The Complete Guide to SEO for Course Creators

Develop your evergreen marketing machine to keep selling your online course on autopilot.

Does your online course marketing plan look anything like most course launches?:

• Step 1: Plan the course.
• Step 2: Create the course.
• Step 3: What next?

Actually, almost all new course creators suffer this problem. You’re an expert in your field, but not an online marketer. You’ve just spent months brainstorming, scripting, recording, editing, uploading your course, and you even ran your first beta round. And now what? How do you bring more visitors to your sales page and enroll more students?

The answer is search engine optimization (SEO). 

Today, you’re going to learn how to start bringing in a constant stream of highly targeted leads directly to your course without paying for ads or monitoring social media all day.  

What is SEO, and how does it work?

Search engine optimization is the practice of optimizing a website’s quantity and quality of traffic (visitors)from a search engine’s results page. When done properly, SEO brings in free, passive traffic directly from Google every day. No paid ads needed. In simpler terms, it’s basically the practice of optimizing your website and its content so that Google likes it and ranks you higher for terms relevant to your business. 

For example, if you’ve got a course for learning guitar, SEO will help you be more visible when people search for “online guitar course”. 

How does SEO work?

Think of search engines like a massive digital library. Only instead of books, they store copies of websites. Google sends out bots called “crawlers” to investigate every website. These guys figure out what a site is all about, and then index it in the library.

When someone searches “online guitar course”, Google’s algorithm scans the index and displays what it thinks is the best answer to the query. Search engines evaluate your site based on hundreds or even thousands of factors, including content, user behavior, authority, social media and links (a lot more on this later).

Google even judges your page based on speed. It’s trying to show the best results for users, so if your pages load slowly, you’ll be penalized. That’s how advanced the algorithm is. So, if you think about it, SEO is optimizing your pages to please Google’s algorithm and demonstrate to it that you’re the best answer to a search term.

Why is SEO so powerful for course creators?

Imagine a steady stream of interested visitors coming to your website every week, all without paying for ads, spending all day on Reddit, or monitoring Facebook groups. Some course keywords have hundreds or even thousands of searches a month. If you rank at the top of Google, the majority of the visitors will come to your site.

Back to our guitar course example. 

About 450 people search for an online guitar course per month. That’s 450 highly interested customers looking for a guitar course with the intent to purchase. That’s roughly 112 per week, or 16 per day.

I don’t know about you, but I’d love to have 16 interested customers come to my sales page each day with no extra effort. Even if I only convert two, that’s hundreds of dollars in sales a day. Can you see the potential power of ranking for a key term with regular search volume?

Compare this to other marketing methods, and it becomes a no-brainer. 

• Google or Facebook Ads: They’re becoming more and more expensive, and ROI is decreasing. Plus, they require a lot of capital to get off the ground. SEO requires only time and patience (plus knowledge on how to do it right). 
• Social Media: Facebook requires constant monitoring and customer service. It’s highly valuable for sure, but it requires a lot of time that could be better spent elsewhere. With SEO, you do the work upfront, and from there it’s 99 percent hands-off.
• Affiliates: Finding affiliates for your courses is one of the best ways to get sales in the beginning, but you’ve got to pay up to 50 percent or more to the affiliate. With SEO, you keep 100 percent of the sale. 

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