How a New Website Made Steph Rank Higher and Become an AI-Cited Answer

The Problem

Steph Gaudreau has been coaching women for over 13 years. She’s a strength coach, a podcast host, and an author, and she’s built a great reputation as one of the go-to voices for women who lift. But her website was doing the best job at showing all of this.

Her site had last been rebuilt back in 2020, two years after Steph had already shifted away from the recipe content that once defined her brand. So by the time she came to me, she was sitting on a site that was part strength coach, part leftover food blogger, and fully out of step with where her business actually was.

That mismatch was showing up in her inbox as Steph kept fielding inquiries from women who weren’t a fit for her programs, people looking to lose weight or just start moving. Her ideal audience is athletic women 40 and up who are already active and want to stay strong, capable, and injury-resistant for decades. She could feel the disconnect but couldn’t quite pin down where it was coming from or how to fix it.

In her words:

“Every time I sat down to think about how to fix the existing website, I got overwhelmed. I have over 13 years of content and had a major business shift in 2018, but there were still issues with my website.”

What We Set Out to Do

Steph and I had already worked together on smaller projects, so this wasn’t a cold start. When it came time for the full rebuild, the priorities were clear:

Rebuild the site around her actual flagship offer, the Strong with Steph app, instead of spreading attention evenly across every program she’d ever launched.
Sharpen the messaging so it spoke directly to athletic, active women 40+, not “any woman who should probably exercise more.
Clear out years of legacy content that no longer matched her business (including retiring the old recipe archive she’d stopped updating in 2018) so Google and AI tools alike had a cleaner, more accurate picture of who she is.
And build real SEO and AEO groundwork around the terms her actual ideal client is searching and asking AI assistants about.

In her own words:

“Working with Jess reminds me of baking a cake. You can’t wing it in baking, ingredients must be gathered and precisely measured. Care must be taken with the methods and process. If you do that, you’ll be rewarded with something satisfying in the long run. She really does prepare and use strategy, and the end result is excellent.”

The Approach

Messaging built for the client she actually wants. Steph’s ideal client isn’t someone who needs external permission to work out. It’s someone who’s already active, who’s noticing her performance sliding or her body not bouncing back the way it used to, and who wants a coach who understands lifting as a long-term practice rather than an eight-week transformation. We wrote the copy around that identity instead of generic “women’s fitness” language, which meant getting specific about who the site was and wasn’t trying to attract.

One flagship offer, with a clear path to everything else. Instead of a homepage trying to represent every program Steph has ever built, the new site puts the Strong with Steph app front and center as the primary offer, with custom 1:1 coaching positioned as the option for people who need more. Some of her smaller legacy programs were phased out as part of the same decision.

A cleaner foundation for both search engines and AI. Steph’s old site had thousands of indexed pages from her paleo blogging days, and while that meant a high keyword count on paper, none of it was relevant to strength coaching. We retired that content and rebuilt her pages and copy around the questions her audience is asking, both in Google and in AI tools: what counts as heavy lifting, how much weight women should be able to lift, what functional movement patterns are.

A podcast woven into the strategy. Steph’s podcast is one of her biggest drivers of trust and recognition, so the site was structured to actually support it, with featured episodes tied to the audience she’s trying to reach instead of a generic “listen here” link buried in the navigation.

Ready to close the gap between your expertise and your online presence? Let’s talk.

A few design and copy decisions to point out:

We cut down the checkout path significantly. Her old site sent visitors from a sales page to one of two option pages (DIY or premium), each with three separate payment options. Now every payment option lives on the main sales page, so there’s one page instead of a maze of clicks.
The copy calls out “women over 40” directly and often. That specificity was intentional. Steph’s ideal client wants to know a program was built for her, not adapted from some random workout program meant for a 22 year old.
Video plays a much bigger role throughout the site, both of Steph and from her clients. It builds trust faster than text alone, and it gives search engines more signals to work with too.

The Results

The shift shows up clearly in her search rankings. Steph’s keyword count actually dropped once the old recipe content came down, but what’s left is even better: the overwhelming majority of her rankings now sit in the top 10, and she holds the number one spot for dozens of terms tied directly to what she actually does.

She ranks #1 for high-intent questions like “how much weight should women lift,” “what is considered heavy lifting for a woman,” and “am I lifting heavy enough,” the exact searches her ideal client runs before ever hearing her name.

She also holds the top spot for foundational training terms like “functional movement patterns” and “7 functional movements,” along with podcast-related searches like “best fitness podcasts” and “womens fitness podcast.”

Ready to close the gap between your expertise and your online presence? Let’s talk.

Final Website Design Reveal

stephgaudreau.com

Ready to close the gap between your expertise and your website? Let’s talk.