Your online course is designed to share your knowledge on a subject, and it’s where people will turn to learn more about a specific topic relevant to your work. But, if the right people don’t find your course, you may find your sales numbers lacking.
To help your online course be successful, you need to attract your target customers. And, one of the most common mistakes course creators tend to make is neglecting to market their products using SEO.
Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the process of enhancing your website, creating content, or using off-site tactics like link building to help your business rank higher on relevant search engine results pages (SERPs). Online course creatives should strive to improve their rankings on relevant SERPs to reach the right people and get more essential sign-ups.
So, let’s take a look at five easy ways you can optimize your online course’s sign-up page to attract new customers and increase your conversions.
- Use the right keywords to optimize your course web page
Keywords are specific words and phrases that define what your business or content is about. They are what users input into a search engine to find what they are looking for, and targeting the right ones can help you to boost your course sales.
To identify the keywords you need to target on your course’s web page, you’ll need to conduct some thorough keyword research. You can use a specialist SEO tool like Ahrefs or SEMrush to identify terms that your target audience uses when looking for courses like yours.
These tools will allow you to identify terms that are frequently searched and understand the level of competition you’ll face when targeting them. You should then aim to find a balance between choosing popular keywords, but also those you have a chance of ranking for.
You should also consider using long tail keywords to help drive qualified traffic. These are phrases that are three or four words long. They typically have lower search volumes, but indicate that people are looking for the specific solutions that you offer. This means they can help you drive more qualified traffic to your online course.
You can use keywords in the headers of your content, weave them into your body copy, and even include keywords in the calls to action (CTAs) on your course page to improve your organic visibility and get more sign-ups. .
- Publish website content your ideal audience needs
You can use content as a magnet that draws your target audience to your website and directs them to your online course. So, you should focus on creating content that will enhance a customer’s journey and inspire them to become one of your students.
This will also support your SEO efforts by giving you more opportunities to target relevant keywords and boost your website’s expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness (E-A-T). E-A-T derives from Google’s Search Quality Ranking Guidelines, and it looks at the trustworthiness and authority of a site to deliver the best content to online searchers.
To create content that will support your SEO efforts and help your course reach the right people, you’ll need to use some best practices, like:
- Creating content that is relevant and meaningful to your target audience.
- Using the right keywords to ensure you rank for the most relevant queries.
- Focusing on topics that do a great job of demonstrating your expertise.
For inspiration, let’s look at a company that does a great job of publishing content for its ideal audience and to boost its SEO.
RMIT Online, an online university, creates content based on their target audience who are looking for different HR career options. To help them reach the right people, they’ve put together an in-depth piece of content that explains how workforce transformation can expand the opportunities in this particular space.
Notice how everything about the blog post speaks to the needs of someone looking for more information about a career in HR. This is incredibly important, as it allows the online university to target relevant keywords, show off their expertise, and reach their ideal students.
We also have another effective example of valuable and SEO-boosting content from ActiveCampaign.
The company’s post about email deliverability defines this very important term that their ideal customers might be looking for more information about. If someone is searching for the meaning of the term “email deliverability”, they probably need some support with their email marketing, which is something ActiveCampaign is there to provide. As a result, this helpful piece of content that is also well-optimized is likely to help the company reach more of their target clients.
You can use the same strategies to create content that draws your ideal audience to your course by identifying the keywords you should be using and covering topics your customers are going to be genuinely interested in. Answering the questions your customers have will also help you rank higher on the right SERPs, so be sure to start creating your own content inspired by the examples we’ve provided.
- Build internal links to your course web page
Internal links connect pages, posts, and other content on your website. Internal links are the bread and butter of any SEO strategy because they can help Google to crawl your website and rank your pages for relevant queries by establishing a hierarchy.
Make sure to include at least two or three internal links in every new piece of content you produce. Each internal link should direct people to pieces of content to help your audience understand the topic further, or point to other pages on your site to help drive people towards a purchase.
Internal linking is a great way to help people find your course because these links provide additional context for Google and other search engines. Internal links also help people learn more about your site and direct them towards a conversion.
- Optimize the images you use
High-quality, relevant imagery is a must for any website to ensure your content is engaging for your audience. The images you choose will go a long way towards supporting your brand message and engaging your visitors.
Whether you use copyright-free images or ones you took yourself, optimizing that imagery can help support your web page’s SEO. Image optimization is the process of generating and delivering high-quality imagery in the proper size, resolution, and format, as well as giving each image an accurate label. It also offers contextual information to search engines and improves your page loading speed. These benefits will help to increase user engagement and improve your search engine rankings. Here are some ways you can ensure your images are helping your rankings instead of harming them:
- Resize your images and use the correct file formats to ensure your images render quickly.
- Use target keywords in your image file names and alt text to help people and search engines understand your images.
- Write unique alt text for each image to help search engines and people understand what each image shows.
Choosing the right images and optimizing them is a very effective way to ensure you reach the right people and get more course sign-ups as a result.
- Build external links on websites related to your course content
Another great way to get your course content out there and boost your SEO is to do some link building. This increases the number of high-quality websites directing users back to yours, which will increase your website rankings and quality score. Google uses external links to understand the context and trustworthiness of a page. This is because the search engine knows that sites only link to others when their content is helpful and provides genuine value, so it’s more inclined to promote websites with a lot of great external links.
To secure external links, you’ll need to reach out to websites related to your course topic.
Here are some techniques or assets you can use to build strategic links to your site and help improve your online visibility through search engines:
- Guest blogging: Find sites in your industry that you think your target audience reads. Reach out to the editors or website owners to ask them if you can contribute an article in exchange for a backlink in the author’s bio of the post.
- Podcasts: Often, podcasts have show notes that you can ask for your link to be added to. Reach out to podcasters to see if you can come on an episode as a guest in exchange for a backlink to your site..
- Create infographics: You can create infographics using statistics related to your industry and share them with sites who might be interested in publishing them. Bloggers are always looking for ways to include stats and interactive media in their posts, and you can offer your infographics in exchange for a link back to your site.
Use link building to earn the trust of both search engines and visitors to help your online course succeed.
Summary
A strong SEO strategy will help you to reach the right people and get more course sign-ups.
So, take the time to create engaging content that demonstrates your knowledge to your audience. In addition, make sure you build internal links on your site, optimize your images, and secure some external links to prove your worth. Before long, you’ll see an increase in web traffic and conversions as visitors rush to sign up for your online course.
