You are still in the early stages of planning your coaching business, you are completing your training and gaining your qualifications. Whilst you are training you are wisely taking the opportunity to start putting together your coaching practice.
We have discussed in previous blogs how it is wise to think now about what services you are going to offer to your customers, what areas of coaching you are going to specialise in. Think about the skills that you have, the areas of knowledge and expertise that you have built up over the years, and match your areas of coaching as closely as possible to these skills.
We are thinking now about future marketing opportunities. How are you going to acquire clients? One way, and the best way is through word of mouth. If you provide coaching services in an area of life or business where you have a track record of experience, and maybe expertise, then it will make the job of acquiring clients much easier for you. It will most likely also mean that you are guaranteed to get great results with your clients as you will certainly be able to add a good amount of value to their lives. The more value that you add, the more likely it is that your clients will speak to colleagues and friends about how good you are, and refer you on to them.
One other way of acquiring clients that is becoming more and more successful is by using the internet.
There are over 40,000 searches per month on Google for “Life Coaching” in the UK, 9,000 monthly searches for “Executive Coaching” and 12,000 monthly searches for “Business Coaching.” So, there are plenty of people searching for coaching services, and if you are at the top of the search results for these Keywords, then you are going to be doing very nicely indeed.
The thing is that it is not going to be easy to get to the top of the search results for these Keywords since all the other coaches in the UK are going to be competing with you to be there and most of them have got a head start on you!
So, start thinking about words that are specific to the services that you are going to offer. For example, what is your location? What are the specific locations that you are going to market your services? “Executive Coaching Bristol” will get far fewer searches per month than “Coaching” or “Training” or “Counselling” but there will be much less competition for these Keywords, so you stand a good chance of getting your services on the first page of the search results, and this is what we are after.
“Relationship Counselling Derbyshire” is another good example, it describes exactly what your services are, so people searching on these keywords find what they are looking for. It is about being specific and the competition for these keywords is modest, so you stand a chance of getting enquiries from your website if you target these type of keywords.
Once you have decided on some keywords that represent what you want to offer, are specific in description and location, then it is time to research these keywords to make sure that they are popular enough to get you some clients.
The free internet based tool that we use to do the research is the Keyword tool in Google Adwords.
Just type your keywords into their tool, and google will tell you how many people have been searching using those specific words or phrases. You will be provided with global monthly searches and local monthly searches. Assuming that you are not selling services internationally, then the local monthly searches is the one that we are interested in as that will tell you the number of searches that have been made on those keywords in your country.
Initially I would recommend looking at keywords that have 1,000 monthly searches or less, as this will give you the best chance of making a quick move onto the first page of search results for those keywords. You may need to look at several phrases in order to get the numbers to around 1,000, and that is ok, because you can target different keywords with different pages of your website.
If your keyword phrases are similar in type, then all the better. For example, “Training Kent” and “Coaching Kent” are similar in type as Kent is common to both phrases, and this will help the search engines to get to know what you are offering, and therefore which search results to place your website listing in. “Relationship Coaching” and “Relationship Counselling” again are of similar type and this is good.
You will use the Keyword tool then to identify what your services are going to be specifically, so that you know that there are people looking for what you are offering, and so that you can start naming your business accordingly and designing your website.
Google Adwords has many more facilities than just the keyword research that we have discussed, and once we have our business set up and we are looking at marketing options, we may well be back to this tool to design advertising campaigns with Google.
The next stage in the process of setting up your coaching business is to choose a legal structure, name your coaching business, and get your website address, we will discuss these stages in further blogs…..
Have you started your coaching training? NLP Training with Excellence Assured is your perfect starting point. You can start now by training in NLP Online.
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