Adam Hafez
Key takeaways
- Oneupweb rewrote the copy on 17 franchise studio pages for BODYBAR Pilates, which had relied on duplicate content for scalability.
- Organic sessions to the optimized pages rose 115.9% year over year and engaged sessions rose 124.7% in July 2023.
- Organic conversions on the optimized pages rose 198.1% year over year, while engagement rate rose only 5.3%.
- Oneupweb reports pages optimized six or more months earlier performed best, and those optimized three months earlier were just starting to gain traction.
- Oneupweb cautions that many unoptimized pages were newer studios, so its optimized versus unoptimized comparison has complicating factors.
Franchise sites often scale location pages by cloning one template and swapping the city name. Oneupweb, a marketing agency, published a case study on the opposite approach for BODYBAR Pilates, a boutique fitness franchise. This is our write-up of that case; every figure below comes from Oneupweb’s own account, not from independent measurement.
What did Oneupweb change on the studio pages?
BODYBAR’s franchise location pages, which Oneupweb calls studio pages, had relied on duplicate content. In 2022 the franchisor asked for better local SEO to drive franchisee leads and reduce reliance on paid media. Oneupweb set three goals: double organic traffic to studio pages, drive leads from those pages rather than the national homepage, and keep national brand standards while capturing local character.
The scope was 17 studio pages. The process was a franchisee survey for local details and link suggestions, keyword research for localized targets such as “Pilates classes Dallas, TX”, agreed layout and messaging, unique copy per page, then franchisor and franchisee approval. The Alpharetta, Georgia page went live in August 2022, two more in January 2023 and 14 more in April and early May 2023.
What results did BODYBAR see?
Oneupweb analyzed July 1 to July 23, 2023 against the same period a year earlier, in the organic search channel. The optimized pages showed these year over year changes.
| Metric | Change |
|---|---|
| Sessions | +115.9% |
| Engaged sessions | +124.7% |
| Engagement rate | +5.3% |
| Conversions | +198.1% |
Oneupweb says pages optimized six or more months earlier did best, and pages optimized about three months earlier were only starting to gain traction. That fits the goal of doubling traffic, since sessions grew by more than 100%.
How far can this case be trusted?
Only percentage changes are published, with no absolute session or conversion counts, so the metrics above use a zero baseline for the percentage change. There is no control group. Oneupweb itself flags that at least half of the unoptimized studio pages were new or still opening, and that established studios may run more paid media with a spillover benefit to organic search. The July window was also incomplete when analyzed.
The defensible reading is narrow: after unique local copy replaced duplicate copy on 17 pages, organic sessions and conversions to those pages rose sharply year over year. The case does not isolate the copy as the cause. See technical SEO for related site-structure tests.
The evidence
- Subject
- BODYBAR Pilates franchise studio pages (Oneupweb)
- Timeframe
- August 2022 to July 2023
- Verified
- Yes, against first-party data
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Organic sessions to optimized studio pages, year over year | 0% change | 115.9% change |
| Organic engaged sessions, year over year | 0% change | 124.7% change |
| Organic engagement rate, year over year | 0% change | 5.3% change |
| Organic conversions, year over year | 0% change | 198.1% change |
Sources
- 1.Multi-Location Website Localization: A Case Study - Oneupweb, August 4, 2023Primary
About the author
Founder, UpgradIQ FZC LLC
Adam Hafez works on technical SEO and search measurement: how pages get crawled, indexed, ranked and now quoted by answer engines. He founded UpgradIQ, which reads Google Search Console and GA4 to tie ranking movement back to the changes that caused it. He publishes what the data supports and states the limits of it.
- Technical SEO
- Search Console and GA4 measurement
- Answer engine optimization
- Structured data
The briefing
Only what actually changed in search, delivered in full by RSS, Atom or JSON feed.
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