The Client

The London Piano Centre, founded by international performing artist Gabriele Baldocci, serves piano students in the Marylebone neighborhood of London. Gabriele has a staff of five teachers, and they had a growing piano studio to get off the ground.

Competition for music lessons in London is extremely stiff. Celebrities (including Ryan Gosling) have piano coaches located in London, and at least two local piano teaching businesses have several locations and do $3M+ per year in revenue.

The Need

Gabriele Baldocci found me organically online, and he hired me to deliver a fully built website, SEO content plan, ongoing SEO strategy, and Google Ads campaign. The London Piano Centre was brand new, so they needed a website and a steady flow of organic and paid leads. The annual value of a student at London Piano Centre is around $4,000.

The Work

My engagement with the London Piano Centre was the last four months and in that time, we had to build a website, write the content, populate his blog, build a number of links to his site, optimize his local SEO presence, and build an industry-standard Google Ads campaign.

The Website Build

The website was built in the mold of a luxury business and suited to the clientele in his area of london. Additionally, it was loaded with content before we launched it, it was lightning fast, and it was fully optimized for Google (including Local SEO optimizations and internal link structure).

See the London Piano Centre’s website here: https://londonpianocentre.com/ 

SEO Campaign

The first step was to find every mention of Gabriele Baldocci’s name on the internet. He’s a well-known pianist, so he has been written about in newspapers, featured at universities, and the like. I reached out to every editor and writer I could find, asking them to include links to his piano school — the end result was 5-10 high powered external links from universities and respected publications.

Secondly, I built his Google My Business listing and set about creating “citations” on the web. He started receiving traffic from his Google My Business listing with three weeks of it being built.

The third — and most challenging — step was to build links to his site by finding reputable web directories, reaching out to relevant blogs and websites about links and features, and guest writing articles that contained links to his site. I also used a proprietary method to buy expired domains that already had great backlinks and redirect them into his website.

Content Strategy Implementation

Google loves content, so in addition to generous homepage copy, service pages, geo-targeted pages, and biography pages, I implemented a 20-blog content strategy. I wrote expert blogs on a number of piano-related topics, including guides to piano tuners in London (this blog now ranks on the first page of Google) and piano moving companies in London. These blogs also included strategically arranged internal links to the money pages on the website.

Google Ads Campaign

I built a Google Ads campaign targeting these three areas:

  • Searches included the words “near me” within a 2km range of his business
  • Searches included more generalized terms within 5km of his business
  • Searches for “live piano lessons online,” “skype piano lessons,” and the like

I also connected his Google Ads account to his Google My business listing, so his ads were eligible to show in the map pack.

Results

We’ve seen astounding keyword ranking growth since londonpianocentre.com launched in January of 2020:

Gabriele’s contract paid itself off in the first month of his site being live, and considering the fact that it often takes 6 months before Google truly rewards a brand new site for SEO work, it would appear that we are far ahead of the curve. The London Piano Centre now ranks on page one of Google for the terms “Piano lessons London” and “London Piano Lessons.”