SEO For Online Courses (Quick Practical Guide For 2020)

Have Something to Rank & Money Loves Speed

Control is everything. Own your content. This way if a platform goes out of business or stops working (as they often do) you are still able to make money. Replacing a check out process and course hosting is easy. Losing your funnel is not. 

Also pages on subdomains that are given to you by these platforms do not rank well. 

Sales pages can rank. To do this they need to be a part of a larger brand. This is the job of your site. SEO is a longer play but it will set you free in the end. It’s the one thing that will allow you to choose whether or not you have to use paid traffic. 

Do not use course platforms to host any of your sales pages, opt-ins or blogs. They are not meant for that. Not only are you limited with your design but the speed will suffer. 

For every extra second a prospect has to wait your conversions go down by a couple %.

This includes garbage such as Click Funnels, Kartra etc.. as these are hard to track and suck at speed. 

Step 1: 

Get fast and flexible hosting. If your site is on hostgator, godaddy or any of other ancient/white label host… move it now. 

We recommend this one.

Step 2: 

Move your sales page to wordpress if its not there yet. It should be a part of your site. The URL should include your main keyword. 

If you need help with this step contact us and we’ll see if we can help.

Step 3:

Run your sales page through this site speed tester. It will explain what problems there are and how to solve them. 

If you are unable to fix the issues yourself this speed fix service is the best.

Prep Work Before You Start Building Links

*The ‘Prep Work’ is what you need to do before getting started with using the fiverr gigs or any backlinking work. 

Your Keywords

You want to create two lists:

  1. Keywords that you are targeting.
  2. Generic Keywords (You can use my list)

The ratio should never go beyond 90/10. 

90% Generic keywords / 10% Specific Keywords. 

*To be safe. Use only the generic keywords list for all of the fiverr gigs. 

*In the Generic Keywords list there is a KEYWORD that you will need to replace. 

The ‘keyword’ there stands for what the main keyword of your entire site is. It is the #1 thing you would want to rank for. It is the keyword that will get you the most searches in google. 

You can always go and find this via your Google Adwords account in the keyword planner.

Examples:

  • A compensation consultant located that wants nationwide clients.

Main keyword: compensation consultant

  • A muay thai trainer.

Main keyword: muay thai training

  • A coach that provides accredited training

Main keyword: coach training

Your Website

You’ll want to create two lists:

  1. Main URLs. These are the ones that you want to rank

Example:
Home Page
Services Page
Course Page
About Me Page
Main Blog Posts

2. Other URLs. These are blog posts and other less important pages that you will use to balance out your link profile. If google sees that links are only being sent to your main URLs and for the specific keywords it looks unnatural and they might give your site a penalty. 

*To be safe. Create one list of all of the pages of your site. Give them out at random to each fiverr gig. 

*The relationship between URLs and Keywords

If you look at your website. Some pages are designed to have people take action. 

Main pages would be:

Home Page – tell people where to go

Course Sales Page – making them buy

Pre-Advertorial page – blog post written like an ad with a clear action step at the end

Others are more geared towards showing your expertise and educating people. 

About page – explaining who you are

Blog posts – educating about your field of expertise

What usually happens is people only focus on their main pages. 

Let’s say you’re trying to sell “life coach training” and want to rank for that keyword.

Most people will only try to build links using that keyword and target their home page & sales page. 

This looks very unnatural in Google’s eyes. What you want to do is show that your entire website is valuable and then the links you do build to your main site will have a much easier job. That is why you’re using generic keywords which work for any page to prop up your entire site. 

Whenever you write a blog post… you should do a bit of research and find some keywords that fit and target that specific page (especially if its a pre-advertorial) but it does get complicated and is beyond the scope of this guide. 

How to Scrape All The URLs From a Website

Use this tool: https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/

Enter your website URL and let it run

Once done copy all and paste into a text document. Then manually remove all of time codes

You have your list. 

FIVERR GIGS TO USE

Do not use more than one per week. Make sure to continually get links. I recommend setting aside one day each week and run a new gig. You don’t want spikes or breaks. Stead and long term is key. 

Grab the updated list here



DO SALES PAGES RANK?

Short answer: Yes

Longer answer: They’re not as easy as pure content pages. A sales page is meant to convert viewers into buyers but I have ranked many. 

Some tips:

  • Include the keyword in the URL
  • Include keywords in the first paragraph, meta tags or header (only if it fits naturally)
  • Grab as many keyword variations as you can of your seed keyword and use these as well 
  • Have the strongest pages on your site inner link to your sales page
  • Make sure it is blazing fast, has high engagement and low bounce rate

NEXT STEPS TO SEO YOUR SITE

The process I outlined is meant to build a solid link foundation for your site. With that in place, every next link that you get (and you should constantly try to do so) will be 10x more effective. 

You’re looking for a podcast, news, guest post opportunities where 

(A) the site is relevant to yours – similar niche

(B) these links contain the keyword you want to rank for

(C) are pointed at the pages you want to rank

Whenever you’re ready, there are 2 ways I can help you:
  1. If you’re still looking for traction in your online course, I’d recommend starting with an affordable guide:

The Course Engine: Transform your course into a money-making machine with The Course Engine. This quick and actionable guide will teach you the system I use to transform average courses into ones that can grow past 7 figures in revenue with my in-person clients.  Join 279+ students here.

  1. Want an expert to take over or help you with your marketing?

Check out what we do, our case studies and book a free consultationwemarketonlinecourses.com

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Join others just like you. Learn more about Tom Libelt and Smart Brand Marketing