Bonus: 3 Easy Steps to Sell Your Online Course With SEO

In this bonus podcast episode, my guest is SEO Expert, Rachel Lindteigen. Rachel is the President & Founder Etched Marketing and in this episode she walks us through three easy steps to sell our online course with search engine optimization.

Listen in for her tips on how to optimize your online course sales page for Google and an insider tip on how to handle courses that may not be open all year round.

Mentioned In This Episode:

Where you can find Rachel and her free SEO course: www.etchedmarketing.com

Transcript:

Speaker 1 (00:01):

And today my special guest is Rachel Lindteigen. She is the president and founder of Etched Marketing, and Rachel is an SEO expert, and I have brought her onto the podcast to help us with three easy steps to sell your online course with SEO. And I'm super excited, Rachel, to dig in to this with you today, and just to learn more about how we can sell our online courses just through Google and SEO, which I'm sure you're going to go into this, which is just basically search engine optimization. So Rachel, thanks so much for joining us. And why don't you take just a second and tell the audience just a little bit about you and what you do and what your company does.

Speaker 2 (00:48):

All right. Thank you so much, destiny. I'm so happy to be here and have the opportunity to help your audience learn about SEO. So like you said, I'm Rachel Lindteigen I offer SEO services, but more importantly, I teach SEO, which is search engine optimization. It's a process of getting our websites found on Google. So you may not know that until you optimize your website, Google doesn't really understand what it's about. So they're not as likely to show you when people search for things related to you. So by optimizing your website, you make it easier for Google to understand what you're about, which means they show you two more people. So you get more traffic coming to your site. And the amazing thing about SEO is it's people who are looking for what you have to offer. They are literally going to Google and typing in things that are related to your business. And then Google is popping your website up there as a result, and they trust those natural search results more than they trust an ad. So really understanding and unlocking how SEO works is huge, especially within something like an online course builder community.

Speaker 1 (02:05):

So I just want to kind of dig into this a little bit more and ask you a couple of questions here. So thinking about this from an online course, per se, you know, online course creator, we have our website and we have a sales page for a website. So when we talk about this today, are we talking about optimizing our website or optimizing our sales page for our website,

Speaker 2 (02:33):

In all honesty, we're going to talk about optimizing all of it. We should be optimizing our website, our sales page, our opt-in pages and our blog, because every one of them is an opportunity to be found in Google and have more people come to our website to learn about our course. So we want to optimize all of it where we're going to start today. Let's start with talking about our sales page because that's a really powerful tool, but you can use these strategies on every page on your website and blog.

Speaker 1 (03:05):

So that's a very good point. So what you're going to cover today, we need to think about all of these steps that you're going to cover for a blog post that we put out, or just anything that we're doing on our own website.

Speaker 2 (03:18):

Absolutely. The better optimized your entire website is the better results you will have from SEL.

Speaker 1 (03:26):

Okay. Okay. I'm excited to dig into this. This is one of, kind of my I will say this is a subject that I know a little bit about, but I definitely don't consider myself to be an expert in, so I'm hoping, I hope I can also learn some stuff here. So what is step one, we're going to talk about three easy steps to sell your online course with SEO. Rachel, what is the step one? We need to think about

Speaker 2 (03:51):

The very first thing in step one is to start brainstorming those keywords that might be used on your sales page, your home page keywords you might use for blog posts. So since we're going to talk about our sales page, let's talk about keywords for the sales page. So what is your ideal customer searching when they're looking for a solution like an online course, and let's just pretend you, right. You have an online course on baking cupcakes. So what would they be looking for when they're searching for how to learn, how to bake cupcakes or online cupcake baking program, online cupcake decorating programs. So you're going to want to brainstorm for a few minutes. And what I say when I teach my students, I teach online SEO for course creators. So what I teach is how do you come up with these terms? So you think about your ideal customer, the who, what, why, where when and how answer those questions, who are they?

Speaker 2 (04:51):

What are they asking? Why do they want to know it? How do they want to learn it? All of that will get you started and help you start brainstorming. Once you have a list of, I would say for a sales page, let's look for maybe 10 keywords that we could potentially use. Then I'm going to want you to go over and use a keyword research tool. The one that I really like, and I know it can feel a little difficult to use, but it's the Google keyword planner. And the reason I like that is it's direct from Google. It's free. There's no limit to the number of keywords that you can research. Some of the other paid tools have free versions, but they'll only let you search three keywords a day. If you've got a list of 10 only being able to search three keywords a day means you're going to be four days till you have your answer.

Speaker 2 (05:38):

And that's too slow for me. So learn how to use the Google keyword planner. You will have to set up an account like you were going to do an AdWords ad. You will have to put your credit card information in there. You do not have to ever run an ad. Okay? Just, you know, you have to set it up, but you do not have to use it. You do not have to run an ad research, those 10 words. So you're going to put them in there. You're going to see what the search volume is. It's also going to give you additional information like the cost per click and the competitiveness. That's all related to paid search. You don't have to worry about that part of it. But I do want you to take note of the competitiveness because if a word is highly competitive for paid search, it's also going to be highly competitive for natural search for SEO.

Speaker 2 (06:21):

So you're going to want to look for the keyword that has the highest search volume and the lowest competitiveness, so lower medium competitiveness. So that's your first step for keyword research. The next step within keyword research, I want you to take whatever term you've identified as your best opportunity. So the most volume, the smallest competitiveness. And I want you to put that term into Google. And I want you to look and see who ranks on page one. And the reason we have to look at who ranks on page one is because nobody is going to page two. Think about your own search history. When's the last time you went to page two 99 point some percent. It's like 99.7% of searchers never click to page two. So you got to rank on page one. So who's ranking on page one. And how similar are you to them?

Speaker 2 (07:14):

Are they competitors? Are they people you are familiar with? Or are you familiar with them? Because they're very big brands. If they were a retailer, would they be at the mall? So I want you to look and find a keyword where the websites that are ranking on page one are very similar to you. They are competitors to you. They look similar, they feel similar. All of that. That's your first step is to really identify that keyword. Now I teach a much more involved process in my course, but this'll get you started and help you get on the right track. And this is really important because if you choose a keyword that's too big for you, you will not be able to rank for it. You will not be on page one. And like I said, 99.7% of people don't click to page two, which means being on page two, three, four, five, doesn't count. So spend extra time. This is your most important step of everything you're going to do to optimize this sales page.

Speaker 1 (08:12):

Okay. So let's assume that you have, you you've come up with that best opportunity if you would, that you were talking about. And is there, I'm trying to figure out how to word this. Is it depending on what you do, is there, is it easy to get on page one or is there a lot of things you need to do to get your sales page ready to get there?

Speaker 2 (08:38):

So just choosing the keywords, not going to get you there. There's some stuff that we have to do on that sales page, but as long as you've chosen a key word that you can rank for, we should be able to get you to page one. As a test case study, I did a new sales page for my course. And within 30 days I had hit page one. So as long as you choose the right one and you follow the steps that I'm going to teach you, you should be able to get to page one. It may not happen as quickly as it did for me. I was honestly surprised that it was within 30 days, but it will start to happen.

Speaker 3 (09:17):

Okay.

Speaker 1 (09:18):

So are we ready to move to the second step? Absolutely. If you're ready, what's the second step there.

Speaker 2 (09:24):

Okay. Now we've got our keyword. We've identified the number one keyword. The next step is you're going to create a landing page or your sales page. So you're going to write your sales page. Now you want to make sure that you leave your sales page up all year. And I know this goes against a lot of the advice that you receive for online course businesses, and you have to do cart close and cart open. And I'm not saying that you can't do that. I'm just saying you need to have a dedicated page for your course that you leave up all year. Now, if you're not selling at that moment, you can make that a waitlist page. The reason we need to leave this up all year is that the longer that page is up, the more likely it is to be ranked. And once you start ranking, if you take that page down, you lose your rankings.

Speaker 2 (10:16):

We do this. So when I was with the agency and I worked with a lot of e-commerce retailers, this is how we protected their black Friday and cyber Monday rankings. Those are very competitive keywords. Those are things that they want to make sure they have. If you go now and search black Friday, cyber Monday, you will find a bunch of landing pages that say sign up to be the first to know about our ads. And that's why they do it that way. And that's the same thing I want you to think about with your core sales page. So create that page, use that keyword in your copy, make sure that you're using it. Now, I'm not going to say, write your sales page and use your keyword 10 times, because I don't like doing that. What I'm going to tell you is write your sales page, answer the questions that you need to answer.

Speaker 2 (11:04):

Make sure you have the information for your customer, and then go back and read it out loud to yourself. You will naturally see, you will see where you have naturally used your keyword. And if you have used it too many times, it's going to feel weird when you read it out loud and you'll know you need to edit. If you haven't used it enough, you'll see where there are opportunities to edit it and add it back in. So I don't believe in use your keyword X number of times, I believe in writing for your customer. You'll get better results and you'll use your keyword. Don't even worry about

Speaker 1 (11:37):

It. And I think people have called that in the past, like keyword stuffing, if you it as well. Yeah. So definitely we definitely don't want to do that, but I love, absolutely love the tip that you gave about keeping the sales page up all year round. And if for some, if you're not open for enrollment, because we know that a lot of courses that we have maybe even in courses that have group coaching programs in on, like, we open them up at certain times and close on, just have that wait list on there. So I think that's a, a really great tip for us. Are we ready to move on to step three? We are.

Speaker 2 (12:13):

So now we've chosen that keyword. We've created that perfect landing page. Now what we're going to do is optimize that page and you're going to use that keyword in your optimization elements. So this is where we tell Google what we're about. So your optimization elements, you're going to create a title tag, and you're going to edit that. If you're on WordPress, you're going to edit that in the Yoast SEO plugin. If you're on Squarespace, it's in the pages section, you'll find out, you'll probably know where to do that. So you're going to add a title tag and your title tag is the first thing that someone sees in the search results when they're looking at your listing. So you want it to be enticing. You want them to click on it. You want them to understand what that page is about at your first opportunity to catch their attention.

Speaker 2 (13:03):

But there are some challenges here. It's a maximum of 60 characters and that includes the spaces. So you don't have a lot of room to work with. You also need to make sure that you're including that most important keyword and your business name. Now here's a bonus like pro tip that I like to share. If you can find a way to include a call to action term shop, find out, learn, discover by something like that. At the beginning of your title tag, we actually see up to a 30 to 35% increase in the through rate. So three to like a 30 to 35% increase in the number of people who see that, who click on it versus not clicking on it. So if you can incorporate that call to action, that's huge. The next thing that you're going to want to do is to create a meta description.

Speaker 2 (13:56):

Now, a meta-description is a sentence format. It's one to two sentences. It's very short, but it should give a little more information about that page. You really want somebody to want to click because they feel like they're going to find the information they need. Your meta-description is a maximum of 160 characters that includes spaces, and it should include your primary keyword. So you're going to want to write that you're going to want to tech test both of those to ensure that you are within the right boundaries, sport and following best practices. That way you have control of what Google shows for your page. Then a bonus that you can do is to optimize your image file name. So all those pretty pictures that you put on your website or on your sales page, Google can't read the text that's on them. So if you have text on them, it doesn't do you any good.

Speaker 2 (14:48):

It's good for your consumer, but it's not good for Google, but Google can read your file names and that's another way that they can better understand what your page is about. Use your core keyword, that most important one that you chose put dashes, not underscores dashes in between the letter in between the words because Google reads dashes as spaces. Now, if you want a bonus tip, you want to be able to be found in Google image search, go ahead and add your business name there. So keyword with the dashes in between it business name, with the dashes in between it. And it doesn't matter if it's a long file. I have some crazy long file names with like six and seven words. It doesn't matter because they're optimized for the keyword and the business name. And then that way it shows up. So if somebody's searching your business name or they're searching the keyword either way, you have a better chance of showing up, you will also. So you will have already created your copy in step. Number two, you will have gone through, you should have optimized it in step two. That's what I had you do. As you went through to determine had you stuffed it, had you used your keyword too many times or had you not used it enough times. So by doing those three steps, you should have a page that is ready to rank in Google and send traffic to your website for free.

Speaker 1 (16:11):

I love the tips you gave us in step three, but particularly about the one about the images I had. I have never done that before on any of the images in my website. And I wish I know that now I have hundreds and hundreds of images that don't have that in there. So thank you for that. So the title tag, the meta description, and then the image found names. That is a great tip. Anything else that you can think of Rachel, that would be good for the audience to know about optimizing their sales page for SEO?

Speaker 2 (16:43):

I think that it's really the main, those are the main points for optimizing your sales page. The one thing I want to say back just a second and go to what you said destiny about not knowing about that. So sometimes that happens, you learn something and you're like, oh my gosh, I wish I would have done that. Just start now. You don't have to go back and change everything start now. And you'll start to see the results. If you really want to go back and make a change, look at your analytics and determine which pages are driving the most traffic, which are the most popular and prioritize based on the ones that are getting the most traffic.

Speaker 3 (17:18):

That's.

Speaker 1 (17:19):

That's some good advice too. I know occasionally I'll go into my Google analytics and try to figure out, you know, what blog posts are driving the most traffic or what podcast episodes that I've done or driving the most traffic. So I'm going to definitely do that. It actually, Rachel I'll have some action items coming out of our session today. I'm going to go check all my sales pages and make sure I've done all three of these steps for them. And thank you so much for joining me today and giving us these three tips on how we optimize our core sales pages for SEO.

Speaker 2 (17:52):

You're welcome. Thank you so much for having me here. This is my absolute favorite subject, you know, SEO and online course creators. You couldn't make this

Speaker 1 (18:01):

Girl happier. Well, before we end, can you let the audience know where they can find you and where they can find that SEO course?

Speaker 2 (18:10):

Yeah, absolutely. So you can find me at my website, which is etchedmarketing.com. I do have a free SEO class. That'll get you started it's right there on the homepage. And then simple SEO is my full SEO program. That's going to teach you everything we talked about, but teach you why Google works the way it does and what you need to do. And it teaches you my fail safe method for choosing the right keyword for every page and verifying that you can rank for it before you get started, saves you a lot of time. You can find out about that on the website as well. And there's a number of different freebies for you. There's an SEO checklist, a quick start guide, a marketing plan template, pretty much whatever you need. Blog idea guides, it's all there for.

Speaker 1 (18:54):

And Rachel will make sure that the link to your website is in our show notes so people can click on it and find you.

Speaker 2 (19:00):

Wonderful. Thank you. Thanks so much.