I run structured cohorts at SEO University, and I do one-on-one coaching with business owners and marketing teams. They serve different purposes, and the right choice depends on where you are and what you are trying to accomplish.

What a Course Does Well

A course — whether a live cohort or a self-paced program — is good at delivering a complete framework in a structured sequence. You learn the vocabulary, the principles, the tools, and how they connect. If you are starting from scratch or have significant gaps in your knowledge, a course gives you the foundation efficiently. The SEO University six-week cohort is built around this: by the end, students have a complete mental model of how search marketing works and have done real work applying it.

What a course cannot do: respond to your specific situation. The cohort does not know that your website is on a platform that creates crawl problems, or that your industry has a particular competitive dynamic that changes the standard advice, or that you tried the recommended approach and it produced unexpected results. That specificity is where coaching comes in.

There is also a pacing benefit to a course that people underrate. A structured cohort with weekly deliverables forces you through the material in a fixed window instead of letting it stretch out indefinitely, which is what tends to happen with self-directed learning. Most people who try to learn marketing fundamentals entirely on their own, from scattered articles and videos, either never finish or finish with an incomplete, unevenly-weighted picture — strong on the topics that happened to be well covered by whatever they read first, weak everywhere else. A structured curriculum fixes that unevenness by design.

What Coaching Does That a Course Cannot

Ongoing coaching is useful when:

  • You have the framework but keep running into implementation problems specific to your business
  • You need someone to review your actual work — your content, your reports, your campaigns — and give honest feedback
  • You are making decisions that involve trade-offs the course did not cover
  • Your situation is changing and the strategy needs to adapt, not just the tactics
  • You want accountability to actually do the work rather than just know what the work is

That last point is underestimated. Most marketing problems are not knowledge problems. People know they should post consistently, track their analytics, improve their site speed. The gap between knowing and doing is where most marketing stalls, and a coaching relationship closes that gap for a lot of people. I have watched business owners sit through an entire cohort, take excellent notes, and then not touch their website for three months afterward because there was no one checking in. A coaching cadence exists specifically to close that gap.

How I Structure Coaching Engagements

Coaching with me is not a subscription to general advice. It is structured around your specific situation: your business, your site, your current marketing setup, and the specific goals you are trying to move. Typically we start with a review session where I get a clear picture of where things stand, then we establish a cadence — usually bi-weekly or monthly — where we review what happened, troubleshoot what is not working, and set the next priorities.

As a marketing instructor, my coaching draws on the same knowledge base I use in training — search, structured data, content strategy, analytics — but applied specifically to your context rather than taught as general principles. Strategy consulting runs $500 per hour, and most coaching clients start with a set of four to six sessions before deciding whether an ongoing arrangement makes sense.

Between sessions, I usually ask for something concrete to review — a page draft, a set of analytics screenshots, a campaign brief — rather than running a purely conversational check-in. A session built around a real artifact produces more useful feedback than a general status update, and it keeps the client producing work between sessions instead of just showing up to talk about intentions.

Coaching for Teams vs. Individuals

I work with both individual business owners and small marketing teams. Team coaching is different: the goal is often to align the team on strategy, build shared vocabulary, and create a review process the team can own independently rather than rely on external input indefinitely. That is actually the outcome I prefer — a team that has built enough capability to coach itself, with occasional outside perspective when it is useful.

With teams, one early exercise I run is having each person on the team independently describe the marketing strategy in their own words, then comparing the answers. It is common for a team of four or five people to produce four or five noticeably different descriptions of what they are supposedly all executing against. That gap is worth surfacing before anything else, because no amount of tactical coaching fixes a team that is not aligned on the underlying strategy.

At Salterra, we combine coaching with agency work for some clients — doing the technical and creative work ourselves while coaching the client’s internal team on strategy and measurement. That hybrid model works well when the business wants to build internal capability over time while still getting results in the short term.

Which Is Right for You

If you are earlier in your marketing education and want a structured path through the fundamentals, a course or cohort is the right starting point. If you have the basics and need help applying them — or if you have a team that is doing marketing work and needs strategic direction — coaching is likely more useful. Many people do both: take the course to build the foundation, then work through coaching to apply it in their specific situation.

A simple way to check which category you fall into: if you cannot describe your current strategy in a few sentences, you probably need the course first. If you can describe the strategy clearly but keep struggling with execution, prioritization, or a specific recurring problem, coaching is the better use of your time and money. Skipping straight to coaching without the foundation usually means paying for sessions that end up re-teaching basics one topic at a time instead of solving the actual problem you came in with.

The marketing instructor overview describes the full range of training and coaching options available, including how to get started with a strategy session if you want to talk through what would actually make sense for your situation before committing to a program.