Welcome back to the CoachingWebsites blog, everyone. This week, we’re turning our attention back to probably the most popular topic in any web-advice column: Search Engine Optimization.

Some of the basics you may already know:

The site should have a clean navigational structure, so search engines can easily index your pages.

Your content should include the search terms that are most important to you – in the regular text, as well as in headers, links, and page names.

Your Meta Keywords, Meta Descriptions, and Title tags should resonate with the content of your pages – there should be parity and harmony between what you tell search engines your site is about on the back-end, and what they see when they crawl the front-end.  And finally, you should never forget that in the end your site must friendly, welcoming, and human-readable, so that once people do find you, they’ll like what they see!

Search engines use these basic aspects of your website to determine that it’s honest, relevant, easily navigable – in other words – that it’s a place that they should be sending real traffic too.

But what do you do to go beyond the basics?

How do you stand out, then, if you’ve done all the basics, but still find yourself needing to compete? What if you’re in a market like San Francisco, Los Angeles, or New York where the competition even for local results is enormous?

Don’t worry! There are still ways to separate yourself from the pack!

You might think at this point that your only recourse is paid advertising, link exchanges, directory listings, or even posting on forums or comment threads on related sites with a link back to your site. And as a matter of fact, these are all great ideas – as is setting up a blog for your website – but these are all ‘external’ optimizations.

Are there are any other ‘internal’ optimization techniques you can use?

In a word: Absolutely.

In fact, one of the most powerful optimization techniques you can employ is one that is often forgotten when people work on their SEO. You see, search engines treat every page of your website as unique possible destination, and each page could come up for completely different keywords than the others. This means you have a powerful tool at your disposal:

Targeted landing pages.

So what is a ‘targeted landing page’ and how can it help your search engine optimization?

Here’s the basic idea:

Go to Google right now in a new window, and type in the phrase that you wish your site was #1 for. Go on – give it a try!

Okay – have you done that? Now – take a look at what you typed into the search bar. It will probably look something like these:

“Motivational speaking for businesses in Portland, OR”

“Relationship coaching for workaholics in Chicago, IL”

“Career coaching for new grads in Columbus, OH”

These search phrases are built of 3 primary components:

A topical keyword + an application/situation + a location

This is the naturalistic construction of a search phrase for just about anything that someone may use a search engine for. The topical keyword represents, broadly speaking, what the searcher is looking for, the application/situation represents why they are searching for it, and the location represents where they are. So how do you turn this to your advantage?

Simple – create a new page on your website targeted to exactly that search phrase. Just take that search phrase and use exactly that as the name of your new page. Use it as the heading on the page. Make sure that phrase appears in the body of the page itself. This will give the search engines an exact match for the phrase in their search results from your website – whenever anybody types it in.

The key here is not to try to optimize for everything at once. Focus exclusively on the particular phrase you know you want to come up for and use this page to target just that result. You may be tempted to optimize for as many keywords as you can think of that are even slightly related, but resist the urge! Your job with a targeted landing page is to make it crystal-clear to the search engines what this particular page is about.

Then do it all again. Think of another search phrase – make another targeted landing page that matches it exactly – and you’ll be on your way to being an SEO Top Gun!

Looking to build a top-gun optimized website for your practice, but don’t have the time to do it all yourself? Take advantage of our expertise. At CoachingWebsites.com you can build build a beautiful, professional, and affordable website and then contact our SEO experts to take advantage of this, and other techniques to grow your practice online.

Tim L – CoachingWebsites Support
Email any questions to [email protected]