4 Important Details to Include on Your Health Coaching Website

4 (Easily Forgotten) Things You Need on Your Health Coaching Website // Four Wellness Co. for health coaches: business tips and resources for health coaches and wellness entrepreneurs // how to start a health coaching business and become an online h…

Melissa, integrative nutrition health coach and founder, Four Wellness Co. // Four Wellness Co. for health coaches: business tips and resources for health and wellness coaches, fitness instructors, personal trainers and other wellness professionals

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With the wide range of businesses run by health coaches (or any wellness professional), it’s not quite possible to suggest one specific formula that every health coaching or wellness website needs to follow to be successful.

Like health coaching itself, there’s simply no one-size-fits-all strategy that works best for every health coach, every health coaching business model, and all of our different needs.

But, that said, there are some basic underlying principles of web design that do apply to pretty much everyone—health coaches, nutritionists, personal trainers, yoga instructors, vegan food bloggers, and everyone in between.

These are things that, regardless of your specific wellness niche, help your website stay professional (and legal!), connect with the right audience, and grow your business and brand.

Unfortunately, these things also frequently get left off of websites, particularly for new health coaches, who may not be aware that they’re needed.

4 must-haves for your health coaching website

Here are four simple (but easily overlooked) things to be sure you have on your health coaching website:

1. Custom favicon

What’s a favicon?

It’s the little icon that appears in your browser, specific to your website.

Here are the favicons for Google, Facebook and Four Wellness Co.:

Favicons also show up in your browser’s bookmarks bar, browsing history and other places across the web (and Google now displays them in mobile search results too!).

Customizing your website’s favicon adds to the professionalism and branding of your health coaching website, as well as helps visitors recognize it in a list of bookmarked pages or a window of many open tabs.

To customize your favicon, you’ll need to create a 32x32 pixel image (Canva is a great free design tool for this) and upload it to your website’s favicon settings.

In Squarespace (my very favorite website platform for health coaches), this is found under Design > Logo & Title > Browser Icon (Favicon).

If you don’t upload a custom favicon, your site will use a default icon from your website host. For example, websites built on Squarespace will use this default cube icon:

2. Strategic opt-in forms

As a health coach, a key purpose of your website is to promote and sell your health coaching services (and/or other digital wellness products, if you’ve got ‘em!).

Utilizing opt-in forms on your website is an essential way to grow your email list (aka your interested audience members and potential health coaching customers) by capturing information from visitors who stop by your site and happen to like your content.

Why you need email opt-ins on your health coaching website

Building a list of interested visitors means you can continue to have contact with them in the future.

These new visitors who enjoyed your wellness content are now potential clients who may wish to purchase from you down the road—whether that’s your premium health coaching program, a new product or service you’ve yet to launch (or maybe even thought of), or an existing product or service you offer that they just haven’t been introduced to or weren’t ready for yet.

It’s unlikely that every person who lands on your website will be ready to purchase the exact moment they first encounter you (this is especially true for $$$$ health coaching programs!), but by establishing a longer-term professional connection with this interested reader via your email list, you’re able to continue offering value and perhaps reach them at a later time that they’re seeking what you have to offer.

Opt-in forms can exist in and of themselves (a simple “Subscribe!” form)—for example, here’s our subscribe form for our health coach newsletters:

Or, opt-in forms can be accompanied by a special offer that may make them more enticing—otherwise known as a lead magnet.

Lead magnets are usually free (so, often synonymous with “freebie”) and could be something like a checklist or worksheet, a discount code, an ebook, a free course or a free consultation with you. (Here’s our list of the best opt-in gifts for health coaching websites!)

Creating strategic opt-ins for your health coaching audience

It’s important to be strategic about how you frame your opt-in offers.

The goal is to make “opting-in” appealing to your target audience (someone who would be a good fit for your health coaching services and benefit from purchasing them) while also gracefully weeding out anyone who is not part of that group of “ideal clients.”

And, no, this isn’t mean or exclusive—it’s necessary to recognize that your health coaching services are not for everyone, and instead of trying to appeal to everyone, focus your attention and resources on reaching and helping those whom your specific offerings are a good fit for.

Opt-ins can (and should!) be placed at various locations around your website. A common place to include opt-ins is in blog posts, which are already catering to people with certain interests that align with your business.

Here are a couple examples of opt-ins we use in our own blog posts to connect with readers who may be interested in more content similar to what they’re currently viewing: 1) an offer to subscribe to our regular newsletter, and 2) a freebie that specifically applies to people interested in natural products for their home (this one is placed in a blog post about indoor air quality).

Newsletter opt-in

Freebie opt-in

Here’s the full list of all the places I recommend adding opt-ins around your health coaching website—plus, how to set that all up!

3. Privacy policy

If you collect any personal information on your website (such as email addresses on your opt-in form), you’ll need to have a privacy policy posted in a visible location on your website (the footer is a common place), letting visitors know how you collect and use their information.

Your website privacy policy is even more important since the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) went into effect in May 2018.

If you work with an attorney for your coaching business, you can have them draft a privacy policy specific to your business and website. If you don’t have a personal attorney (quite common, don’t worry), there are plenty of privacy policy templates available online, both free and paid. If you do opt for a DIY template, you’ll just want to be sure that it applies to your particular business and covers your specific legal needs.

Another option is to purchase an attorney-drafted template from a legal template business. The benefit of going this route vs. using a free template is that the business owner will often be able to help you determine if their template is a good fit for you. (Super essential when you need it to legally protect you!)

DIY Legal templates for health coaches

For health coaching and wellness businesses, check out the DIY legal templates from Sam Vander Wielen. She’s a former attorney and health coach, and offers templates specific to the health coaching industry.

4. Social Sharing Image

As a health coach with fixed-length programs or services, your business likely requires a steady stream of new clients, and thus greatly benefits from gaining exposure to new prospective clients or audiences.

One of the simplest, most effective (and most affordable!) ways to gain exposure to new health coaching clients is through social sharing—i.e. one of your readers/followers/fans re-shares a piece of your content to their audience.

Free marketing is great!

Now, let’s make sure that whatever they’re sharing is set up professionally to give you a great first impression to your new potential clients.

This means: customizing your website’s social sharing image so that when someone shares one of your webpages or blog posts on social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc.) it’s properly branded and optimized with key information for your business.

On most website platforms, blog posts shared to social media are automatically branded with their thumbnail image and post excerpt.

However, other pages on your website are shared with a more generic site-wide “social sharing image” (also called “social sharing logo” on Squarespace).

You can customize your social sharing image in your website settings. On Squarespace sites, this is found under Design > Logo & Title.

Side note: Also be sure you’ve customized each of your pages’ specific page description, which will accompany them wherever they may go around the internet—such as being shared on social media. In Squarespace, this can be found under Page Settings > SEO > SEO Description.