SEO for Online Course & Membership Sites

In this online workshop Brendan Tully will show you some simple SEO strategies and tactics he’s used on websites across nearly a dozen industries in the past 8-10 years. In many cases he has dramatically improved the quality and quantity of the (free) organic traffic those sites get with relatively a relatively minimal amount of work.

---

SEO Training for Online Course and Membership Site Owners

This training with SEO strategist Brendan Tully breaks down how search engine optimization actually works for course creators and membership site owners. Brendan covers owning your brand’s search results, building a keyword list around real buyer intent, rewriting meta descriptions to earn clicks instead of just rankings, tracking conversions instead of guessing, and using the Google Display Network as a cheap, hyper-targeted alternative to competing head-on for expensive search terms.

What You’ll Learn

• Why brand-name search results are the most valuable and most neglected part of most course creators’ SEO
• How to build a keyword list around brand terms, product terms, and the questions customers ask before buying
• Why click-through rate matters as much as ranking position, and how to rewrite a meta description like paid ad copy
• Which tools to use for rank tracking, conversion tracking, and finding out what’s already working in Search Console
• How to use the Google Display Network to reach buyers on the exact pages where they’re already comparing options

Key Takeaways

• Search your own brand name periodically and claim a Google Maps listing, since brand search is the highest-converting traffic most businesses ignore
• Build or repurpose a page for every search term you actually want to rank for; a term with no matching page can’t rank
• Set a sitewide meta description and Open Graph image template in Yoast so every page gets a baseline instead of nothing
• Put a review funnel on autopilot so a steady stream of good reviews outweighs the bad one that eventually shows up
• Track conversions end to end, not just traffic volume, since quality traffic beats quantity every time

Frequently Asked Questions

Full Webinar Transcript

How Brendan Tully Grew an Online Store From $100K to $6.5 Million With SEO

Chris Badgett: Welcome back to another LifterLMS training with Brendan Tully. Today we’re talking about SEO for course creators and training-based membership sites. Yesterday Brendan talked about site speed, and I got a lot of feedback about how much people loved that one, so I’m excited to see where we go today.

I first came across Brendan through his course over at Pareto Ecommerce. I started implementing it right away on the LifterLMS site, which is actually more of a WooCommerce site than a course site, and I started getting results right away. What I loved most about the training was how actionable it was. Right from the start there were quick wins, things I could tweak in the Yoast SEO plugin, basics I had been overlooking for years. I guarantee this training is going to have a lot of low-hanging fruit that isn’t too crazy or time-intensive to implement.

Brendan Tully: Thanks, it’s good to be here. The topic is SEO for online courses and membership sites, but broadly this is going to be applicable regardless of what type of site you’re running, so let’s get into it.

Some background on me. I started in business in the early 2000s. I owned a mid-size IT company, so I have a very technical background, but we also had an online store as part of that business. We acquired it doing $100K in turnover, and within two years we grew it to a million dollars in revenue, then six and a half million the year after that, around 2008. We grew that through SEO, though I didn’t really know that’s what it was called at the time. I just knew that if I changed things on the website, rankings moved up and down. We also grew through forum marketing, since there was no real Facebook yet.

Around that time I started a local search agency selling SEO services. That’s branched out now, and today our agency actively manages somewhere around 200 to 250 client sites, primarily local businesses in Australia. Working with very small or constricted budgets, needing to generate results quickly, is where a lot of these tactics come from. We built them out of the constraint of not having a lot of time or money to spend, but still needing results.

The Two Goals of This SEO Training for Course Creators

Brendan Tully: We have two goals for this session. One is to show you a new way of looking at SEO, how it actually works today versus the traditional approach, so you can come up with your own tactics and strategy built on the fundamentals rather than copying someone else’s playbook. The other is to hand you tactics that work for DIY, nothing spammy or black hat, and at least one or two of them should move the needle for you.

Don’t feel overwhelmed. Some of this, especially the bigger your site, could easily be a six or twelve month project. SEO is a long-term play, so you don’t need to get all of it done this week.

The Three-Layer Framework for Thinking About SEO

Brendan Tully: We think about SEO through three lenses. The outer layer is principles, the fundamentals and foundational components, effectively the rules of the game. Those don’t really change over time, and that’s really where the power is. I prefer to teach the fundamentals in training like this, because that lets you come up with your own strategy and tactics, and the tactics are going to change over time even as the fundamentals hold.

In the middle, we think of SEO less as a forever, ongoing process and more as a campaign. A three or six month SEO campaign with specific goals, a business strategy tied to those goals, and specific tactics to get there. When we work with clients, we talk through their business goals, propose a strategy, define the work, run it for three or six months, review the results, and reassess from there. It’s a lot more powerful than just piling random tactics onto your to-do list.

Why Paid Traffic Is Getting More Expensive While SEO Gets More Powerful

Brendan Tully: Here’s where we’re at with traffic and search today. Paid traffic is getting more expensive from both Google and Facebook, and attention generally is getting more expensive and more fragmented. At the same time, Google is actually getting better at weeding out garbage. Classic SEO used to be about finding gaps in the algorithm and exploiting them. Google’s done a pretty good job closing those gaps and rewarding real businesses doing SEO the right way.

The game is shifting toward value and engagement, and toward matching search intent, working out what someone actually means by a search term and serving the result that best fits it. If you’re running a legitimate, long-term business, that shift favors you over short-term black-hat tactics.

On top of that, consumers are getting more tech savvy and spend is moving online. Most people on a webinar like this are already comfortable buying and learning online, but the mainstream market still has a long way to go, which means the total addressable market and overall search volume are both still growing. Put it together: paid traffic is getting more expensive, dodgy SEO is working less well, and the market for organic search is growing. If you have a long-term focus in your business, an SEO strategy is going to win over time.

Why Backlinks Alone No Longer Define SEO Success

Brendan Tully: The traditional SEO approach was keyword research, backlinks, and on-page SEO, usually weighted heavily toward links. Today SEO is much more holistic, and backlinks have really become backlinks plus online activity plus brand: reviews, social shares, and general activity and conversation about your brand and products online.

Conversion and sales have also become part of SEO, and it’s a feedback loop. User engagement feeds back into how Google evaluates your content, since Google wants to serve results that are genuinely good for the visitor. It’s probably not a strict one-to-one relationship where more engagement always means higher rankings, but it does feed back into rankings and traffic over time.

How Keyword Intent and On-Page SEO Fit Into the New SEO Model

Brendan Tully: Keywords have turned into keywords and their intent, tied to the content, products, and funnels on your site. I know “funnel” has become an overused buzzword, but a funnel is really just a systemized way of walking a visitor through the process of buying your product and getting value from it.

On-page SEO is still about the technology and the systems you use, but there’s also a layer of general SEO best practices that apply regardless of your business: ranking number one for your own brand name, getting reviews online, and having a solid Google Maps listing. Everything I’m going to walk through today ties back to this model. Used consistently, it builds a moat around the business and earns long-term organic traffic. SEO isn’t free, it costs time, effort, and energy, but this is the model that gets a long-term return on that investment.

Why Owning the Search Results for Your Brand Name Matters Most

Brendan Tully: Let’s get into the action steps. The first is owning the search results for your own brand’s search terms: your business name, your product names, anything tied to your brand. These are generally the most powerful and highest-converting search terms you have, and they’re almost universally ignored. Business owners don’t Google their own business name or check what their product-name searches actually look like.

That means we regularly get a new client, Google their name, and find a single bad review from some obscure site sitting on page one, looking terrible, simply because they never built a review strategy and there was nothing else there to outweigh it.

How Affiliates and Competitors Can Hijack Your Brand Search Results

Brendan Tully: Owning the SERP for your brand also protects you against brand-jacking by competitors and affiliates claiming the search results for your own business name. Google cares a lot about brand and brand mentions, so it’s worth paying attention to what that search actually looks like. One more thing to watch: competitors sometimes run AdWords against your brand name directly. That’s less common in the course space and more common in local SEO, where a click is very close to a sale.

Let me show you a live example. If we search “LifterLMS,” you can see a couple of affiliate results showing up in the search results. They’re below the number one spot, which is good, but this is exactly the dynamic to watch, especially if you rely on affiliates heavily for your course program. Affiliate brand-jacking is its own business model in the affiliate marketing world. These particular results could likely be pushed down with better targeting or more content aimed directly at LifterLMS’s own brand searches.

Chris Badgett: Since you’re putting me on the spot, let me ask you a question. How come some of my most popular videos aren’t showing up there?

Brendan Tully: That’s an interesting one. Yesterday when I searched, one of your own videos showed up. Today it’s all WP Crafters, which could be a couple of things. They might be targeting your search terms directly and you might not have a video specifically targeting your own brand term. It could also be something in the YouTube channel settings, keywords that aren’t filled in, or the channel not being linked to the site properly. Or it could simply be that you don’t have a YouTube video targeting your brand term embedded on an important page, like the homepage. I noticed you’re using Wistia there instead of embedding YouTube, so there’s just not much pushing traffic and signal back to the YouTube channel itself.

A Side-by-Side Example of Who Really Owns a Brand Search

Brendan Tully: For comparison, here’s an example from someone who came in through the Facebook comments, an “Italian massage” search. If you look at his brand search, it’s a completely different picture. He owns his own video result, he’s got a Wikipedia entry, essentially everything on page one is him.

Chris Badgett: Is it actually bad for your affiliates to be on page one alongside you?

Brendan Tully: It really depends on your business and how much it actually impacts you. For some businesses, owning the SERP completely is critical. For others it’s not that big a deal. But broadly, it’s worth being aware of, because your brand name is going to be one of your most-searched and highest-converting terms. At minimum, search your own business name now and again and make sure there isn’t a negative result sitting there.

Chris Badgett: Just to throw this in, one of our keyword phrases is “WordPress LMS,” which is more of a category term than our actual brand name.

Brendan Tully: Right, and that’s a different exercise. Every business is different, and there’s always more you could do than you have time or resources for, so not everything gets equal priority. Some of these things matter a lot for one business and barely at all for another. Broadly, just be aware of it, and keep an eye on your own brand search now and then.

How to Use a Free Tool to Map Search Terms Related to Your Brand

Chris Badgett: What’s that tool you have open on the right side of your screen?

Brendan Tully: That’s a keyword tool called Keywords Everywhere. It surfaces related search terms based on whatever you’ve searched. It’s a genuinely good, free SEO tool. For LifterLMS, it’s showing related searches like people looking for a demo, “LifterLMS versus LearnDash,” “LearnDash reviews,” and questions about the API. It gives you a broad sense of the topically related search terms people are actually typing in around your brand.

How to Claim a Google Maps Listing to Dominate Brand Search

Brendan Tully: A simple, powerful way to own your brand’s search results is claiming your Maps listings and looking as close to a real business as possible, even if an online course isn’t a bricks-and-mortar business. It can still have a physical address and a phone number tied to it.

Once your brand gets enough search volume, the Maps listing starts to appear and it dominates the SERP for those brand searches. Pair that with a review funnel and it becomes really powerful. On our Didgeridoo Dojo business, our Facebook page shows 380 reviews and our Maps listing shows 30. That’s a fairly simple, one-and-done setup that doesn’t need ongoing resources once it’s in place. Do this on Google, Apple Maps, and Bing Maps. All three also function as strong backlinks in their own right.

How to Build a Review Funnel That Collects Reviews on Autopilot

Brendan Tully: A review funnel is basically an automated way to collect reviews. In our online store, fourteen days after someone buys, they get an email asking if the product arrived and what they thought, with an invitation to hit reply, and then a request to leave a review with a direct link.

For a course or membership site, checking in around the ten to fourteen day mark, asking how it’s going and whether they’ve learned anything or gotten stuck, does double duty. You get feedback you can use to improve the course, and you get a natural opening to ask for a review. You can wait for someone to give positive feedback before asking for the review, or just ask directly in one email if you’re running at a bigger scale.

The key is having some automated version of this running on autopilot, because you’re guaranteed to eventually get a bad review from someone who wasn’t happy about something. The best insulation against that is a steady stream of good reviews already coming in.

How to Claim and Link Every Social Property for Free Backlinks

Brendan Tully: Another way to own your brand’s search results is claiming all your key social properties and setting them up properly, with real banner images, logos, and blurbs. Link them together, or run everything through a single publishing tool like HootSuite so one post pushes everywhere. Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, SoundCloud if you’re doing audio, whatever’s relevant to your market. These are easy wins for filling out your brand’s search presence, and each property is also a genuinely powerful, free backlink that helps push the whole site up in search results.

Why You Need a Matching Page for Every Search Term You Want to Rank For

Brendan Tully: Let’s move to keywords. We call this keyword-content matching, and it’s a simple rule that gets missed constantly: for every search term you want to rank for, you need a matching piece of content on the site. You can’t rank for something you haven’t written a page about.

The flip side matters just as much. You can only have one piece of content targeting a given search term. Multiple pages competing for the same term causes keyword cannibalization, which confuses Google about which page is actually the most relevant, so neither one ranks well. And your homepage generally doesn’t count as that dedicated page, so it needs its own separate strategy for whatever terms it’s meant to target.

Where Your Keywords Sit in the Buyer’s Journey

Brendan Tully: That raises the real question: what terms are you actually targeting? Do you have a spreadsheet listing them, and a strategy behind it? It also matters where those terms sit in the classic marketing funnel: attention, interest, desire, action. Someone at the bottom of the funnel is one or two steps from buying. Someone at the top might not even know they have a problem yet. Those searches carry very different intent, and the content needs to match that intent and nurture people along rather than expecting an instant sale from a top-of-funnel visitor.

How to Start a Keyword List With Brand and Product Search Terms

Brendan Tully: Start your keyword list with your brand name terms, since they’re the easiest to rank for and the highest value, and then your product name terms if your products have their own names separate from your brand. In LifterLMS’s case, people are searching for “LifterLMS API,” which tells you those are people who already have the product or are close to buying, and want to know what the API can do.

Google Search Console is probably the best free source for building this list, since it shows you what’s already happening in the search results. Beyond that, get clear on exactly what products and services you sell, and check whether each one has its own dedicated page. If there’s no page, there’s no way to rank for it, and adding one is a straightforward way to start picking up new traffic.

How to Find the Problems Your Product Solves and Rank for Them

Brendan Tully: Get equally clear on the problems your products and services actually solve, and build content around those problems directly. For example, our WP Speed Fix business deals in WordPress performance, so we wrote a blog article on how to fix a slow WordPress site, and we rank number one in the world for that exact problem. It’s a simple idea, but people often have this list in their head rather than written down anywhere, with no real strategy behind ranking for it.

How to Turn Customer Support Questions Into SEO Content

Brendan Tully: One commonly missed source is the questions customers need answered before they’ll buy, especially for a more expensive or complex product. Look at what customers are actually asking, live chat logs are a great source for this, shipping questions, payment methods, guarantees, how much time a course takes. Content that answers those questions directly captures search traffic for people actively looking for those answers, and it has a nice side effect of reducing the load on your support team, since customers can find the answer themselves.

Which Tools Reveal What People Are Actually Searching For

Brendan Tully: For building out that keyword list, we lean on a handful of tools. Google Search Console first, it’s free and full of real search data. Google AdWords if you’ve run search campaigns before, since there’s usually a lot of keyword data sitting in there. Keywords Everywhere, which we already looked at. And Ahrefs, which is a very powerful tool for competitor and keyword research.

If you want something more advanced, there’s a detailed blog article from an agency called From The Future that digs into combining Search Console, Ahrefs, and AdWords data at a much more enterprise level. We’ll have that link at the end. Broadly, the point is having a spreadsheet tracking your target keywords, being clear on what content matches each one, and creating content for anything on that list that doesn’t have a page yet.

How Didgeridoo Dojo Turned Gated Lessons Into an SEO Asset

Brendan Tully: Here’s an easy way to leverage content you already have: repurpose paid content. We discovered this by accident on Didgeridoo Dojo, a membership site teaching people to play the didgeridoo. We built the sales site and the membership site as one combined site years ago. If we were building it again, we’d split them into two separate sites, but reworking that now would be a massive project since there are around 200 lessons.

The accidental discovery came from a problem: the membership software we were using threw a plain “you can’t access this content, you’re not logged in” error message for any locked lesson, which was quietly hurting our SEO. Instead of leaving that error message in place, we created short preview versions of each locked lesson, a quick demonstration of the technique plus details on how to sign up.

Why Preview Pages for Locked Content Now Drive Thousands of Visits

Brendan Tully: That fix scaled into roughly 180 to 190 pages, each built around the preview content we’d already created for a specific technique. Because there’s now a real page matching each of these specific, often obscure technique names, and long-tail didgeridoo search terms have a lot of variety, that change alone now brings in thousands of visits a month that the old error-message pages could never have earned.

Why Giving Away Half a Lesson for Free Can Multiply Search Traffic

Brendan Tully: We also give away the first half of certain lessons entirely for free. Circular breathing is a good example, a technique you need to be able to play the didgeridoo at all, and there’s a huge volume of searches around it. We didn’t want to give the whole lesson away, so we released the first half. That let us rank for the search term, earn a lot of links, and pick up hundreds of thousands of plays on YouTube, while people still need to sign up to get the full value of the second half. It’s the same underlying rule: you need a piece of content to rank for a term, and repurposing what you’ve already paid to produce is a genuinely easy way to do it.

Why an Old All-in-One Membership Site Becomes a Liability Over Time

Chris Badgett: Why did you say that if you were building Didgeridoo Dojo again, you’d split the marketing site and the membership site apart? I see people go both ways on that.

Brendan Tully: A couple of reasons. We built the site in 2010 or 2011 on a really old theme that wasn’t mobile compatible at all, so we had to pay for custom development just to make it work on a phone. That constraint has followed us ever since and limited what we can do from a modern marketing standpoint.

The video quality is also dated, since it was shot eight years ago and we’re slowly reshooting. And the membership software itself, not LifterLMS, isn’t great. The site actually got hacked a few months back because we’d stopped updating that plugin, since every update kept breaking something. Having everything rolled into one site means we can’t upgrade the marketing side to a better theme without touching the course delivery side, and with 180 to 200 lessons, changing that structure now would be a three to six month project. We know we need to rebuild it eventually, we’re just prioritizing reshooting the videos first.

Chris Badgett: That’s a good point. You’re rarely trying to improve the marketing and the teaching experience at the same time. Those tend to be two completely separate projects that don’t always play well together.

Brendan Tully: Exactly. They’re two different purposes and two different audiences hitting the site, and rolling them into one makes everything more complicated and harder to untangle.

How LifterLMS and WP Fusion Support Either a Combined or Split Site Structure

Chris Badgett: To answer a couple of questions coming in, with LifterLMS you can run everything on one site, or you can run a separate marketing site and either sell directly from there or run a full marketing funnel that links into the LifterLMS checkout as the final step. LifterLMS is flexible either way, and where you hand off from one to the other depends on your goals. There’s also a tool called WP Fusion, where as long as you’re getting a tag applied inside a CRM, WP Fusion can enroll that person into a course or membership on your LifterLMS site from anywhere on the internet. Whatever funnel structure you want to build is possible.

Why Click-Through Rate Matters as Much as Search Ranking

Brendan Tully: Let’s talk about click-through rate optimization, something I’m genuinely fanatical about that gets almost no attention outside the AdWords world. In AdWords, even simple changes like swapping the top and bottom lines of a search ad can double the click-through rate with the exact same ad copy. Nobody talks about this in SEO, where there’s an assumption that ranking number one means you automatically get all the traffic. You don’t. You need the ranking and the click, the same way going viral on social still requires people to actually click through.

It’s getting harder too, since the number one organic spot today often sits below four ads, a Maps listing, or a knowledge panel. Number one today isn’t the same as number one five years ago. We think click-through rate is an important, and probably algorithmic, part of getting organic traffic, since listings that earn more clicks over time tend to climb.

A Before-and-After Example of Rewriting a Meta Description to Sell

Brendan Tully: Here’s an example. This is a product page for a vitamin D3 supplement that had no custom meta description set at all, so Google just pulled generic text from the page. It tells you what vitamin D is, which doesn’t help someone who’s already searching for the product and already knows what it is. It doesn’t match their intent, so it’s not likely to earn many clicks.

Rewritten with click-through rate in mind, it becomes something like: “Premium High Potency Vitamin D3 with Cold Pressed Organic Coconut Oil for Rapid Absorption. Buy online with fast, insured worldwide shipping.” That’s a lot more like something you’d actually write for an AdWords ad, and a lot more likely to earn the click.

Why You Should Write Every Meta Description Like You’re Paying for the Click

Brendan Tully: A lot of people treat meta descriptions as an afterthought, and some in the SEO world will tell you they don’t matter because they don’t directly affect rankings. That’s true, they don’t affect which terms you rank for, but they do affect click-through rate, and click-through rate matters. Spend real time on this, especially on your homepage and your top five to ten highest-traffic pages, since that’s where the leverage is biggest. Think about it as a piece of sales copy, exactly the way you would if you were paying for every click.

Chris Badgett: That’s one of the things I picked up from your course. I went and found all my top pages and realized I actually needed to spend time on this.

Brendan Tully: And adding a phone number into the title tag or meta description, more of a local SEO trick, can also build trust even when people don’t actually call. There’s probably not a huge number of course creators for whom that specific tactic applies, but anything that adds value or stands out for the visitor helps click-through rate.

The Simple Rules for Writing a Meta Description That Earns the Click

Brendan Tully: Here’s the LifterLMS homepage search result, rewritten with these rules in mind. Look at what competitors are doing, one thing we do for clients is deliberately outsell their copy. If you’re sitting in position two or three with better copy than the number one result, you’ll often get as many clicks or more, since consumers are smart enough to read past the top listing.

Capitalize the start of important words, which we know from AdWords data makes a real difference. Use all caps sparingly for genuine power words, since it stands out and it’s something you can’t even do inside AdWords itself. And match the actual intent behind the search term. For LifterLMS, the homepage is targeting “best LMS plugin,” so it should lean into that directly, along with a clear call to action like the demo.

Chris Badgett: So you’re saying write it like you’re actually paying for it.

Brendan Tully: Exactly, and spend some time playing with it. Pull language from your own homepage headlines and callouts, or from customer reviews if you’re not sure what resonates. At the end of the day it’s sales copy. This isn’t a huge amount of work, twenty minutes to half an hour per page, and in some cases it can double or triple traffic without needing a single new link. If you’ve got a big site, start with your top ten or twenty pages and see what happens before moving further down the list.

How to Set a Meta Description Template Across an Entire Site in Yoast

Brendan Tully: For anyone newer to this, the meta description is a setting inside the Yoast SEO plugin, either per-page or as a sitewide template. If you set a custom meta description on a specific page, that one shows. If you haven’t, Yoast falls back to whatever template you’ve set. On a large site with fifty, a hundred, or several hundred pages, spending half an hour writing one strong template line means every page without a custom description still benefits, instead of showing nothing useful at all. We have a short video linked at the end walking through exactly where to set this inside Yoast.

How to Preview and Fix How Your Pages Look When Shared on Facebook

Brendan Tully: The other important surface is what your page looks like when it’s shared on Facebook. There’s a Facebook debugging tool that shows exactly what a page looks like when shared. LifterLMS has a custom Open Graph image set for the homepage, so it looks clear and clean when shared, effectively a Facebook ad in its own right.

Some other examples aren’t as strong. One site has a custom image set, but it doesn’t clearly communicate what the site is actually about. Another has no Open Graph settings at all, so whatever tool is trying to pull an image, Facebook, Slack, Messenger, iMessage, simply can’t find one, and the shared link looks broken. That site has 176 likes, which isn’t huge, but it means nothing meaningful appears whenever it does get shared, which is a missed opportunity, especially for anyone running Facebook ads.

How to Template Open Graph Images and Prioritize Your Highest-Traffic Pages

Brendan Tully: The fix here is the same pattern as the meta description: set a default Open Graph image for the homepage, then template that same image across the whole site so every page benefits automatically, with any page-specific image overriding it when you set one. It’s a simple, one-time step with long-term leverage, since it’s just about increasing click-through rate on traffic you’re already generating.

Beyond that default, treat any high-impact page, a sales page, a launch, a promo, as its own priority for a custom Open Graph image, since it’s effectively a Facebook ad you’ve already earned the audience for. You can also set custom Facebook share text separately from the meta description, and Facebook’s fields run a bit longer than a typical search snippet, so there’s room to say more if you’re doing a lot of social promotion around that page.

Why You Have to Track Rankings Instead of Guessing at Them

Brendan Tully: Let’s talk tracking and analytics, because what gets measured gets managed. If you actually want more organic traffic, occasional manual searches to check where you rank aren’t good enough. We use SERPFox for rank tracking because it’s lightweight and easy to read the trend, but any solid rank tracker works. We always track brand-term rankings specifically for clients, since movement there is often the earliest warning sign that something’s going wrong.

We’re also big on conversion tracking. Getting the quantity of traffic is only half the job. You don’t actually know if that traffic is quality traffic unless you’re tracking what happens on the other end, and quality traffic beats quantity every time.

The Real Difference Between Google Analytics and Google Search Console

Chris Badgett: For anyone newer to this, how would you describe the difference between Google Analytics and Google Search Console?

Brendan Tully: Analytics is what’s happening on your website. Search Console is what’s happening in the search results. They’re genuinely different data sets, and you can’t cross them the way you used to. Google turned off keyword data inside Analytics years ago, but that keyword data is still available inside Search Console, in a slightly different, slightly less precise format, and it’s still very powerful. There’s often a lot of low-hanging fruit in there, so if you haven’t looked at your Search Console data recently, that’s a good place to start.

The Tool Stack Brendan’s Agency Uses to Track Chat, CRM, and Reviews

Brendan Tully: For conversion tracking end to end, here’s roughly what we use. Call Rails for call tracking, less relevant for most course businesses. Drift for live chat, wired into Google Analytics through events so we can see when someone starts a chat. Google Search Console for keyword data, and Google recently relaunched it in a much more user-friendly version, and it’s free, so it’s the right price.

Conversion and ecommerce tracking inside Google Analytics for seeing exactly where sales come from. A CRM tied into that whole path, we mostly use ActiveCampaign, which matters especially if you have a longer sales cycle, since it lets you actually see the journey a customer takes. Review-monitoring tools watching Facebook and Google Maps and general brand mentions across the web, we use mention.net for that. Lucky Orange for heat maps and real session recordings, genuinely cheap, ten or twenty dollars a month, and it will literally show you video of real visitor sessions, mouse movements and all. And Agency Analytics for rolling everything up into management-level dashboards without logging into twenty different tools.

The point of all of it is that it’s not just about traffic volume or where you rank. At the end of the day this is commercial first, we want to sell more of our products and services, so tracking both traffic and conversion end to end is essential.

Why Real-Time Backups Matter More for a Live Course or Membership Site

Brendan Tully: Moving to on-page and technical basics, quickly, since we covered some of this yesterday. Good, fast hosting matters. Uptime monitoring matters, since customers get unhappy fast when a site’s down. And backups matter more than people think, because SEO isn’t free. Even attending this webinar is time and effort. If you’re optimizing pages, adding content, and tweaking meta descriptions without backing any of it up, and something happens, a hack, a host issue, a server failure, you lose that work and potentially the rankings that came with it.

We use BlogVault because it does real-time backups. For a course or membership site where orders and comments are happening all day, whether through WooCommerce or the LifterLMS checkout, a single daily backup usually isn’t good enough.

Why Protecting Your Domain Name Is Cheap Insurance for the Whole Business

Brendan Tully: Another thing that rarely gets attention: protecting your domain name. Your entire business sits on top of a domain that costs ten or twenty dollars a year, and it’s treated as a total throwaway cost. People spend thousands of dollars a day on Facebook ads resting on top of a ten dollar domain nobody’s keeping up to date.

Keep your contact details current, register as far into the future as you can, a .com can be registered up to ten years out for around a hundred dollars, and turn on two-factor authentication with your registrar. Your entire business and every search ranking you’ve earned is tied to that domain. We see domains expire far too often, and it’s a genuinely painful thing to watch happen to someone.

Why On-Page Content Still Has to Serve the Customer First

Brendan Tully: Keyword-content matching is important, and so is making sure pages are technically well optimized: proper H1 tags, alt tags on images, keyword-rich image file names. But I see this mistake a lot, pages stuffed with keywords or content that exists just to exist, instead of content that actually speaks to the visitor’s intent and helps them. It’s commercial first, but that always runs through actually helping the customer and earning the conversion. We run every site through SEMrush as a general on-page SEO checklist, it’s a good way to catch anything obviously broken and get a list of things worth fixing.

How to Build a Repeatable SEO Checklist for Every New Piece of Content

Brendan Tully: If you have repeatable tasks, and most course creators are publishing content regularly, you need a documented process for it. A lot of the time it’s a VA or a team member publishing that content, and things like the meta description and Open Graph tags quietly never get filled in. We use Process Street, since it pairs a checklist with an explanation of the process in one place, so there’s no ambiguity about whether a step got done. We’ve built a template that just makes sure the SEO basics get checked every time a new blog post or page goes live, and there’s a link at the end with short explainer videos for each step.

Simple Sustainable Ways to Build Backlinks Without Anything Shady

Brendan Tully: Backlinks are still important, and there are a lot of simple ways to earn them. Maps listings and linked, syndicated social properties, video and audio published across YouTube, Dailymotion, Instagram, and SoundCloud, all count. Citations, essentially directory listings, are a local SEO technique that’s an easy way to pick up more links while signaling to Google that you’re a real business.

Getting on podcasts, or starting your own, has worked really well for us and for clients, since podcast content gets shared and linked in ways other content rarely does. And leveraging affiliates, particularly for a course business, pairs naturally with a podcast strategy. None of this is shady or black hat. It’s a sustainable approach that genuinely supports the business long term.

Why the Google Display Network Is a Hybrid SEO and Paid Traffic Tactic

Brendan Tully: I’ve got one more advanced technique. If you’ve been actively doing SEO for a while, you’ve probably already checked a lot of these boxes, so let’s talk about the Google Display Network for a minute. It’s the network behind every AdSense ad you see across the web, and it has really powerful, really cheap targeting.

Here are some real results. One ecommerce-style campaign spent $4,000 in ads and generated $24,500 in sales, a 6.3x return. A second spent $2,000 and generated $16,000, a 7.5x return. A third, an info product, spent $4,700 across 18 million impressions and got 569 conversions, at roughly twelve cents a click. Dirt cheap, and most people chasing Facebook ads have never touched it.

How to Target Ads on the Exact Page Where Your Buyers Are Already Searching

Brendan Tully: Here’s the hybrid part. Rather than fighting to rank for a hard, expensive term like “best LMS,” you can target the Display Network ad blocks already running on the pages that rank for it. If you search that term, you’ll see roundup pages like “Top 20 LMS Software of 2018,” and half of them are running AdSense ads, since these media sites make their money from ads and affiliates.

Chris Badgett: That makes sense. I’m guessing a big site like PCMag is pretty notorious for advertising too.

Brendan Tully: Exactly, that block at the top there is a Display Network ad. Rather than spending a lot of SEO effort trying to outrank a huge site like that directly, you can just target that specific page and run an ad there instead. Someone reading that page is already actively shopping for an LMS. You’re not doing any of the work to rank for that term yourself, but you’re still capturing that search-driven intent, often for well under a dollar a click.

Why GDN Targeting Reaches Far Beyond Roundup Pages and Comparison Sites

Brendan Tully: Display Network targeting goes a lot further than roundup pages. We target a didgeridoo-specific subreddit directly for our didgeridoo lessons, and almost any niche topic has a relevant subreddit you can target the same way. You can also target broad-match search terms directly and see which pages come up in the results, target specific YouTube channels or videos, not necessarily as video ads but as banner placements, and target relevant forums the same way we did with didgeridoo forums, for just a few dollars a month with a strong return. The common thread is that the traffic is dirt cheap and the targeting is far more precise than most people realize.

How to Use Impression Capping and Exclude Existing Customers From Display Ads

Brendan Tully: A couple of important settings if you go this route. Use impression capping, something Facebook doesn’t offer but the Display Network does, so an ad only shows a given visitor five or ten times before backing off, instead of following them around for weeks the way a poorly configured retargeting campaign does. And use negative remarketing lists to exclude existing customers and current email subscribers, so you’re not wasting budget re-targeting people who’ve already bought. Match the offer to where the visitor actually sits in the funnel, since someone still in an information-gathering stage isn’t ready to convert yet. It all comes back to the same marketing fundamentals.

Why Even a Location-Independent Business Should Claim a Google Maps Listing

Chris Badgett: Let me ask a follow-up on Maps listings. A lot of course creators are solo entrepreneurs working from home. I’ll sometimes get a mailbox from a local mail service, which I need anyway to open a business bank account, and register the business there. Even if my course serves the entire world, are you saying it’s still worth doing that? I have a course on organic farming and permaculture, and if you look it up, it shows a registered address in Whitefish, Montana. Is that a good thing?

Brendan Tully: You don’t have to live in Montana to teach people about organic farming. This is really about controlling the search results. From an SEO standpoint, more links are almost always better, and a Maps listing is a genuinely powerful one. It gives you a lot more control over the search result, since half of it can effectively become your Maps panel, and it’s a strong place to collect reviews.

Take our didgeridoo retail site as an example. It’s the online store side of the didgeridoo business, separate from the membership site. The listing doesn’t show a street address at all, just that it services all of Australia, and that’s not a big deal. Even for our own WP Speed Fix business, we only set up that listing a couple of months ago, and there are plenty of legitimate exceptions to having a full physical address.

What a Weak Google Maps Listing Looks Like Next to a Competitor’s

Brendan Tully: The WP Speed Fix listing is a good example of the flip side. We haven’t pushed any reviews to it yet, and because the business is only a year old as a standalone brand, we’ve got a few competitors showing up in that same search. One competitor in particular really stands out because their listing already has visible review stars, and ours doesn’t yet. It’s a good illustration of why the review-funnel piece matters so much: the Maps listing alone gives you a strong distraction from other competitors crowding that brand search, but it only works fully once the reviews are actually flowing in behind it.

Why a Clean XML Sitemap Matters More Than Just Having One

Attendee question, promoted from live Q&A: What’s the most important thing to remember about getting Google to index your XML sitemap?

Brendan Tully: Honestly, the sitemap itself doesn’t carry the importance it used to. It tells Google what pages exist on the site, but the real risk is sending Google conflicting signals. That means making sure any page you don’t want indexed, like a cart or checkout page on WooCommerce, actually carries a no-index tag, and that the sitemap reflects that by not listing it. If you no-index a page in Yoast, it disappears from the sitemap automatically.

Google is powerful in some ways and genuinely dumb in others. If a client sends it a conflicting signal, like a page appearing in the sitemap with a no-index tag still active, or two pages competing for the same search term, Google doesn’t reliably guess the right answer. It might rank the wrong page, rank neither, or just get confused. It’s still software running on a set of rules, so the priority is making sure the signals you’re sending are consistent, not just making sure the sitemap gets indexed in Search Console.

How to Remove a Page From Google’s Index for Good

Brendan Tully: If you want a specific page out of the index, set it to no-index. In Yoast that’s a setting on the page itself, something like whether you want this page to appear in search results, defaulted to yes, that you switch to no. That adds the no-index tag, and the next time the indexer crawls the page, it’ll eventually drop out, though it can take several weeks.

Attendee follow-up, live: That’s really helpful. As someone new to this, a few pages went up that we didn’t want indexed. Once I saw them, I unchecked the index box. Does that mean the next crawl will just pull those down?

Brendan Tully: It will, but it can take some time, sometimes a few passes of the crawler. Once the no-index tag is set, going into Search Console and using the fetch tool, then submitting that URL to the index, will speed the process along, especially on a newer site. There’s also a separate tool in there to directly request a URL’s removal, but I’m always a little cautious about that one, since you don’t always know exactly what’s happening on Google’s end when you use it. If you’re not in a huge rush, fetching and resubmitting to the index is the safer path. It might take two to four weeks, sometimes six, before the page actually disappears.

The specific pages in that case were an intake form and a records-release form tied to a court-referred class business, both accidentally indexed when the site first went live, exactly the kind of accidental exposure this process is meant to catch.

What You Can Learn From Watching Real Visitor Session Recordings

Chris Badgett: What’s something you’ve actually learned from a heat map that led to a real change?

Brendan Tully: A simple one is finding images that get a lot of clicks but aren’t actually linked to anything. That usually means people want to click through and learn more about whatever’s in that image, and it’s a quick fix once you see it. Menu items are another one, items that get almost no clicks, or items that get clicked constantly, both are signals worth reordering the menu around.

Beyond the heat map itself, I like just sitting down for twenty or thirty minutes and watching a batch of real user session recordings in Lucky Orange. It’s more art than science, watching mouse movements and clicks over someone’s shoulder, admittedly a little creepy the first time you see it, but you’ll usually notice a pattern. You can segment by traffic source, watch a batch of visitors who came from a specific search term, and see them visibly hunting for something, like the order button or payment information, that felt obvious to you but clearly wasn’t to them. Heat maps give you the hard facts of where people click. Session recordings give you the softer, more subjective read on what they were actually trying to do.