7 easy ways to improve your health coaching website
You’re ready to, or maybe you’ve already launched, your health coach website (or you’re a nutritionist, essential oil advocate, naturopath, chiropractor, etc). Unless you have at least $3,000, chances are your website is a DIY job, which I’m a total believer in. The problem is that since you’re likely not a professional website designer, you’re not entirely sure your health website has all the things it needs to really build your business. Let’s change that!
One of the things I love to do the most as a wellness website expert is to give professional feedback to improve your health coach website in the form of a live website review.
After a few submissions on Instagram, I reviewed Angela Zimmerlé’s health website at www.hoohappiness.com. Angela lives in France and helps moms to create natural and non-toxic homes so their families can have a safe space to live a healthy and vibrant life. Her main business income is with doTERRA essential oils, but she plans on launching online courses in the future.
The main problems we solved in this live health website review include:
what should be on your navigation bar (including what NOT to do at the very top of your website!)
what you need to write on the very top of your home page
what the next most important sentence is on your home page
what a call to action is and why you need it on your home page
design tricks to get your website visitors to read a lot of information without getting overwhelmed by it
how to write an about page that converts new website visitors into fans and then customers
what to blog about to actually grow your business and find new customers
Go ahead and watch the video below (I highly recommend clicking the little gear icon in the lower right hand corner, and switching the playback speed to 1.5x so you can watch it about 40 minutes), or for the main points we covered - including time stamps - you can keep scrolling below the video.
P.S. At 10 minutes in, Angela’s husband came into the room with an interesting request (hint: we almost saw him naked ;), so if you want a little laugh, just watch that part!
Here are the 7 ways to improve your health coach website that we covered in this live video review with Angela:
#1 Declutter your navigation bar & don’t include this (ever!)
The first thing I brought to Angela’s attention is that she had links to her social media in the very top right hand corner of her website in the navigation bar.
Anything in your navigation bar will get a lot of attention, and why would you want to send people to your social media, where they’ll inevitably end up clicking away from your account and forget all about you and your services, when you should be focusing on keeping them on your website longer?
The longer people are on your website, the higher the chance of them either joining your email list or seeing your products or paid services.
Even with the rise of social media, most big online business owners will tell you that the money is in their email list, and the research I’ve found on the topic and my own personal experience agrees with this.
If you are going to link to your social media accounts, do it at the bottom of certain pages (like your about page) or put it in the footer like I do.
The second thing I taught Angela is to treat your navigation bar like giving a treat to a toddler: if you give them too many options, they won’t be able to choose. But if you give them fewer, edited options, they can choose much easier.
A confused person doesn’t buy, so make it super easy for them by putting the fewest possible number of options in your navigation bar.
The must have pages for your health coach website include:
Start here (this links to your home page)
About
Work with me
Blog
I’ve started putting the contact page in the footer at the bottom of my website, as most people just DM me on social media.
If you use Squarespace, which I highly recommend, you can clean up your navigation bar by utilizing the folder function in the primary and secondary navigation. Just create a new folder in the navigation, and drag your current pages under that folder.
#2 The one sentence you need on your home page
You have 50 milliseconds for someone to form an impression of you and your business when they land on your website. 50 milliseconds. That’s 6 times faster than the time it takes to blink.
Do you think someone will take 5 minutes to scroll down through an infinite abyss to reach any useful information, or to read huge paragraphs of writing to figure out if you can help them? Hells no!
At the very top of your home page should be one sentence (or two) that clearly identifies who you help or what problem you solve.
Example from my own website: Tired of not making a full time income in your health & wellness business? Let’s change that.
Angela’s new example: Want to learn more about what it means to live a more natural life? You are in the right place!
#3 The next most important sentence you need on your home page
Now that someone who landed on your website knows they should keep reading, the next most important sentence is the “I help” or “I offer” sentence that goes in the next section or a few sections down.
This is where you say, in the most literal, non abstract way, who you help.
Example from my own website: I offer online courses and tools to transform your health and wellness business from passion project to permanently profitable.
Angela’s new example: I help moms to create natural + non toxic homes so their families can have a safe space to live a healthy + vibrant life.
After reading this sentence, it should be 1,000% crystal clear if your website visitor is in the right place. If it’s not, you actually want them to leave!
You want your health website frequented by people who are most likely to buy from you and grow your business, and that is your ideal clients. Can you help others? Sure you can! But your marketing message needs to be specific to one ideal client so that there’s no question that YOU, and you alone, are the person to help them.
Skip the video above to 16:20 to hear Angela’s question about this, and her fear about niching down and potentially alienating others who visit her website.
#4 Include an obvious call-to-action
When you build your own health website, you assume that people will know how to use it. You think they’ll know what they can click on and where that will take them, but you know what happens when you assume things, right?
On your home page there should be several calls-to-action for someone to take so they can continue learning from you, and you need to be obvious about it. Actually write “Click below to” or “Click here to join now”.
Whether it’s to download something free (like an e-book) in exchange for their email, join a challenge, take a quiz, or to check out other content on your website, such as reading your blog or your about page, what’s obvious to you isn’t always obvious to them.
Make it obvious by telling them exactly what to do, especially if it looks like they’re clicking on a pretty picture that’s also a button.
#5 Use design to ‘trick’ people into reading more
No one wants to read a book on a website, otherwise they’d just read a book. If someone clicks to a website and sees a wall of writing, they’re likely to say “I don’t have time for this” and click away, no matter how amazing that content might be.
By using sections with different coloured backgrounds, changing up the size of the fonts, and inserting images, you can trick the brain into thinking it’s not reading as much.
Heck, even in this blog post I’m splitting huge paragraphs of writing into 2-3 sentence chunks so that it doesn’t look so overwhelming!
Starting at 27 minutes in the video above, I blew Angela’s mind by showing her what Squarespace is truly capable of with its built-in design capabilities - no coding required (her actual gasp happens at 32 minutes).
She’s already made some big changes within 48 hours of this website review, and I think you can agree that it looks way more readable:
Before
After
#6 Write an About page that isn’t actually about you … it’s about them
This sounds so strange and counterintuitive, but your about page shouldn’t actually be all about you. Why not? Because the fastest way to get people to trust you (and then to buy from you) is for them to feel understood. And how do you get them to feel understood?
You talk about them in the context of your shared values, beliefs, and objections. If you get this right, they’re going to feel like you’re inside of their head.
Once they feel seen, heard, and validated, then you share everything about yourself that makes you an expert, which helps them to feel like they don’t have to search for anyone else to solve their problem, because they’ve found you.
I broke this confusing concept down in detail starting at 36:40 in the above video using the example of my own about page, and also shared where it IS more helpful and appropriate to share personal stories about yourself.
You won’t be able to read the content because it’s too small, but you can see the huge changes to Angela’s about page after our review:
BEFORE
AFTER
#7 You need a blog, but you need to use it strategically
The last page that we reviewed was Angela’s blog … because she’s got a LOT of existing content.
Having a blog on your health website is a must have (I’ve previously talked about 6 ways to use a blog to grow your business, how to use a blog to create 2 weeks of social media content in 4 hours, and how to use a blog to grow your business on autopilot), but there’s actually 2 ways to use a blog to educate new website visitors.
These are called the 2 buckets, and I talk about them starting at 48 minutes into the video above.
What Angela realized during the review is that she can split most of her existing blog posts up into at least 2 separate ones, and she has lots of ready made content that can reuse as free downloads (in exchange for an email address) at the bottom of them.
This strategy of including free downloads right at the bottom of a blog post is called a content upgrade, and I find that this strategy works way faster than a lead magnet sitting on your homepage ever will. Why?
Blog posts have a much higher chance of getting traffic and new website visitors from more passive social media platforms like Pinterest, as well as organic search traffic from Google, because each blog post solves one specific problem that people are actually searching for.
They’re probably not searching “Angela Zimmerlé’s anxiety story”, which is a blog post she had already written, but they might be searching “essential oils for anxiety” (which about 18,000 people do search for each month!).
Put yourself in the shoes of your ideal client: if you were experiencing the issue they’re trying to solve right now (and you’re trying to sell them a solution for), what would you be searching on Google? That’s what you write in blog posts.
Each specific question gets one blog post to answer it.
If you know your ideal client well, I bet you could come up with at least 10 questions right now that you know they have (0r you get asked all the time), so brainstorm the matching blog posts to answer those questions!
There you have it, 7 ways to improve your health coach website … but phew, that’s a LOT of things to remember. It took me years to figure all these moving parts out, it’s like a symphony but on a website.
While I love designing websites, I’ve realized that it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. You need a new website, you need it now, and you don’t want to have to figure out a new piece of software or learn custom code. No worries, I got you!
I’ve started offering one week websites in a service called template restyle!
The Template Restyle service is for you if:
You want to take your online business to the next level, but aren’t ready for the 5-figure investment it’ll cost for a custom website.
You want a website that has a few custom tweaks that differentiates it from everyone else’s.
You want an experienced professional to take the wheel so you don’t have to feel so alone in the complicated website design process.
