They loved the class. They did not talk to you afterward, because you were talking to someone else and they had to get to work. What they left with is your first name, possibly misheard, the studio, and the fact that it was a Tuesday morning.
Three days later they try to find you. This is the moment almost every teacher loses people, and it happens silently, so you never learn it happened.
Being findable on a first name is not a marketing problem. It is a plumbing problem, and most of it can be fixed in an afternoon.
What they actually type
Not much. Usually one of these:
"nina yoga lisbon"
"yoga leela tuesday morning teacher"
"nina" typed into the Instagram search box, followed by a scroll through a hundred accounts and a giving up
That is the entire search. Nobody tries harder than that for a teacher they took one class with. They are not investigating you. They are giving it thirty seconds because they enjoyed something and would like more of it.
So the whole task is: make one of those three searches work.
The string that has to exist somewhere
For the first search to work, your first name, the word yoga or breathwork or whatever you teach, and your city need to appear together, in the same place, on a page that a search engine has actually looked at.
That is it. That is the mechanism. Not keywords, not tricks. A page where the words "Nina," "yoga," "Lisbon" sit near each other, ideally with your surname, and ideally on more than one site so that no single page going down takes you with it.
Most teachers fail this in a specific way: the words exist, but scattered. The name is on Instagram, where the city is not written anywhere. The city is on the studio site, where you are listed as "Nina" with no surname. Each place has half of it. Neither is findable.
Write the full string out once and then go put it in the places below, unchanged.
Nina Alves, yoga teacher, Lisbon.
Your Instagram handle is not your name
This is the most common single fix and it takes forty seconds.
Instagram search matches on the handle and on the name field, and most teachers have a handle like "nina.moves.slow" and a name field containing something like a moon emoji and the word "breathe." So a person searching "Nina" finds nothing, because nothing on the profile says Nina.
Put your actual full name in the name field. Not your handle, the name field, the one that shows in bold. Then put your city in the bio line, written as a word rather than a flag emoji, because nobody searches for a flag.
Nina Alves Yoga, Lisbon. Tuesdays and Fridays at Leela.
If you also teach breathwork or sound, the word for it needs to be in there too, because that is what someone will type if that is the class they took.
Let the studio do the work
The studio's website almost certainly ranks better than anything you will ever build, because it has been there for years and people link to it. Which means the studio's teacher page is doing your finding for you, whether or not it is doing it well.
So go and look at yours. Right now, on your phone.
The common problems are all small: you are listed by first name only, your bio is the one you wrote in 2022, there is no photo, or the page does not say which classes are yours. Any of those and someone searching the studio plus your first name lands somewhere that does not confirm they have found the right person.
The message to fix it is one line and studio managers do not mind it at all:
"Hi, could you update my teacher page? Full name Nina Alves, and could you add that I teach Tuesday and Friday mornings? Happy to send a new photo and a short bio if it helps."
Do this for every studio you teach at, including the one where you only cover occasionally. Three studio pages carrying your full name and city is a stronger position than any personal site, because you did not have to build or maintain any of them.
When your name is common, or already taken
Some names are not searchable on their own. If you share a name with a footballer, an actor, or four thousand other people, you will not win that search and there is no point trying.
The answer is to always attach the second word. Not "Nina" but "Nina Alves yoga." Say it that way out loud, write it that way everywhere, and use it as the handle and the page address if you can. You are not competing for your name. You are making a phrase that only points at you.
Pick one phrase and never vary it. The most damaging thing here is inconsistency: a handle with a dot, a page address with a hyphen, a studio listing with your middle name. Each variation splits you into a different person as far as any search is concerned.
Names that are hard to spell where you are
Diacritics, two surnames, a name that is pronounced nothing like it is written in the local language. This is normal in this work, because teachers move between countries constantly, and it is worth handling deliberately rather than hoping.
Two practical things.
Write your name in the plain form as well as the correct form, somewhere on your page, so that a search without accents still finds you. A line as simple as "also written Nina Alves" does the job.
And if you go by a shortened name in class, make sure the long one is attached to it somewhere visible. A student who heard "Nina" and searches for "Nina" should land somewhere that also says Antonina, or they will assume they have found the wrong person and stop.
The thirty seconds before they need to search at all
The cheapest fix of all is to remove the search. Write your name, in full, where the room can see it.
On the studio whiteboard, under the class time. On a small card at the door. In the class description the studio publishes. Saying it out loud at the start costs four seconds and almost nobody does it:
"I'm Nina Alves, I teach this one on Tuesdays and Fridays."
Say the surname. It feels formal for about half a second and then it is just information. People who never had the nerve to come and talk to you now have the one thing they were missing.
The other places your name already lives
You are probably more findable than you think, in places you have forgotten about, and they are all easier to fix than to build.
Festival and event programs, which stay online for years after the event. Eventbrite and ticketing pages for workshops you taught once. The pages of the people you co-host with, since nearly every retreat has two or three names on it. Old collaborators, teacher training listings, a friend's studio blog.
Each of those is a page carrying your name that you did not have to maintain. The ones worth a message are the ones where your name appears without your city or without your surname, because those are the ones failing the search for no good reason.
"Hey, would you mind adding my full name and Lisbon to the retreat page? Someone tried to find me from it last month and couldn't."
Nobody has ever refused that request. It takes them a minute and it costs you one message.
When someone finds the wrong Nina
It happens, and it is worth checking rather than assuming. If there is another teacher with your name in your city, or a much larger account with your handle spelling, then a fair number of the people looking for you are landing on them and quietly concluding you have no presence.
There is nothing hostile to do about this. You just have to be more specific than they are: your name plus the studio, your name plus the neighborhood, your name plus the style. Whatever combination is only true of you.
Search yourself from a phone you are not logged in on
This is the actual assignment, and it takes four minutes.
Borrow a friend's phone, or open a private window. Search your first name and your city and the word for what you teach. Then search your full name. Then type your first name into Instagram search and scroll until you find yourself, and count how far down you were.
Whatever you had to know in advance in order to find yourself is the thing that is broken. Your students do not know it.
Most teachers doing this for the first time discover the same thing: they are on page one for their full name, which nobody has, and invisible for their first name plus their city, which is all anybody has. Closing that gap is one afternoon of small edits on pages you already control.