Where it started
For the six months before the engagement, Google sent the site an average of 325 organic sessions a month. The Maps listings were not tagged at all, so not one visit from a Google Business Profile could be identified. Paid search ran in bursts and stopped.
The business itself was healthy — two studios, a strong treatment, loyal clients. What it did not have was a way for someone searching buccal massage near me at 11pm to find it, book, and be counted.
What we ran
- Organic search. Service pages per location and per treatment, plus an editorial programme answering the questions people actually type before they book.
- Google Business Profile. Both listings claimed, categorised, posted to weekly, and — critically — tagged so Maps traffic could be told apart from ordinary search.
- Google Ads. A single tight search campaign on the treatment terms, rebuilt around the booking button rather than raw clicks.
- Rank tracking on a 9×9 grid. Visibility measured from 81 points across a five-mile radius per location, every two weeks, instead of from one position check.
The Maps channel did not exist before this work — it was simply untagged. From March 2025 the Business Profile links carry their own tracking, so separately identified Maps visits begin there rather than at zero. Everything before that date sat inside ordinary organic search or direct traffic and could not be separated.
Paid search was switched off between October 2025 and February 2026 and relaunched in March 2026.
What happened to bookings
Completed bookings run through a third-party scheduling widget. Tracking for that event came online in early 2025, so the series starts in March 2025, the first full month on the clock. Everything before that date is absent, not zero.
Volumes are the client's own business figures and are shown as an index: March 2025 = 100. Comparing the same seven months a year apart, which removes the seasonality, bookings are up 21%. June 2026 was the strongest month since tracking began, two thirds above the starting level.
Bookings are indexed to March 2025, the first fully tracked month. Bookings are a whole-business number. They cannot be split by marketing channel: the booking widget sits on its own domain and breaks the referral chain, so the completed booking is never attributed back to the visit that produced it. This is named in every report we send and is on the fix list.
The channel punches above its size
Because bookings cannot be attributed, we measure each channel on the step that can be: the click on the booking button. Over the most recent six-month window, Google sent 23% of the site's traffic and 41% of all booking intent.
For April–September 2026, Google supplied 23% of site traffic and 41% of booking-button clicks. The site average includes all other sources, paid social among them.
98% of the 81-point map grid held the top spot for the studio's lead treatment term, across ten consecutive scans.
Average Maps position for tmj massage in the Newport grid improved from 3.7 to 2.4 — the best reading since tracking began.
The month the other channel went dark
In September 2026 the client switched off its paid social, which had been supplying roughly 60% of all site traffic. Site sessions halved overnight — from 11,157 to 5,196.
Bookings fell 10%. Meanwhile Google hit its highest month on record at 2,853 sessions and rose from a fifth of the site's traffic to 55%. The conversion rate from booking click to completed booking went from 13.9% to 16.6%, the best figure in the two years.
That month is the cleanest evidence in the whole engagement: when the volume channel was removed, the result barely moved, because the channel that had been producing the intent was still there.
| September 2026 | Aug | Sep | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Site sessions | 11,157 | 5,196 | −53% |
| Sessions from Google | 2,182 | 2,853 | +31% |
| Google share of site traffic | 19.6% | 54.9% | +35 pts |
| Booking clicks from Google | 519 | 567 | +9% |
| Completed bookings (Aug = 100) | 100 | 90 | −10% |
| Booking click → completed | 13.9% | 16.6% | +2.7 pts |
How this is measured
Every figure here comes from the client's own Google Analytics property, Google Ads account and Local Falcon grid scans. Four limits are worth stating plainly, because they shape what can and cannot be claimed.
- Completed bookings are not attributed to a channel. The scheduling widget runs on its own domain, so the booking is counted but the visit that caused it is lost. Channel performance here is measured on booking-button clicks, which are attributed.
- The Maps channel has a start date, not a zero. Tagging began in March 2025; earlier Maps visits exist in the data but cannot be separated out.
- Booking volumes are indexed, not absolute. How many bookings a month the studios take is the client's commercial information. Every booking figure here is a relative change or an index against a stated starting month; the underlying counts stay with the client.
- Paid social is not ours. It ran alongside this work for most of the period and at its peak was 60% of site traffic. Total-traffic growth is therefore not claimed anywhere in this case study — only the Google channels are.
Sources: Google Analytics 4 property for the client's site; Google Ads account; Local Falcon campaign scans at 9×9 grid, five-mile radius. Figures pulled 8 October 2026 and cover 1 October 2024 to 30 September 2026. Client named on request.
