Introduction
The current global pandemic has changed our learning system and increased the need and demand for online courses.
With the educational system shifting to online platforms, online courses have become the new digital revolution with increasing numbers providing valuable information and revenue for upcoming entrepreneurs venturing into course creation.
If you’re an upcoming course creator, you may be intimidated by the rising numbers and ask yourself, ‘is it worth it creating an online course?’
Our answer is yes!
This is the best time to create online courses that help people achieve success, and it’s a genius and guaranteed way to make money online while working from the comfort of your home.
So now that you’ve spent months brainstorming, scripting, recording, editing, and finally uploading your course, how do you bring visitors to enroll on your website?
The only proven way to bring them flooding in while you make the big bucks is through effective Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).
What Is SEO?
Just like an eCommerce business owner relies on organic traffic for profitable conversion, you also require SEO-optimized content to increase your online visibility and ranking on search engine pages.
According to Wikipedia, search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a web page from search engines, and it targets unpaid traffic rather than direct traffic or paid traffic.
When done right, SEO brings in free, organic traffic directly from Google to your website every day without any paid ads required.
SEO simply means optimizing your website and its content so that Google ranks it higher and makes it more visible to searchers relevant to your business.
Or, in this case, your course.
SEO helps is especially significant and valuable for you as a course creator because it allows your educational content to get found easily with increased visibility.
For instance, if you’ve created a course for voice-over training, SEO will help you be more visible when people search for “online voice-over courses.”
If you desire to sell out, then it’s time to harness your audience’s full potential by driving organic traffic using SEO; you can focus on relevant keywords that will make your site even more appealing.
How Does It Work?
SEO enables you to up your game and keep selling your online course on autopilot by bringing in highly targeted leads directly to your course without paying for ads!
You can now plan and create your courses hassle-free, save money while using Google’s algorithms to rank higher in searches and get more students enrolling in your course.
Search engine optimization enables Google to index your website under relevant keywords in its library. Google sends out bots called “crawlers” to investigate every website, and it’s their job to figure out what each site is about and then index it in the library. This enables its algorithm to scan the index and displays what it thinks is the best answer queries whenever anyone searches online.
Google judges your page based on several factors, from keywords to speed and more, so SEO optimizes your pages to please Google’s algorithm and proves that your website is the best answer to relevant search terms.
Why Is SEO So Crucial For Course Creators?
- If SEO brings you a steady stream of traffic to your site without ads or you spending a dime, and you’re ranked at the top of Google, then it’s an essential and cost-effective choice compared to other marketing methods.
- Unlike paid online ads that are becoming more and more expensive, and taking your revenue SEO only requires time, patience, and knowledge to do it right.
- It doesn’t require constant monitoring and customer service as social media ads do, just do the work, create informative, valuable courses, then hands-off and up to Google.
- SEO saves you the hassle of finding and paying affiliates 50% to market and sell your courses. With SEO, you get to keep 100 percent of the sale and get an influx of visitors to enroll for your course for free.
It’s a no-brainer! You need SEO to succeed as a course creator.
Guides and Tips For The Perfect SEO
Although SEO sounds and looks really simple and easy, it can also be quite complex at the same time.
SEO is simple because you typically do the same thing a business owner does to attract the right target audience. From creating quality content about your products or services with an active social media presence and a great user experience on your website and more.
SEO can also be complicated because it’s easy to get blown so far off course if you don’t start with the foundation of all good SEO.
Keyword Research
The first and most vital foundation for good SEO is keyword research.
It’s the ability to discover what your audience is actually searching for and which order you should target them, and if you get it wrong, all your SEO efforts will be a waste of time and money.
You can start by thinking like a searcher and noting down all the keywords you think your target audience will search for. You can also use the related searches box at the bottom of the Google results page for more inspiration.
Once you have all these ideas, then use a keyword research tool to find adequate data on all keywords related to your course.
This part is very crucial and requires your utmost attention.
Many course creators veer off course here by choosing the keywords with the most traffic with hopes that it will bring in more visitors to their site.
But it doesn’t because the keywords with the highest traffic also have the highest competition with established websites, authority, content, and links, and your website will get crushed in a heartbeat.
Here’s an easy tip to get low-competition traffic:
Don’t target high-ranking keywords. Instead, aim for the low-volume, more specific keywords first and build from there.
For instance, don’t target “voice-over course or voice-over class.” Instead, go for “online voice-over course for beginners.” because they are more specific, you’ll get low competition traffic and higher ROI.
The idea behind this tactic is to get Google to start warming up to you more as you start getting traffic, and soon you would have built enough to target those high keywords.
Planning
Next is planning.
Now that you have the right keywords for your course, how do you plan and create your perfect SEO content?
Appropriate planning and structuring of your content topics will give you a significant SEO advantage over competitors who are just producing content for the sake of it.
One of the best ways to plan your content is by using something called “content clusters.”
A content cluster is when you create one article on the main topic with several other articles on a subtopic within that topic. You can link the subtopics within the main topic’s article.
For instance:
Your main topic might be “how to become a successful voice-over artist.”
You’d write an extensive guide on everything, including subtopics, how to find your style, voice-over technique, how to create demos, buying the right recording equipment, to getting a coach.
Then you’ll create articles on each of these subtopics with links to each of them and include them within that article.
Content clusters make it easy for Google to understand what your website is about and how to provide more value to your web visitors because this content cluster tactic provides answers on a single page with in-depth information on each of those subtopics, so your website visitor doesn’t need to click away.
Write Good Content For SEO
Writing informative, easily readable content based on your keywords is crucial for SEO because it satisfies your reader’s queries and provides them with an enjoyable reading experience.
Try these tips –
- Write short, readable sentences – google prefers easily legible and easily scannable content. Short sentences, paragraphs, simple grammar keep readers glued and less distracted, and they also make it easy to read and extract value.
- Have a quick and highly targeted introduction – avoid long intros that only state basic and irrelevant facts; they only waste time and are bad for SEO. Have great opening introductions that capture attention and not bored your website visitors to death.
- Provide value every time you write – your website visitors want solutions to their problems, and they are constantly looking for practical, actionable, valuable information that leaves them wanting.
Use SEO Boosting Links
Google evaluates the quality of your web page through your links.
When other websites link to yours, it assures Google that those websites vouch for yours as a great web page.
The more links you have, the better chance to win a top spot on search engine pages. As a course creator, your SEO goal is to optimize the quantity and quality of links to your course page.
Try any of these free and easy linking opportunities –
- Social media – If you don’t have any social media platform setup, don’t hesitate to set them and place a link to your course page in the bio in of your Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Youtube, and other social media sites.
- Create a Google My Business – you can also start a Google My Business for your course, all you need is a physical address, and when you set it up, you will get a fast and powerful link.
- Ask for a link exchange – collaborate with another course creator or affiliates who are interested in working with you by asking for a link exchange where you link to their sites in exchange for their linking back to yours.
- Reach out to course reviewers – find people who review courses in your industry and see if they’ll place you in their rankings. They may ask for a fee, but there’s a good chance that a few will add you in for free, and you can also bag some sales from those reviews too.
Conclusion
SEO is a practical, effective, effortless, and crucial way to bring in targeted and organic traffic to enroll in your course.
SEO is not an overnight process, it requires time and perseverance, and without a doubt, it’s a worthy investment that will help you gain a strong ROI from your online course.
Try these easy tips and guides to build your ranking on search engine result pages.
We know that SEO content creation can be daunting for course creators.
Let’s make it hassle-free!
Top Content Marketing Agency is a dynamic content marketing agency that can help you drive more organic traffic and increase conversions.
Ready to get started? Contact us today!