Case Study: KnoxvilleBassLessons.com

CASE STUDY – KnoxvilleBassLessons.com (Updated as of 9/24/19): As the owner/operator of Music Ed Media, I don’t just develop websites FOR music schools and music instructors – I AM a working music instructor. My income is affected by how well my web properties perform in the SERPs (search engine results pages) when prospects search for music lessons in my city (Knoxville, Tennessee), and I have become VERY good at ranking my websites in Google. So for my first case study, I will present one of my own sites, KnoxvilleBassLessons.com (KBL).

Back Story

First, a bit of background on me. I am a former New Hampshire public school music teacher that moved to Nashville, Tennessee and became a touring bassist for a decade. Toward the end of that decade I got married and eventually settled in my wife’s native city of Knoxville, where I now teach private music lessons as well as continue to perform professionally. As per the scope of this post, I’ll wrap up my background there – though if you want to know more about me, I continue to gush all about myself at RyanByrne.com (RB).

Thanks in large part to my music education degree, I have learned how to teach many different musical instruments to beginner and intermediate students – the bread and butter of the music lessons industry. However, bass guitar is my primary instrument. It is the one on which I feel I can offer the most detailed, technical expertise to advanced students. So I wanted to have as many bass students as possible.

Though I already had my RB website that highlighted my various musical endeavors (bassist for hire for live gigs and online sessions, show schedules, music videos, and of course, music lessons on multiple instruments), I felt like the information about my bass lessons was getting lost in the shuffle of all the other info on that site. I decided to develop a niche website dedicated to nothing other than my bass lessons. I registered a domain name, KnoxvilleBassLessons.com, built a website, and SEO’d the heck out of it. The dedicated domain and website made it instantly clear that I was serious about teaching bass lessons. It was no longer just a page on my RB website talking about one of the many things I do musically. I also picked up a few similar domains (BassLessonsKnoxville.com, and BassLessonsKnoxvilleTN.com) to keep them out of the hands of competitors and redirected those domains to my new bass lessons website.

Common Ways Users Search on Google

• Product/Service + City + State Abbreviation (“bass lessons knoxville tn”): One of the most common ways that people use Google Search is to type in or say the product or service they are searching for, followed by the city name and state abbreviation, ie., “bass lessons knoxville tn”. By adding the state abbreviation, the user is filtering out listings from other cities named Knoxville in other states.
• Product/Service + City (“bass lessons knoxville”): Another common method of searching is to again start with the product or service followed by the city name, but this time without the state abbreviation, ie., “bass lessons knoxville”. This is more common in larger cities where the search results are less likely to show content from other cities of the same name. In Knoxville’s case, there are other cities and towns named Knoxville in Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania, and possibly elsewhere. However, even though Knoxville, TN is a small to medium sized market in general, it is the largest Knoxville in the USA by far in terms of population. So, a search like “bass lessons knoxville” is most likely going to only display results from Knoxville, TN.
• City + Product/Service (“knoxville bass lessons”): Another common way of searching, again depending on the market, is to start with city name followed by the product or service you are looking for, ie., “knoxville bass lessons”. As is the case with the previous example, searches like these are more common in larger cities where results will likely not include listings from other smaller cities of the same name in other states.

Remember those three domains I registered when I first decided to build my new bass lessons website? BassLessonsKnoxvilleTN.com, BassLessonsKnoxville.com, and KnoxvilleBassLessons.com? Did you notice that those domains match the three most common ways that people search for products and services on Google? When I first built my website, I built it on the KnoxvilleBassLessons.com domain because I thought that “Knoxville Bass Lessons” sounded the most brandable. Of course, I have the other two domains redirecting to it, so users will get there no matter which domain they type in. However, if I were to start all over again, I would highly consider branding it as “Bass Lessons Knoxville”, to put “Bass Lessons” first, and build the website on the BassLessonsKnoxville.com domain, and then have the other two domains redirecting to it.

Based on the discussion above about how users search on Google, I used the Keyword Rank Checker tool from SmallSEOtools.com to check the rank of KBL against three common search phrases – “bass lessons knoxville tn”, “bass lessons knoxville”, and “knoxville bass lessons” – which for the sake of this post, I’ll call “the big three search phrases”. As of 9/22/19, KBL is ranking at #2, #1, and #1, respectively.

Google Keyword Rank Reports: KBL vs. The Big Three Search Phrases

After building the KBL website, I also created a Facebook page dedicated to my bass lessons. I named the page “Knoxville Bass Lessons with Ryan Byrne” and created a custom url, Facebook.com/KnoxvilleBassLessons. Between my RB website, my KBL website and KBL Facebook page, I eventually had three web properties ranking on page 1 of Google for the big three search phrases. I was on to something!

Google Keyword Rank Report: “bass lessons knoxville tn”

The above report shows the top 10 (page 1) listings for the search phrase “bass lessons knoxville tn” as of 9/22/19 as searched from a laptop/desktop computer. This particular search phrase is the only one where the KBL website isn’t ranking at #1, but rather at #2. However, it is the first listing on page 1 for an actual school/instructor website, as the #1 listing is a directory site. As a matter of fact, 5 out of the top 10 results are all directory sites. This leaves only 5 spots on page 1 for actual school/instructor websites, and as of 9/22/19, I have three of those spots! As a matter of fact, the first two non-directory listings are mine.

Also ranking on page 1 is a listing for the music academy where I teach. Bass students enrolling at the academy will be distributed among the various bass instructors, which means that a percentage of those students will end up on my schedule. Therefore, I also count this listing as part of my SERPs domination strategy.

Google Keyword Rank Report: “bass lessons knoxville”

I then decided to start running a Google Ads (formerly Google AdWords) campaign for the big three search phrases (and closely related phrases) and found the bid price that displays my ad first most of the time. Between the Google Ad, my three sites, and the school site all ranking on page 1 of Google, I am definitely dominating page 1 of the Google SERPs for the big three search phrases in terms of having more listings than any other single entity. My experiment worked!

Since the KBL website and Facebook pages were performing so well, and since I also teach other instruments, I decided to create a website dedicated to my music lessons business in general to market myself for some of the other popular instruments that I teach. I named my music lessons business “Music Lessons West” (MLW) based on the fact that I teach in West Knoxville, and because the MusicLessonsWest.com domain name was available. I also registered MusicLessonsWestKnoxville.com, and built my new website on it so that the domain name itself getting indexed in the search results included the keywords “Music Lessons”, as well as the “Knoxville” and “West Knoxville” keywords. But I have the MusicLessonsWest.com domain set up to redirect to my website so that if I am telling somebody what my website url is I can just give them the shorter, more memorable domain name, MusicLessonsWest.com, that matches my business name. I also registered MusicLessonsKnoxvilleWest.com to keep it out of competitors hands and set it up to redirect to my new website as well. I am continuing to build out and optimize landing pages on my MLW website for various instruments that I teach, including a landing page for bass lessons, MusicLessonsWestKnoxville.com/Bass-Lessons. As of 9/22/19, that bass landing page is now also starting to rank on page 1 of Google for the search phrase, “knoxville bass lessons”. This means that I now have four web properties ranking on page 1 for that search phrase, plus my Google Ad on the top of the page! Talk about Page 1 Domination!

Google Keyword Rank Report: “knoxville bass lessons”

Suffice it to say that I teach more bass lessons by far each week than any other bass instructors at the academy, and have bass students requesting me by name when they sign up! MusicLessonsWestKnoxville.com will be the subject of a future case study, but I wanted to mention it here to illustrate how having a mix of full-service websites marketing your business as a whole (RyanByrne.com, MusicLessonsWestKnoxville.com), as well as niche websites zeroing in a specific service (KnoxvilleBassLessons.com) can really help to position you as a leader in your local market.

Are You Ready to Stake Your Claim?

Is your studio already on page 1 of Google? If not, we can help! If you already have a listing on page 1, are you ready to claim an even bigger chunk of page 1? We can develop a full-service or niche website to help your studio take up even more digital real estate on page 1. Contact us today!

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