As a life coach, you have a sacred calling and a desire to make a difference in the lives of others. But as the world becomes more of a digital marketplace, how do you continue to connect with clients on a soul level?
The solution is to meet your potential clients where they already are:
Online.
And one of the best ways to leave a digital footprint for your clients to follow is by building a life coaching business website!
Your website is not only an extension of your business, but also a channel to communicate a clear message about who you are and what you offer. If done well, a coaching business website is a great way to promote your services, build expertise, and attract clients.
So today we’re going to break down what it takes to build a functional life coaching business website (a.k.a. a friendly guide for even the least tech-savvy entrepreneur).
This is an opportunity to exponentially increase your impact, reach, and visibility, so let’s dive into the details of what makes an effective coaching business website!
How Do You Create a Coaching Business Website?
If you already have a website, move on to the next section: The Foundation.
But if you’re just dipping your toes in, let’s talk about how easy it can be to give your business a place in the digital space. First step:
Register Your Life Coaching Business Domain Name
First, let’s talk about the difference between your domain and your domain extension.
A domain extension helps categorize your website (.com/.edu/.org/.gov/etc.). So a commercial organization might use “.com” while a non-profit organization would likely use “.org”.
Your domain name is where you can plug in your keywords for potential clients to recognize your coaching business website.
For example, you can find us at www.bravethinkinginstitute.com. “Bravethinkinginstitute” is our domain name and “.com” is our domain extension.
Choose Your Hosting Provider
Think of a hosting provider as the lot you need to have before you can build a house on it. It’s your little piece of internet real estate.
Scratch that – you can’t really “own” a space on the internet. It’s more like you’re renting a spot for your website domain to park.
You can purchase your domain from places like godaddy, hostgator, and bluehost. I highly recommend registering your domain when you buy hosting.
Secure Your Website
Most hosting providers give you a free SSL certificate which tells your users that your website is safe and secure from hackers, spammers, and cyber criminal attacks. You’ll know you have it activated when there’s a little padlock icon on the left side of your URL address car.
If you don’t get one included, you can find a few service SSL Certificate options here.
Pretty simple, right?
I recommend you also keep things simple with the name of your business as well. Popular life coaches stick with their first and/or last name since it’s immediately recognizable. But when you’re just starting off, it’s best to use keywords your audience will recognize. So if you’re a life coach, I advise including it somewhere in your domain, for example.
Choose Your Website Platform
Your website platform is like choosing a homebuilder. It’s important to choose wisely because you’ll be limited by the tools and elements that your platform provides for your website building.
Luckily, most website platforms have templates and designs that you can manage and edit with ease. I recommend WordPress.org which calls their templates “themes”.
Themes
A theme is like a blueprint for building a house. It gives your website a consistent look and feel. There are hundreds of thousands of themes available online, and most of them are free or very affordable.
Drag-and-Drop Page Builders
As you fill up your website with information and content, you can use drag-and-drop builders within WordPress to make it as easy as possible to customize your website. Builders like Astra, Elementor, and Beaver Builder (which work on WordPress) are great examples. The advantage of WordPress is the flexibility, but the downside is that it usually requires some working knowledge of what they are and how to use them to get started.
Make Time and Delegate as Needed
Building a website isn’t a “one and done” project. I recommend dedicating at least ten minutes a week for website maintenance (making sure it’s updated and running smoothly). Maintenance usually looks like keeping your website updated, ensuring your copyright information is up-to-date, updating plug-ins, adding in your most recent client testimonials, and so on and so forth.
Consider hiring a virtual assistant or web designer to set up your website. They can take care of everything from designing a beautiful homepage to creating custom pages and forms.
And once you have your groundwork done, you’ll be ready to move on to the foundation!
The Foundation: What a Coaching Business Website Really Needs
Before building a house, there has to be a solid foundation in place. The same goes for your coaching business website. Otherwise, your website won’t stand a chance in the ever-evolving, shifting online space we call the internet.
So, if you want your website to have even the slightest chance of being found, the first step is to *really* get to know Google.
Why Google?
Google dominates as the search engine with the highest traffic volume. And it’s by a huge margin. Google boasts about 75% of traffic while the second most popular search engine – Amazon – sits at 11%.
Why is this important?
The more optimized your website is for search engines like Google, the more likely it is for you to not only increase traffic to your site, but also build consistency. And the best part is that most of your success would be considered “free” or “organic” since you wouldn’t be paying those visitors to find or interact with your website.
Most SEO (Search Engine Optimization) experts recommend prioritizing the following elements on any website:
Essential Coaching Business Website Pages
A functional coaching business website usually has the following main pages displayed (tabs in your menu bar):
- Home: This is where your users will immediately land when they find your website. It used to be called the index page because it’s a hub that points to every page you want them to see on your website. Important to have a flow that they can follow down the page (which we’ll be going over in a later section).
- About: A page dedicated to your professional experience and your personal background. The main goal for this page is to establish credibility and build rapport with your web visitors. This is where you would discuss your coaching philosophy with your visitor.
- Coaching Services: This page will host your offers, programs, and all the different ways your potential clients can work with you. This is where you highlight the benefits of working with you and the outcomes they can expect.
- Testimonials: One of the best ways to build credibility is to have a page full of client reviews. If you haven’t worked with your first coaching client yet, you can display testimonials on the sidebar of other pages. You can also use testimonials of others who have worked with you in a non coaching environment.
- Blog: Blogging is a great way to grow your coaching business from the ground up. Blogging is simply creating relevant, valuable written content (articles). Your blog posts will provide even more context for what your life coaching website is about. When done intentionally and strategically, you’ll attract higher traffic to your website.
- Contact: This page invites people to reach out to you. You could ask your visitor to click a link to a calendaring system, to send an email, or call your business phone number. Be sure to add where they can follow you on social media, too!
- Media Page: This page makes it easy for people to find your bio, photos, logos, contact info, and your top reviews to reference. That way, if anyone needs to quote you or credit you on media in any way, they can just visit your media page!
While there are other pages you can add to your website as your coaching business grows, these essentials will get you up and running.
But before you launch, check your footer content. Your footer is anchored to the bottom of every page and usually includes:
- Navigation Links (like a mini menu to guide your visitor through your website)
- Copyright Statement (declares ownership of your website content)
- Social Media Links or Icons (makes it easy for people to connect with you on multiple platforms)
- Link to Privacy Policy page (informs website visitors on how you collect and use their personal information)
- Link to Terms of Use Page (establishes a liability agreement that your users must abide by in order to use your website or services)
With your essentials up and running, let’s talk about best practices for a successful coaching business website.
Top Tips in Creating Your Own Life Coach Website
- Check out other websites that are familiar and relevant to your business. By going to the websites you connect with, you’ll naturally find design elements that will inspire how you’d like your coaching business website to look and feel like. You can browse our website and blog as an easy starting point!
- Sketch out your website design and how you want each page to look. By drafting out how you want things to flow on pen and paper, you’ll have more direction and intention in your website design.
- Assuming you already have your target avatar (if not, click here for our client avatar guide) for every decision you make in your website design. Think about how each piece builds your KNOW-LIKE-TRUST factor and guides your user through your page. Additionally, your homepage is an ideal place to build out your elevator pitch.
- High-quality images can take up a lot of bandwidth and slow down your website. Thankfully, there are WordPress plug-ins like ShortPixel that can compress and optimize your images and videos (for example, you can set videos to autoplay) so your website loads faster without decreasing the quality of your content. We use ShortPixel to compress our images.
- Learn how to generate extraordinary testimonials from clients and use them on your website.
- Embrace what makes you different! I encourage you to believe in what makes you unique and how you provide value with your gifts. When you lean into who you are and how you serve in your own way, you’ll be unfazed by a saturated market.
- Avoid putting your prices directly on your website (do this instead).
5 Life Coaching Websites You Can Pull Inspiration From
- For a clean, polished website with a remarkable home page: Marie Forleo – host of MarieTV, entrepreneur and philanthropist
- A great example of a clear call-to-action in the hero section (the area that immediately shows up on the screen under your logo and menu) and a tasteful opt-in: Jack Canfield: Maximizing Your Potential | Jack Canfield
- A website that magnetizes a specific target audience in a vulnerable, authentic way: ReConnected Life | Move Past Your Past
- An “About” page that’s professional, personal, and impressive: About Cortney McDermott: Writer, Speaker, and Business-Life Strategist
- Personal, fun, and straight-forward, this website centers on the essentials and has an easy-to-follow home page: HOME – Holley Gerth
Strategies to Promote Your Website and Attract More Clients
Launching your website and letting it sit on the internet isn’t the best strategy for building your business. It’s important to promote your site regularly, drive traffic, and engage with people. Here are some tips for getting started:
- Use social media platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook or Instagram to share your life coaching website with others. Share valuable posts and services as well as relevant blog posts.
- Get creative with your marketing (without being complicated). Share a link to your website in your email signature and social media profiles.
- Create engaging content. Write blog posts that answer questions, offer free advice, and inspire. You can even collaborate with influencers in related industries to increase your visibility through podcasts, video content, speaking engagements, and other events.
- Host your own webinars, live events, workshops, and other engagements to draw in an audience, build authority, and present your offer.
- Create lead magnets that demonstrate your expertise and provide value. Include a form where visitors can request more information and join your email list.
- Promote your site using paid advertising. There are many opportunities to promote your site including Google Ads, Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, YouTube ads, etc.
Build Your Dream Website For Your Dream Clients
Your coaching business website is a valuable, powerful marketing tool in the online marketplace. It’s one of the few places where you can carefully (read: selectively) choose what others see and consume, unlike other platforms. People from all over the world can discover you, learn more about you, and connect with you, all with a click of a button (on a space you actually own).
And when done with intention and strategy, your website will help promote your services, build expertise, and attract your dream clients!
It’s natural to feel excited and inspired at this point, but you may also feel that there’s more to attracting clients than building a functional website.
Your gut feeling is right.
As powerful as a website can be on its own, there are ways to amplify and optimize the results you get out of it. If you’re interested in learning how to enroll even more new clients and seriously launch your career as a life coach, you’re in luck.
Discover how to network and promote your coaching business with this free gift:
>> Download “10 New Clients in 90 Days”
Get ready to take your life coaching business to the next level!
Until next time…
Think bravely and act boldly,
Mat Boggs
