Wagstaff Walkers
Dog walking & pet sitting, 6 teams · Manchester · Local SEO · 8 months
Six walking teams, six neighbourhoods, one map pack sweep across Manchester
Modelled scenario for a fictional business.
01The challenge
Six vans of walkers. Search could only see one front door.
A growing dog-walking business couldn't rank outside its founder's home postcode, and new teams launched to empty diaries.
Wagstaff had grown from the founder and a lead to six walking teams across south and north Manchester. Google still treated it as one business at one address in Chorlton, so map visibility faded about two kilometres out. Each new team started on referrals alone and took around 9 weeks to fill a diary, paying walkers for empty slots while it did.
02The audit
What we found sniffing round the profile, the listings and the site.
- 01 · Local1 profile
Six teams, one pin
A single Google Business Profile at the founder's home address, so every search was scored on distance from one terraced street in M21.
- 02 · Citations31 listings
Three names, two numbers
31 directory listings split between Wagstaff Walkers, Wagstaff Dog Walking and a pre-rebrand trading name, with an old mobile on 12 of them.
- 03 · Content0 area pages
An 'areas we cover' list
One page listing 28 suburbs in a paragraph. No page could rank for a neighbourhood because no page was about one.
- 04 · Reviews41 total
A review drought
41 reviews in four years, the newest seven weeks old, none mentioning a walker or area. No ask in the booking flow.
- 05 · Technical0 tracked
Invisible bookings
The enquiry form fired no event and had no LocalBusiness schema, so nobody could tell which area a request came from.
- 06 · Technical5.8s LCP
Slow on a lead-in-hand phone
Hero video autoplaying on mobile: 5.8s largest contentful paint, on the device owners use mid-walk.
03The strategy
One lead per team, four tactics per lead.
Built on our Local plan: each team treated as its own local business, launched in sequence so reviews and citations could compound before the next loop began.
- 1
Multi-location GBP
One verified service-area profile per team, each with its own walkers, photos and booking link.
- Home address hidden; service areas drawn to each team's real walking radius
- Primary category per team: dog walker, or pet sitter for Prestwich
- Weekly posts from the team lead, not a central account
- 2
Neighbourhood pages
Six pages written from the walks themselves: the parks, the routes, the questions owners in that patch ask.
- Named parks, meeting points and pick-up windows
- Team lead profile, group sizes and insurance on every page
- LocalBusiness and Service schema linked to the matching profile
- 3
Review velocity
A steady ask, not a spike: a text after the third walk, with a direct link to that team's profile.
- Target 8 to 10 new reviews per team per month
- Prompt suggests mentioning the walker and the park
- Every review answered within 48 hours by the team lead
- 4
Local citations
One name, one number, one service area per team, pushed to the directories that feed the map.
- 31 legacy listings corrected or merged
- Apple Business Connect, Bing Places and Yell per team
- Pet-specific directories and two local community hubs
04The walk
Six loops, one route. Scroll and the lead pulls you round.
Each loop is a team launch. Pins turn red when a neighbourhood reaches the map pack; choose one to read its story.
Loop 1 of 6 · M21 · live from month 1
Chorlton
- Map pack
- #4 → #1
- New reviews
- +58
- Diary full
- already
“dog walker chorlton”. The founder's patch already ranked, but on a profile pinned to a home address that dragged every other team into the same postcode. Splitting it out made Chorlton cleaner, not weaker.
0.0 of 41.6 km walked · scroll to keep going
05Month by month
8 months, at a steady trot.
- 1
Month 1 · Chorlton
Sniff around
Audit, tracking on the booking form, Chorlton profile cleaned and home address hidden.
- 2
Month 2 · Didsbury
Second lead on
Didsbury profile verified, first neighbourhood page live, citation clean-up begins.
- 3
Month 3 · Levenshulme
Ask after walk three
Review text added to the booking flow. Levenshulme launches on 31 corrected listings.
- 4
Month 4 · Ancoats
Up the stairs
Ancoats page and profile; mobile speed fix brings LCP to 1.9s.
- 5
Month 5 · Prestwich
North of the river
Prestwich launches as a sitting-first team; review pace holds at 40 a month.
- 6
Month 6 · Sale
The last loop
Sale goes live. Every team now has a page, a profile and its own review link.
- 7
Month 7
Steady trot
Pages refreshed with owner questions from enquiries; Ancoats enters the top 3.
- 8
Month 8
Full sweep
Six of six neighbourhoods in the map-pack top 3; new diaries fill in three weeks.
06Results
+204% organic booking requests
Modelled scenario for a fictional business — not a client result. Rankings and traffic are never guaranteed; see our Terms.
Neighbourhoods ranking top 3
6 / 6
Google reviews
+260
41 → 301 total, months 1–8
Time to fill new team diary
9 wks → 3 wks
Each block is a week of half-empty diary.
Map-pack positions, month 0 → 8
| Query | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| dog walker chorlton | 4 | #1 |
| dog walker didsbury | 20+ | #2 |
| dog walking levenshulme | 18 | #1 |
| dog walker ancoats | 20+ | #3 |
| dog sitter prestwich | 20+ | #2 |
| dog walker sale | 27 | #1 |
| puppy visits manchester | 31 | #5 |
| dog walker near me (M20 grid) | 20+ | #2 |
Before · “dog walker didsbury”
- APaws & Go Didsbury4.7 ★
- BThe Barking Lot4.6 ★
- CMuddy Mutts M204.5 ★
Wagstaff Walkers: not in the top 20 of the local finder.
After · month 8
- AMuddy Mutts M204.7 ★
- BWagstaff Walkers · Didsbury4.9 ★ (47)
- CPaws & Go Didsbury4.5 ★
Get a plan like this
Several teams, several neighbourhoods, one map pack to win. We'll map your route before we walk it.