You’re confident in your services, your clients only have good things to say about you, and you get new referrals constantly, but you know there’s room for growth.
So you start spending money on ads, creating more social media posts, and tweaking your website’s design and wording. Add in new algorithms, AI tools, and social media platforms that emerge every day, and it’s hard to know where to invest your time, energy, and marketing budget.
You don’t need to spend every evening trying to keep up with every new marketing trend.
All you need is a website that clearly communicates what you do, who you help, and why someone should trust you, paired with a search strategy that helps the people who need your service the most to find you.
When that foundation is in place, your website can become a much more reliable source of qualified traffic and leads. Instead of constantly wondering where your next client will come from, you can spend more of your time actually running your business.
Let’s look at three strategies for creating that foundation: improving your website’s health, optimizing it for the searches your ideal clients are actually making, and building a website that feels human and trustworthy.
Strategy #1: Making Sure Google Can Actually See and Understand Your Website
Before you worry about creating more content or ranking for more keywords, make sure your website is technically sound.
Search engines need to crawl your site, understand the pages, and figure out what each page is about. If something is preventing that, creating more content won’t necessarily solve the problem.
That’s why a technical SEO audit is such an important starting point.
A proper audit assesses your website’s health and identifies issues that could make it harder for search engines to find, understand, or rank your pages.
It can also show whether your website accurately represents what your business actually does. For example, you might know that your company provides a particular service, but if the page doesn’t clearly communicate that service, Google has to work much harder to understand it.
If Google can’t even tell what your website is about, it’s going to make it a heck of a lot harder for your ideal client to find you.
What can you do?
Start by asking:
- Can search engines access and store all of the important pages on my website? Or, are there technical issues preventing important pages from being crawled and indexed?
- Does each important page have a clear purpose?
- Do my page titles and descriptions accurately describe what’s on the page?
- Does my website clearly communicate what my business offers?
- Are there outdated or unnecessary pages creating confusion?
I don’t recommend deleting pages all willy-nilly, creating random redirects, or removing all the no-index tags you see flagged in Google Search Console.
At Well Optimized SEO, we start by understanding your website and business before recommending changes. An SEO audit can identify what’s working, what’s holding your site back, and what needs attention first.
That means you’re not spending hours reading conflicting SEO advice online and trying to guess which technical fix matters most. We want you to have a clear idea of what’s going on and what the next best step is.
Strategy #2: Optimizing Your Website for the Searches Your Ideal Clients Are Actually Making
Once your website is healthy, the next question is:
Are you showing up when the right people are searching for what you offer?
This is where keyword research and search intent come into play. And no, this doesn’t mean stuffing your website with awkward phrases like:
“Best Denver wellness coach” or “wellness coaching near me” across your website.
It’s awkward for potential clients to read, and Google isn’t a big fan either.
Your website should clearly identify:
- What you do (your services)
- Who you serve (your target audience)
- Where you’re located (if you have a brick-and-mortar business or a local service business)
It may look something more like “Wellness Coaching in Denver, Colorado”.
For an online business, it may mean being much more specific about the problem you solve, the audience you serve, and the services or products you provide.
Here you might go with something more along the lines of “Fertility Wellness Coaching for Women with Endometriosis”
One of the biggest opportunities many businesses miss is simply being direct. Creative, flowery language can help communicate your brand and personality, but you don’t want to get too poetic with your headings.
A flowery, non-descriptive heading is actually an ADA compliance issue. Headers are designed to tell Google, AI, and screen readers (for the visually impaired) what your page is about.
So instead of an H1 (main top header on a page) that reads:
“Becoming the Best Version of You”
you might need something more direct, such as:
“Fitness Coaching for Female CEOs”
The second version immediately tells a potential client what the business does and who it is for, and it makes it clear to search engines who need to see your website. You can add that flowery subheadline under your main header. Totally fine! But make sure the main H1 says exactly what the page is about.
You can still make your branding and personality the center of your business (and you should! We’ll talk more about this in strategy 3!), but if you want to show up in Google search results, clarity comes first.
Research the Questions Your Customers are Asking
This is where keyword research and tools like Google’s “People Also Ask” results can be helpful.
You want to understand:
- What does your ideal customer search before they buy?
- What problems are they trying to solve?
- What questions do they have?
- What services are they comparing?
- What location-based searches matter for your business?
- What information would help them decide you’re the right choice?
These searches can become the foundation for your website pages and long-form content.
And this is also where SEO and AEO — Answer Engine Optimization — begin to overlap.
People aren’t only searching for a list of websites anymore. They’re increasingly asking questions and looking for direct answers through search engines and AI. The businesses that clearly answer these questions are the ones that will show up first.
At Well Optimized SEO, keyword research and search analysis help determine what your audience is actually looking for — rather than building a strategy around guesses.
We don’t just want to increase traffic. We want the right people to find you. 100 people actively looking for your service are 1000Xs more valuable than 10,000 visitors who aren’t interested in what you sell.
Strategy #3: Build a Website That Humans Can Trust
SEO might help someone find your website. Your website has to convince them to stay. You can rank well and still have a website that doesn’t generate many leads.
Your website needs to build trust and create a connection to the person you’re selling to. Whether we want to admit it or not, purchasing is highly emotional, especially if you have a high-ticket offer.
Yes, your headings and page structure should help search engines understand your content, but the rest of the experience should make your ideal client think:
“Yes. This is exactly what I’ve been looking for.”
Your website should make it easy for someone to understand:
- What you do
- Who you help
- What problem you solve
- What makes your approach different
- What working with you is like
- Why they should trust you
- What they should do next
Let Your Personality Show
This is particularly important for wellness businesses, purpose-driven brands, service providers, and businesses where the relationship with the customer matters. You don’t want your website to sound like it was written by a robot trying to hit a keyword target.
You have a backstory, something that makes you different from the rest. Something that makes you relatable and that makes the visitors feel seen. You get them! When your ideal client visits your website for the first time, they should feel that instant connection.
Additional trust is built when they see real photos of you, your team, your projects, your clients, etc instead of generic stock (or AI!) images. Sprinkle in client testimonials, credentials, and if relevant, a portfolio, and now your visitor has a full image of what it’s like to work with you.
A lot of times this means writing copy that sounds like an actual conversation! Writing like you talk might not be the most polished, but it’s the most real.
Make Your Website Easy to Navigate
If someone has to hunt around your website to figure out how to work with you, you’ve created unnecessary friction. Keep menus clean and logical. Add FAQs that are easy to find, including ones about pricing or your process.
Social proof should be front and center. It’s probably the biggest part of building trust. People are more likely to purchase when they see that their peers have already had success working with you.
Testimonials, case studies, reviews, results, client stories, credentials, and other forms of proof can help someone who has never worked with you feel more confident taking the next step.
Your website is part of your sales process. It isn’t reaching its full potential if it’s just sitting there as a digital business card. SEO helps bring qualified leads to your website, and a professionally written and designed website helps your ideal clients take that next step to work with you.
That’s why Well Optimized SEO offers more than “helping you rank higher”. We help you optimize your website not just for Google and AI, but for the humans who make the purchasing decisions.
AI Made SEO Irrelevant?
With all the conversation around AI search, this is a completely reasonable question. If people can ask ChatGPT or another AI tool a question and get an answer without clicking through to a website, is it still worth investing in SEO?
The answer is yes. SEO is still very relevant.
AI hasn’t eliminated the need for a strong website. If anything, it reinforces the importance of having a clear, useful, trustworthy online presence.
Search engines and AI systems need information they can understand. Your potential clients need information they can trust. And your business needs a digital foundation that isn’t dependent on the latest social media trend.
In fact, AI has made SEO even more important. AI models are trained at varying intervals, but they are then grounded in search. Meaning, AI models turn to search engines to surface answers. Sometimes, they use Bing or Google. Sometimes, they use their own search bots.
However, there’s no single search engine behind AI.
Each answer engine (ChatGPT, Claude, etc) pulls from its own mix of sources (Google, Bing, Brave, OAI-SearchBot). That can include what the model already knows (the training data), live web queries, licensed partner data, or its own crawler. So answer engine optimization means making sure a brand can be crawled, retrieved, cited, and described.
Technically sound websites that have already built a strong foundation with clear, helpful, and highly authoritative content will keep ranking.
What matters the most for websites now is:
- Clear and accessible website structure (both the rendered content and the HTML in the background – these should match!)
- Useful, trustworthy content
- Answering the questions that your client actually asks
- Clearly explaining services
- Building a reputable brand
Creating helpful, in-depth content that demonstrates your expertise can keep giving your website value long after you publish it.
It’s one of the biggest differences between your website and social media. A social post has about a 24-hour lifecycle before it disappears from your audience’s feeds altogether (if they even see it in the first place). Your website brings in traffic for years after your published content on it.
That doesn’t mean you should ignore social media. Social media can be an important part of your marketing strategy. But you don’t want your entire lead generation strategy to depend on constantly creating content just to stay visible in someone’s feed.
Your website is an evergreen asset you can build a strong foundation for today and keep building on for years to come.
A Better Way to Think about SEO
You don’t need to spend your evenings trying to decode Google’s latest update, and you don’t need to become an SEO expert just because you’re the founder of your business.
Instead, focus on building these foundations and hire experts to help.
1. Improve Your Site Health
Start with an SEO technical audit to make sure search engines can access your website and understand what’s there. In other words, make sure your site is able to be crawled and indexed.
2. Optimize for the Searches Your Ideal Customers Are Making
Use keyword research and search questions to clearly communicate what you do, who you serve, and the problems you solve.
3. Build a Website Humans Can Trust
Make your website easy to navigate, show your personality, use real proof, and create an experience that helps potential customers feel confident choosing you.
When these pieces work together, SEO becomes about much more than rankings. You’re creating a reliable path between the person who needs what you offer and the business that can help them.
Instead of constantly wondering where your next customer is coming from, you can have a website that’s working in the background to attract the right people.
Ready to Stop Guessing and Start Building a Website That Brings in the Right Leads?
You don’t have to figure out SEO, AEO, keywords, technical website issues, content, and conversion strategy all by yourself.
If you’re ready to understand what’s holding your website back—and what you should focus on next—let’s talk.
Book your free SEO consultation with Well Optimized SEO.
We’ll take a look at your current online presence, talk about your goals, and help you understand where the biggest opportunities are for attracting more qualified traffic and leads.
No more chasing every new marketing trend or spending your evenings trying to figure it out alone.
Get a clear, strategic path forward for a website that’s built to support the business you’re growing.