Illustrative case study

A fictional business. The figures are a modelled scenario, not a client result.

Community sailing school · Barcelona

Escola de Vela Garbí

A non-profit sailing school flew past commercial charters in Barcelona search

+129%

organic course sign-ups

The same, in flags

Plan
Local
Duration
7 months
Region
Spain

Hover or tab through the flags to read the hoist

01 · Signal B · R · I · E · F

Charters owned the water. The school was flying the wrong flag.

Tourist charter companies owned 'sailing lessons Barcelona' and the school's Catalan-only site didn't reach residents searching in Spanish or English.

Escola de Vela Garbí has taught dinghy sailing off the city beaches for decades, run by volunteers and priced for local families. Online it looked like a members’ club: one Catalan page, a PDF calendar and a Business Profile filed under “Sports club”.

Meanwhile three charter operators with marketing budgets and hundreds of tourist reviews filled the map pack for every lesson query in Spanish and English, the two languages most of the city’s parents actually search in. Course sign-ups from search had been flat for two seasons.

sailing lessons barcelonaAudit
  1. 1

    Barcelona Sail Charters

    4.8 ★ (1,240) · Boat tour agency

  2. 2

    Mediterrani Yacht Experience

    4.7 ★ (860) · Boat rental service

  3. 3

    Port Sunset Cruises

    4.9 ★ (412) · Tour operator

Mock-up. Escola de Vela Garbí sat at position 11 in the local finder, listed as a “Sports club”.

02 · Signal A · U · D · I · T

Six findings from the dock, the site and the map.

  • Technical

    One URL, three languages, one indexed

    A JavaScript switcher swapped the copy in place, so Google only ever crawled the Catalan version. No hreflang, no x-default.

    0 hreflang tags

  • Technical

    Courses invisible to rich results

    41 course and camp pages carried no structured data; dates and prices lived in a downloadable PDF calendar.

    41 pages, 0 schema

  • Technical

    Slow on the dock

    A 3.2 MB hero photo pushed mobile LCP to 4.8 s, on the phones parents use to compare schools.

    LCP 4.8 s

  • Local

    Listed as a club, not a school

    The Business Profile's primary category was “Sports club”, so it never qualified for “sailing school” map-pack queries.

    Wrong category

  • Local

    Reviews only in Catalan

    14 reviews, all from members, none in Spanish or English, and none answered. Charters averaged 300+.

    14 vs 300+

  • Content

    No page for the youth programme

    The most-requested course, summer sailing for 8–14 year olds, was a paragraph on the homepage with no price or dates.

    0 landing pages

03 · Signal P · L · A · N

Four tactics, one signal: this is the city's sailing school.

Built on our Local plan: local visibility first, then the pages and proof that let Google trust a small non-profit over companies with a hundred times the reviews.

  1. 01

    Google Business Profile

    Recategorised as “Sailing school” with “Non-profit organisation” secondary, then built the profile out like a course catalogue.

    • Courses added as Products with price and age range
    • Seasonal hours for winter and summer terms
    • Weekly posts for every regatta and open day
    • Booking link to the course page, not the homepage

  2. 02

    Multilingual pages

    Split the site into /ca/, /es/ and /en/ with reciprocal hreflang, then wrote each language for the people who search in it rather than translating word for word.

    • Residents in Spanish: “curso de vela niños”
    • Expats and visitors in English: “learn to sail”
    • Language-specific title tags and FAQs
    • Catalan stays the x-default for the city

  3. 03

    Course schema

    Turned the PDF calendar into crawlable pages, each marked up as Course with CourseInstance dates and an Offer price.

    • EducationalOrganization + NGO on the homepage
    • CourseInstance for every term and camp week
    • Offer with price, currency and availability
    • Validated on all 41 pages in Search Console

  4. 04

    Review strategy

    A QR code at the dock and a post-course email in the student's own language, sent on the day of their last session.

    • Asks timed to the end of each course week
    • Every review answered in its own language
    • Parents prompted to mention the youth camp
    • No incentives, in line with Google policy

04 · Signal L · O · G

The ship's log: 7 months, month by month.

  1. Month 1

    Audit and profile rebuild

    Crawl, Business Profile recategorised, citations reconciled across 9 directories.

    Map-pack top 3: 4

  2. Month 2

    Language architecture

    /ca/ /es/ /en/ folders, hreflang and redirects from the old single URLs.

    Map-pack top 3: 6

  3. Month 3

    Calendar to pages

    41 course pages out of the PDF, Course schema validated, hero images compressed.

    Map-pack top 3: 9

  4. Month 4

    Spanish and English copy

    Native-written course pages and a dedicated youth programme hub in each language.

    Map-pack top 3: 13

  5. Month 5

    Reviews at the dock

    QR and email asks live; reviews pass 60 with Spanish and English represented.

    Map-pack top 3: 17

  6. Month 6

    Local links

    Municipal sports directory, the sailing federation and two neighbourhood schools.

    Map-pack top 3: 20

  7. Month 7

    Summer camp season

    Camp weeks fill from search; 22 keywords hold a map-pack top-3 place.

    Map-pack top 3: 22

05 · Signal R · E · S · U · L · T

Flying past the charters.

Modelled scenario for a fictional business — not a client result. Rankings and traffic are never guaranteed; see our Terms.

Headline

+129%

organic course sign-ups, month 7 vs the same month last year

Last year · 216

With Local · 363

02040608033M138M245M352M458M566M671M7

  • Map-pack top 3 keywords

    3 → 22

    M0M1M2M3M4M5M6M722

  • Languages ranking

    3

  • Youth programme enrolments

    +46%

    172from 118

The same query, seven months on

Spanish-language searches now meet the school first.

clases de vela barcelonaMonth 7
  1. 1

    Escola de Vela Garbí

    4.9 ★ (96) · Sailing school · Non-profit

  2. 2

    Barcelona Sail Charters

    4.8 ★ (1,240) · Boat tour agency

  3. 3

    Port Sunset Cruises

    4.9 ★ (412) · Tour operator

Mock-up. The school's own profile leads the map pack, in the language of the search.

Rankings in all three languages

A sample of the tracked set, by site language.

Residents and families searching in Spanish. Google position at the audit vs month 7.

QueryVol/moBeforeAfter
clases de vela barcelona1,900not rankingTop 3#2
curso de vela niños barcelona880not rankingTop 3#1
escuela de vela barcelona1,300#18Top 3#1
campus de verano vela barcelona480not rankingTop 3#3
curso de vela adultos390#34Top 3#3

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