Planning your website is a very important part of your positioning if you want to be coaching online. Especially when you intend to sell your coaching online through your website.

Let’s start by dispelling some myths

by answering two questions I get asked a lot…

1. How can I get my website visitors to buy right away?

It is unrealistic to believe that your customers will buy right away. 

There are other ways to get customers to buy right away (I haven’t written about this yet – but I will soon – watch this space) but your website is not where this happens.

2. How can I include all my services on my website without confusing my audience?

If you have too many coaching packages or customise your packages to each client, chances are you simply cannot. You, therefore, need to work out which packages and price points are more likely to work for you online.

Answer these questions to understand what you need to include in your website plan to make sure that you get clients through it…

1. How will they contact me and why?

The first question to ask yourself is why will people contact me and how do I want them to do it? Do you want them to book a discovery call? Fill in a contact form? Fill in a coaching booking form? Take this decision first and plan your contact tools accordingly.

2. How Great is My ‘About Me’ Page

If you’re a coach or consultant, (even if you have a brand), clients pick you because of your personal strengths and experiences. Use the About page to describe how you help your clients and who you’re a perfect fit for. Add in a call to action. This will be the most visited page on your website. (Always is – even for companies), so make sure you use this website real estate like it’s the one thing people on the main street will see when walking past your shop.

What are the 3 things your ideal client needs to know about you to realise that you’re a perfect fit?

Build your about page around this.

Kira Hug

Talking Shrimp

3. Services Pages

I’m sure you’ve heard various opinions about this. Some say put all your services on separate pages and others recommend putting them all in one page.

Here’s my two cents.

I started off in the industry 20 years ago as a web developer and consultant. I have worked with companies, individuals and anything in between overarching hundreds of industries. 

From the performance I have seen in terms of conversion, here’s what I recommend.

1 page or many

Putting all your packages in one page is a good idea if you intend to add pricing. This moves the conversation away from “Should I work with her?”  to  “Which package is right for me?” That’s a step further down the purchasing journey.

However, if you don’t intend to put prices online, then I would suggest you keep separate pages and describe the services. Work on your sales-copy so that you get people to talk to you. Add a call to action and your calendar scheduler tool too.

Both cases can be optimised for Google to find.

If you have all your prices and packages in one place, categorise them…

Let’s say you offer coaching and consultancy – collect all your coaching packages in one page (with prices) and do the same with your consultancy packages. Now you have two pages. Each one can be optimised for a different keyword – example: ‘Business Coaching for Family Business’ and ‘Consultancy Packages for Scaling Your Family Business’.

You can use a similar approach even if you do not intend to use pricing. You can go to town with your keywords here, choosing a keyword for every package/page. For example: Coaching online for Start-Ups, Business Strategy Coaching, Family Business Scaling, Family Business Consultancy.

If you’re collecting all your courses in one page, give the page a meaningful name such as ‘mindfulness courses’ – don’t go too deep if you have quite a range.

In most cases, curiosity will get you more clicks.

4. An Epic Freebie

It is also advisable to have an Epic freebie on your online coaching website. Once you have identified the kind of people you want to attract to your website, find a Freebie idea that will interest most of your audience. 

The idea is to get the target number of organic visitors on your website to jump on your email list.

Ideally, your freebie should be the entry point to a funnel that nurtures your contacts into knowing and trusting you, so that when you launch that course or open spots on your coaching or consultancy, they are ready to make the decision whether it’s the right time to work with you or not.

Conclusions:

Once you’ve made your mind up about the key pages above, start planning your website. Many make the mistake of designing the website before they write the copy. The website will look better put together if you do your copy first. You can choose the layouts that fit the amount of copy you have. Extract important messages from your copy to make them more prominent where it matters (like your top banners). Plan your funnels and position your freebies in a place where they are easy to see.

Your site will also look well put together because you can choose photography that enhances your message and makes your site more memorable, or if you want to go to town, organise a photoshoot that echoes your copy and message.