By As it became apparent that the pandemic was putting a stranglehold on local businesses we offered to help as many as we could with various free services including hundreds of free SEO reviews, consultation calls, and more. During this time a small fitness business owner asked a friend of mine to reach out and ask if there was anything I could do to help them out for free. I agreed to do an SEO review and told them I would make one optimization change and set them up with our reporting system to track how the change impacted their site.
I discussed this on Twitter which you can read here:
This was an interesting case for us to watch unfold and as you’ll see below one carefully researched and selected SEO change made a big difference over a long period of time.
About the Business
The client for this free effort is a small, local, fitness business. They have asked to remain anonymous as they are worried mentions of free help might adversely impact their business. The business has been serving the community for over 40 years and the owner / instructor is extremely well-known in their industry. The business has had the same website since the late 1990’s (updated periodically) but has never put an emphasis on SEO of any kind including asking for reviews on Google.
The business has 3 marketing targets, but only one really brings in the highest volume of new sign ups.
The Problem
Like most businesses this business got ready for a bounce-back after the full closures during the pandemic. Unfortunately, that did not happen and they continued to lose existing customers due to the pressures of the pandemic weighing on the local economy.
Several of the businesses competitors were starting to go out of business but the business was not seeing any new customers come in from this, likely because those businesses were also losing clients due to pandemic pressures.
The business had a routine pre-pandemic. They knew exactly when their signups would start cancelling and when turning on advertising would start bringing in more new signups at the lowest cost.
The Research
Aside from taking an hour or so to talk to the owner about the business we performed a free SEO review which included keyword research, competitor research, technical SEO examination, and content reviews.
This was pretty much basic level research we do for any of the free SEO review requests we get where our team tries to find some specific tips to help a website improve their rankings.
Typically this research uncovers several things a website can fix, but this company wasn’t really interested in doing a lot of work or hiring us, they just wanted us to do something to help if we could.
Thankfully the research did uncover one thing we could do that looked like it would help them.
Remember, most of their new signups came from one target audience. They have a page that had a great content on it for this target audience but it didn’t rank in the top 100 positions and we uncovered that the page had an under-optimized title tag.
The SEO Work
With the research in hand we made the one change we promised we would make.
What we found was that their current title tag was “[Service]” but the top searched for term for this service in their space was “[Narrow type] + [Service Name] + [City]”.
As an example let’s assume the business offered Personal Training services in Philadelphia. Their original title tag was “Personal Training” and the new title tag was “Strength Personal Training Philadelphia”
We took that most searched for term and made it their title tag for the page they already had created.
No other SEO work has been done by myself or the fitness business since then.
There were no content changes, no links, no news articles, no blog posts, no technical updates. Nothing (WordPress and plugins were maintained by the owner and their GBP has gotten 5 total new reviews over this time span). I have verified this with the owner recently to make sure the results you will see below were not influenced by anything else.
The Results
It took a total of 29 months for this page’s ranking to reach a top 5 position in Google and to consistently hold a bottom to middle of page 1 ranking. It took approximately 20 months before this change led to a ranking that likely is bringing in new business for the SMB.
When we started the business’s site did not rank on the target keyword at all. Within a few weeks the page debuted in Google rankings at p69. Without any other SEO work it took about 3.5 weeks for the first ranking to debut in our system.
The rankings dropped for 5 consecutive months through the end of April hitting an all-time low of p97 before things would start moving upwards.
Through May of 2021 there were significant up and down ranking movements finally ending at p38.
The ranking went up and down from June through September, finally getting into the teens at p15 on Sep 26th, 2021.
The ranking then plummeted in early October to p41 before rising throughout the month finally getting back to p15 on Oct 28th.
Between late Oct and Early Feb 2022 the ranking stayed mostly in the teens hitting a high of p12. Google did drop the rankings frequently into the low 20’s and high 30’s.
In early Feb 2022 another deep drop into the 30s and 20s that lasted from Feb 26th to Mar 22nd when it would again reach into the teens at p15.
This would be the last time the ranking would drop out of the teens, reaching page 1 on Mar 27th at p10 and never again dropping below p15.
Between Mar 22nd and Jul 27th the rankings were really rocky bouncing all around mid page 2 and top of page 2. On Jul 27th though it would start moving between p11 and p10 frequently before hitting p6, the highest point yet, on August 9th of 2022.
After August 9th the ranking would only drop to page 2 for 3 total days (they were consecutive) before starting to move between p10 and p7 routinely.
On Mar 7th 2023 the ranking would hit a new all-time high of p5, 7-months after reaching p6 for an ATH.
Following the ranking peak of p5 on Mar 7th the rankings now routinely move between p9 and p7 hitting p10 only once during the period between Mar 7th 2023 and today.
If this pattern is consistent in about 4 months the ranking will hit a new ATH somewhere around p4 to p1, most likely though around p4 as I do not think the page content is strong enough to rank in the top 3.
What We Learned
This is a rare opportunity to examine a website that has only had one change made it any of its on-page or off-page SEO over the course of 29 months and to evaluate the impact that change had.
You can see clearly in the graphic above there appears to be 7 distinct periods of Google ranking the page highly, then dropping the ranking for a period of time before it gains either a similar or higher ranking that it had at the start.
All of this came from just a simple title tag change to exactly the target keyword that gains the most searches.
When SEOs talk about SEO taking time, this is what we are talking about, though likely a rare and extreme example of it.
Featured photo from Midjourney prompt “local seo rocket taking off in marvel style, photorealistic, cinematic, –v 5 –q 3”