Leveraging Local SEO to Grow Organic Leads 387%

TESTIMONIAL

“While the lockdowns caused by the pandemic had a significant impact on leisure centres and gyms in general, the ending of restrictions presented an opportunity due to a change in consumer sentiment and a willingness to return to some level of normality. Wolfgang Digital understood the ask. The plan to utilise a content integrated SEO strategy focussed on local search by leveraging the existing assets we had on board. This strategy had a positive impact on our local search rankings, drove new traffic to our website and helped secure tangible results for our business.”

George Robinson - Group Marketing Manager · Aura Holohan Group

WOLFGANG DIGEST

Localised content & SEO strategy helped amplify branded and non-branded visibility for Aura Leisure, resulting in increased organic leads.

CHANNELS

SEO

BUSINESS GROWTH

Organic Leads +387% YoY (pre-pandemic).

THE CHALLENGE

The pandemic had a significant impact on the fitness and leisure industry during lockdowns. In addition, PPC and GMB listings (local knowledge panel) began taking up more real estate at the top of Google page 1, limiting the opportunity for organic listings. Keywords related to “swimming pool” held the maximum potential to drive organic growth but their visibility was stagnant at the 30% to 35% mark, which indicated a need for us to revisit our strategy.

THE STRATEGY

We shifted our strategy to dominate local search and increase organic traction for high-intent based generic queries. We focused on leveraging the power of local SEO optimisation techniques and capitalising on seasonal trends to grow website authority.

We leveraged keyword data from Google Search Console, Google Analytics and SEO Monitor to identify low-hanging fruit. Our “location” and “swim academy” pages that predominantly ranked for swimming-related keywords were driving high impressions but were at the bottom of page 2 on the SERP - optimising these became the focus.
We restructured content and SEO tags on all target pages by integrating the best performing local non-branded queries mapped to those pages.
We made use of local schema mark-up and structured internal linking to fuel our entity building approach.
We updated service offerings across the various GMB profiles to grow relevance for our target categories.
We ran outreach campaigns during seasonal events like Black Friday to grow backlinks and overall website authority.

INNOVATION USED

We leveraged data from multiple sources (owned and third party) to identify localised queries and target pages that possessed maximum potential to drive organic growth. We then carried out a competitor SERP analysis for these target queries to identify gaps in our rankings pages with respect to content additions, keyword density, internal linking, HTML optimisations, UI/UX improvements, page speed and a few other factors. The SERP analysis was critical in helping us boost Aura’s visibility in the areas they were located.

In addition to this, our custom schema mark-ups and structured internal linking helped feed the right signals to Google’s NLP algorithm updates. As a result, we saw the visibility for our swimming related keywords in particular to increase by almost 30% on Mobile and Desktop over a 9 month period.

BUSINESS GROWTH

Compared to the pre-pandemic year, Aura Leisure saw Organic Leads increase by a whopping 387%. Organic conversion rate was up by almost 304% which meant that we were now driving more quality traffic onto the website.

Driving traction and leads organically through swimming-related queries was the crux of our local SEO strategy. This paid off because we saw organic leads on our “swim academy” pages increase by almost 151% when compared to the period with no lockdowns.