How To Find High-Converting Life Coaching Keywords

Since you’ve landed on this article, you’re likely looking for the fastest way to find the best keywords for life coaching. But slow down a little, because not all keywords are created equal. Some convert much better than others. Some are good for organic marketing, others not so much. Others still are a great fit for paid Google Ads.

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.

That’s the summary. Below is the full process, including which keywords to use where, what to do when everything looks too competitive, and how this is changing now that people search with AI.

Why keyword research is the only reality check in coach marketing

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.

65% of my clients are life coaches. I’ve worked with hundreds of life coaches over the years. Finding the right keywords for a life coach can make or break their business.

Life coaching can be pretty complex. Often the biggest difficulty for life coaches is that they offer similar outcomes to each other, but they reach those client outcomes in different ways. One might use hypnotherapy, another habit-building techniques, or yoga and meditation.

The secret is to build a customer journey that helps you understand your client’s thoughts and actions before they decide to work with you.

How to choose keywords for life coaching that convert

The keywords for life coaching that convert all start with intent

The first step to finding keywords that convert well is understanding keyword intent (short for intention). The intention behind the search is key to whether your blog post, video, or article will convert into a discovery call.

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 to understand how Google views this keyword and what they think is the intention behind it. Over time you will get better at predicting what the intention of the user might be and how Google might view it.

Map keywords for life coaching to the 3-stage customer journey

In content marketing, the basic customer journey is broken down into 3 stages:

Awareness. Where the prospect is aware of their pain points but doesn’t know what they are and can’t give them a name. They seek to understand where they come from.

Consideration. The stage where they have named their problem and are now looking for a solution. Most Googlers will be in this stage or the next. And that’s great, because these stages are closer to the buying stage.

Decision. This is where they know they want to work with a coach or therapist and now need to decide why they should work with you.

If you create content that addresses all 3 stages, you will end up with content that converts.

The one catch with keywords for life coaching (many ask me this)

There’s only one catch. You can only do this for 1 client type (or client avatar) at a time. Because you’ll need to go deep on one avatar to see results first.

Dividing your time and focus amongst different ideal clients will dilute your results and rob you of sustainability. Do go deep with one ideal client first, then move onto a second when you have enough cash flow to hire help.

The 5-step process to find your life coaching keywords

Step 1. Pick a life coaching 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 (KWFinder). I picked this one for the experience. Most tools will give you a free limited account, even the one 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 life coach keyword to search

Start 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.

Then consult your customer journey and make a list of customer struggles. Your list might look something like this:

Struggle	Desire	Potential keywords
Unhappy at work	To be respected	I hate my boss I’m not respected at work I hate my job How to win respect How to make colleagues respect you How to deal with conflict at work How to be happier at work
Underpaid	Promotion to manager	How to get promoted How to get a promotion at work How to ask for a higher wage How to be considered for a promotion

Once you have your list, pop the keywords into your keyword tool, and voila!

The tool will recommend even more keywords to you. It will also show you how much traffic a keyword has and how difficult it is to rank for those SEO keywords.

You can keep going deeper and deeper into keyword research, starting just from a handful like the list above, because it will keep giving you more and more suggestions. Every suggestion can be used as the main keyword to generate even more suggestions. So the sky’s the limit.

Using this method, you will never run out of content ideas again.

But not all content ideas are created equal. Always focus on the intention of the person searching that keyword and create the perfect article for their desire.

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, and 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.

When you’re picking keywords to use in your organic strategy for blogging on your website and YouTube, you want to look for keywords with low competition. The keyword finder tool has an easy way of showing you. The keywords the tool tells you are easy or possible to rank for, you can go ahead and use them. Don’t go there when the tool says it’s hard or too hard.

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 in 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, categories and tags

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 or 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, and similar, 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. 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. Take a look at the three 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. 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+.

Step 5. Use your keywords to shape your niche and your offer

You can also use keywords to inform your strategy and offerings. If you’re a little lost as to what to niche down to, or what offers you should be selling, you can use keyword research to help you.

For example, when you search ‘life coach’ in the tool, it suggests several other coach titles that have good traffic and are less competitive. These make great niches to get into.

You can also use the struggles you deal with to research some alternatives.

The great thing about these keywords is that if you match them to your niche and your offering, it will be so easy for you to convert them into clients.

These searches come from people whose pain points have become such a struggle that they have gone to Google to look for someone like you. Most of these leads will become clients because they were purchase-ready before they even came across your website.

A starter list of life coaching keywords, grouped by what they actually do

Most keyword lists you’ll find online are sorted by search volume. That’s the wrong way round. Sort them by what they do in your business instead.

Here are the four groups, with real numbers from my own research so you can see what the data looks like when you pull it.

Title-based keywords (for your service pages)

These are the words people use when they already know they want a coach and are looking for the type of coach you are.

Keyword	Searches per month	Ranking difficulty
life coach	132,000	Medium
life coach near me	23,400	Easy
online life coach	3,600	Medium
certified life coach	2,600	Easy
spiritual life coach	2,600	Easy
personal development coach	1,700	Easy

More title-based keywords worth checking for your own niche: mindset coach, executive coach, transformation coach, life coach for women, holistic life coach, accountability coach.

Outcome-based keywords (for your service pages)

These are the words people use when they’re searching for the result they want rather than the job title.

Keyword	Searches per month	Ranking difficulty
career coach	42,000	Medium
life coach career	1,400	Easy
happiness coach	1,200	Easy
anxiety coach	840	Super easy
freedom coach	380	Super easy

More outcome-based keywords worth checking: confidence coach, burnout coach, purpose coach, clarity coach, relationship coach, work-life balance coach.

Notice the pattern. The outcome-based keywords have far less traffic than ‘life coach’, but look at that difficulty column. Super easy. That’s the trade you’re making, and for a new coaching website it’s almost always the right one.

Struggle-based keywords (for your blog)

These are awareness and consideration-stage searches. The person hasn’t decided they need a coach yet. They just know something hurts.

• i hate my job
• i hate my boss
• how to be happier at work
• how to deal with conflict at work
• social anxiety at work
• how to get promoted
• how to ask for a higher wage
• how to stop overthinking
• how to get clarity in life
• feeling stuck in life

These are your articles. One keyword, one article.

Decision-stage keywords (for the pages that close)

• what is a life coach
• how much does a life coach cost
• is life coaching worth it
• how to choose a life coach
• life coaching packages

These convert fastest because the person is already shopping. If you have nothing on your site answering ‘how much does a life coach cost’, you’re losing people at the exact moment they were ready to book.

How many keywords should a life coach target?

This is the question I get asked most, and the answer is much simpler than people expect.

Target one keyword per article. One main keyword per service page. And one all-important keyword that defines the type of coach you are, the niche-specific one, for your homepage.

That’s it. Coaches get into trouble when they try to stuff four keywords into one blog post, or when they optimize every page for ‘life coach’ and end up competing against themselves.

One page, one job.

What to do when your keywords are too competitive to rank for

When your top-level keywords are too difficult to rank for, go for longer keywords.

This is the current trend anyway, so you’re not settling for second best. You’re going where the searches are actually happening.

Instead of ‘life coach’, you’re looking at ‘life coach for women over 40’ or ‘career coach for people changing industries’. Fewer searches each, far easier to rank, and the person searching has told you a lot more about who they are before they’ve even clicked.

Should life coaches use local keywords?

Yes, a life coach should use local keywords. ‘Life coach’ plus your city is usually much easier to rank for than the national term, and it puts you in front of people who are ready to book. If you go this route, set up your Google Business Profile properly at the same time.

But it’s important to change the strategy based on whether you want to expand internationally eventually.

If you plan to stay local, lean into it hard. If you want to work with clients anywhere, be careful. Building your whole site around one city can box you in later and make it harder to rank for the online and international searches you actually want.

Decide which one you are before you start, not after you’ve built thirty pages around the wrong assumption.

Which keywords to pick for Google Ads

Google Ads work a little differently. When picking keywords for Google Ads, you don’t need to worry about competition much. You can easily go for difficult keywords, as you will be paying for visibility, not competing.

The keyword tool I mentioned before, Mangools’ KWFinder, works nicely for this too. When you look up a keyword such as ‘life coach’, you’ll see the CPC column, which tells you what people are paying per click.

 

 

 

‘Life coach’ has a lot of traffic. There are many people out there looking for a life coach. That makes it a good keyword for our life coach. But we encouraged our life coach to niche down, and in fact a nice mix of niche keywords alongside this works really nicely for PPC.

Any keyword you have a niched package for is fair game and will convert into a customer fast. Just avoid really expensive keywords because they will drain your funds fast. The price you see in the research tool is the price per click. So this is how much you pay for each person that comes to your website.

How keyword research for life coaches is changing with AI search

Keyword research still matters. What’s changed is the shape of the keywords.

We are seeing longer, more specific keywords surfacing as people get used to searches yielding better results. When search only gave you ten blue links, people typed two or three words and did the rest of the work themselves. Now that they’re getting real answers, they ask for exactly what they want.

That means the short, fat keywords everyone fights over are getting less important, not more. And the long, specific, oddly-phrased searches are getting more valuable.

This is good news if you’re a coach with a small website. It’s the same advice I’ve been giving for years, but the ground has now shifted in your favor. Go longer. Go more specific. Answer the exact question rather than the category the question sits in.

Practically, that means your struggle-based blog keywords are worth more than they used to be, and ‘life coach’ is worth less.

How long does keyword research take to bring in clients?

SEO turns into clients in 6 to 12 months, depending on your competitors and on whether your tech is well set up.

Those two variables matter more than most people realize. A coach in a crowded niche with a slow website will sit at the far end of that range. A coach in a specific niche with a clean, fast site can see movement much sooner.

I’d rather tell you that than promise you traffic in 30 days. If you need clients this month, keyword research is not your fastest lever. If you want a lead source that keeps working while you sleep, start now, because the clock only starts when you publish.

The short version

Frequently asked questions about keywords for life coaching

Ready to turn your keywords into clients?

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 about SEO for coaches.