

I have over 15 years of experience creating websites, building businesses, writing blogs, creating social campaigns, and funnels, and ranking articles, videos, and podcasts on the first page of Google. I’ve also managed the content and web dev team in my own agency for over 10 years.

Ican teach you how to create content that will convert your visitors into discovery call bookings.Let’s Talk