The Need
How to make each location stand out in its unique crowd
Making yourself feel more beautiful and confident is a very local pursuit. When a consumer finally gets the courage and time to reach for a provider near where they live, there is one short moment in time where they are researching and considering local options.
Ideal Image caters to individuals seeking to enhance their appearance and boost their confidence with a diverse array of services - from Botox to Ultherapy. Each Ideal Image location has appointment slots to fill, and local competitors who offer unique value propositions.
Our mission was clear: to supercharge Ideal Image's organic search visibility and significantly boost their lead generation in specific markets year-on-year, while helping the client reduce its dependence on paid media to drive a healthier bottom line.
Challenges
Given the wide variety of services offered across 173 unique locations, crafting a hyperlocal strategy that would be effective at such a scale was no easy task. Understanding the breadth of offerings was essential. We focused on three services: Botox, CoolSculpting, and Laser Hair Removal, which promised maximum impact. We had to create 519 pages in total across all 173 locations which focused on our three key services, aiming to optimize required unique and specific details to ensure effective local SEO.
The implementation phase demanded creative solutions, agility and an obsessive focus on local details that are not sexy but absolutely critical. We built location-specific service pages and optimized existing location pages across 173 branches - a total of 519 pages in the span of 9 months. This was not just pressing some AI button to toss out 519 random pages, rather each location had to have a unique city-level page, a page for each of the three key services, and more - all written with custom copy specifically tailored for that service and location.
Our Solution
Figure 1: Branch & Branch/Service Pages
Competitive analysis steered our content strategy, providing exact recommendations for headings and content length for each page, tailored specifically to grapple with the unique set of competitors in each locale. This wasn't just local, this was highly customized hyperlocal. In the example of Detroit, we customized local copy for each of the three branches: Allen Park, Novi, and Rochester Hills based on the content that was helping their competitors rank well within their respective borders. Then, for each location a city-level service page was created for Botox, Coolsculpting, and Laser Hair Removal with every one of these pages receiving unique, original copywriting from a human author.
Our operational creativity shone through when we deployed a Headless CMS, allowing us to seamlessly integrate new and optimized content for easy launch and quality checks. Our team would take the content from creation and markup the HTML, perform internal linking, and enter it into a system whereby the Ideal Image dev team could check it and set it live. This significantly reduced the amount of time the content would need to spend in the developer queue for review and deployment.
We didn't stop at the website; we managed listing information and optimized Google Business Profiles and Bing Places across all 173 locations. Our team stayed creative, posting engaging content weekly, and exploring additional citation opportunities on an ongoing basis. Once we began creating posts on a weekly basis for our locations towards the beginning of February 2023, we noticed a significant increase in visibility of our locations showing up in the Map Pack on Google and an influx in leads coming from Map Pack listings.
Results
Our partnership with Ideal Image is a testament to our adaptable and effective approach to hyper-local SEO. Despite an intricate service portfolio (over 10 unique treatments made even more complex by body part and skin type), multiple locations (173 locations), and an economic downturn that shrunk brand demand by 32%, we grew the share of voice in a shrinking market. We used our client’s media market data and our keyword research to make data-driven SEO market prioritization decisions for maximum impact.
