Iron Yard is a gym in North Branch competing against national chains with national marketing budgets. It had no website. Twelve months after launch it was pulling 860 organic clicks a year at an 18.4% click-through rate, and a search for a gym in North Branch puts it above Anytime Fitness.
This is the hardest version of the local search problem. The competition is not the gym down the road, it is a franchise with a national site, national ad spend and a brand people already know.
No website at all. A Facebook page and word of mouth. Every person who moved to North Branch and searched for a gym found the chains, because the chains were the only results that existed.
A national gym site has one page trying to serve hundreds of towns. It outranks you on authority and loses to you on relevance, but only if there is a local page for Google to prefer. That was the whole opening.
Somebody picking a gym is picking somewhere they will go three times a week for years. Losing that search does not cost one sale, it costs a membership.
A custom WordPress site with the local SEO built into the structure rather than added afterwards, which is the only reason a single-location gym can outrank a chain.
Every page written for North Branch and the towns that feed it. A chain's location page cannot do that, because it is one template serving hundreds of addresses.
Categories, services, hours, photos and posts kept current. For a gym the profile is where most of the decision happens, because people check photos and reviews before they ever open a website.
Equipment, floor space, the people who train there. A prospective member wants to know what the room looks like, and stock photos of a different gym answer nothing.
A repeatable way to ask members for a review, so the count climbs steadily rather than in one burst and then nothing for two years.
The gap between an independent gym and a chain is usually presentation, not quality. Closing that gap visually is most of the work.
January and September are when people join gyms. Paid search can be turned up for those windows and down the rest of the year.
The same approach is on the local SEO page and the website design page. North Branch work is collected on the North Branch page.
The clicks and the click-through rate below came out of Iron Yard's own Search Console account. The ranking is a search you can run yourself.
| Metric | Before | After twelve months |
|---|---|---|
| Organic clicks per year | 0 | 860 |
| Click-through rate | No site to measure | 18.4% |
| Website | None | Custom WordPress |
| Gym searches in North Branch | Not present | First result |
| Google Business Profile | Unmanaged | Maintained monthly |
An 18.4% click-through rate is unusually high for a local search listing. Our other accounts run between 3% and 8%, so this one is the outlier rather than the norm, and we would rather say that than imply every client sees it. The case studies page has the full list with each figure attached to the account it came from.
The results above came out of these packages. Ad spend is billed separately and goes straight to Google or Meta, so you always know what we are paid and what the platforms are paid.
One-time project. Most Minnesota small business sites land in here.
For a business with a decent site that needs the phone to ring.
Everything, including me on site with a camera twice a month.
Month to month, no contracts. For SEO we recommend giving it at least six months, because that is how long it takes to be worth judging. If you would rather commit to twelve months, two on-site photo and video shoots are included at no charge.
Every figure on these came out of that client's own Google Ads or Search Console account.
Organic clicks up 172% and average position from 48 to 26, alongside 101 tracked Google Ads leads at $73.61 each on a roughly $200,000 average job.
Read the case study Manufacturing · Stacy, MNOrganic clicks up 209% year on year, from 399 to 1,232, with average position improving from 39 to 19 in a narrow industrial search market.
Read the case study The full listImage Irrigation, Grizzly Concrete, Duck Duck Plumbing, Superior Drywall, VM Welding and the rest, each with the figures that exist and an honest note where they do not.
See all case studiesSearch for a gym in North Branch and look. We are not going to publish an average position from Search Console for it, because Search Console does not hold one for this account, and a number we cannot source is a number we do not print.
The figures above are twelve months after launch. The Google Business Profile moved first, inside the first couple of months. Organic rankings built from there.
No. Our other accounts run between 3% and 8%. Iron Yard is high because the brand name matches what people search and because the listing answers the question before the click.
The structure transfers, the numbers are not a promise. What made this work was a market where no local competitor had a real website. If three gyms in your town already have one, the same work takes longer and costs more to maintain.
The pricing section above has the one-time build and the monthly plans. Iron Yard runs on a monthly plan, which is what keeps the profile and the content moving.
Cory, who grew up in North Branch, which is how we ended up with three clients inside a few minutes of each other there.
