A regional education and training provider offering in-person courses across numerous United Kingdom locations was not performing well in local search or Google Map results. When they approached Grapelight, they had strong student satisfaction, but their individual centres were lacking visibility for course-related searches. This was resulting in them missing opportunities from nearby learners. Their Google Business Profiles were not optimised consistently with location pages not converting effectively. It was clear this education provider needed a bespoke local SEO strategy that would improve Google Map visibility, helping to increase calls and visits, driving more enrolments at a local level. 

Our team carried out a comprehensive audit to identify what was holding this training provider back from being visible in local results and Google Map results. This included auditing their Google Business Profiles, local landing pages, and citation accuracy. Our team then got to work optimising each Google Business Profile individually to improve category relevance, images, business information consistency, and service descriptions. 

With their Google Business Profiles updated and accurate, we focused on their local landing pages. These were all improved to include clear course information, locally relevant content that aligned with search intent, along with improvements to their internal linking structure, that improved user navigation and search engine crawling, ensuring all pages could be easily discovered. We also prioritised mobile usability and page speed, both essential to local SEO.

We worked with the training provider, providing them with guidance on their reviews, helping to improve trust signals and engagement, while encouraging new students to leave reviews. We also provided them with guidance on responding to reviews, both positive and negative, ensuring that they are active and ready to improve, if necessary, further boosting trust. From here we implemented local schema markup, reinforcing their geographical relevance to help improve local search visibility.

Our team created a performance tracking framework, focusing on Google Maps rankings, impressions, class, and direction requests, along with attributed enquiries, which provided us and our client with clear insight into their progress and performance.

This training provider started seeing steady improvements in local visibility and student enquiries in five short months. The biggest impact was Google Maps impressions rose by 70%, while some of their locations started appearing in the Top-3 Google Map placements. This was all driven by their improved, optimised, and accurate Google Business Profiles and strong local signals. 

The client also experienced an increased in phone calls from their Google Business Profiles, which rose by a staggering 80%, with direction requests increasing by close to 65%. This clearly demonstrated higher intent from prospective students. The clients website visits from Google Maps also rose by just shy of 64%.

When it came to local course enquiries, the client experienced an increase of 55% and some of their locations even exceeded this during peak enrolment periods. At the same time, their conversion rates from their location pages rose by almost 30%, which was due to the clear messaging, combined with an improvement in user experience. Students were spending more time on their website discovering new pages, while bounce rates were reduced.

Where the client saw noticeable improvements was on their paid advertising. With an improvement in local visibility online, they were able to reduce their reliance on paid advertising, saving them close to 25% in local acquisition, while enjoying consistent enrolment volumes.