Case studyHealth & wellness · SEO
Outsmarting London’s wellness giants.
How I helped an independent London massage studio win more search visibility than Treatwell, Urban and Fresha, on a £21,600 budget.
ResultsAt a glance
01The brief
An independent studio in the most crowded market in wellness.
MASAJ is an independent massage studio group in London, established in 2016. When they came to me, they were up against corporate wellness brands like Treatwell, Urban and Fresha with far bigger budgets and brand awareness, plus hundreds of independent studios. With competitor ads dominating the paid results, organic visibility mattered more, not less.
- 01Revenue. Grow year-on-year organic revenue from £660,138 to £792,000, a 20% lift.
- 02Rankings. Be the first studio Londoners find for every treatment. Hold top three for all six treatments and both studios, and grow top-three rankings across the tracked set from 40 to 65.
- 03Studio pages. Increase sessions by 30%, from 49,878 to 65,000 across Marylebone and Shoreditch.
- 04Treatment pages. Increase sessions by 150%, from 2,868 to 7,170.
- 05New studio. Launch Islington, establish local-pack visibility from opening, and deliver £25,000 organic revenue in its first ten weeks.
The budget
£21,600 across 16 months at £1,350 a month. No agency team, no content budget beyond my time and MASAJ’s therapists.
02The strategy
Optimise for people first, SEO second.
MASAJ’s strength is the in-person experience, and replicating that online is what sets the brand apart. If rankings follow from putting people first, conversion rates stay high while traffic scales. The strategy ran on two tracks.
Track 1. Localised visibility
Studio pages built MASAJ’s presence for location searches in Marylebone and Shoreditch, later Islington, while also competing for broader London massage queries.
Track 2. Treatment authority
Treatment content established authority for each individual treatment, answering the questions guests actually ask and positioning MASAJ’s therapists as the experts they are.
03How I did it
Search data, meet therapist expertise.
To rank for health treatments, content has to be genuinely authoritative, accurate and trustworthy. Every page combined search data, keyword research, guest questions, chatbot queries and competitor gaps, with real therapist expertise. I drafted from therapist conversations, the therapists edited and added their knowledge, and I finalised for search.
Medical verification
Google’s trust signals are strictest for health content. MASAJ’s pregnancy and postnatal content was written with a therapist holding a Pregnancy and Postnatal Massage Diploma, then verified by a qualified midwife and lactation consultant, both credited on the page.
Authority beyond the studio
I collaborated with GB marathon runner Anya Culling on recovery, injury prevention and sports massage, adding a genuine expert voice to the sports-massage content.
A launch playbook, proven three times
Lymphatic drainage established the method in March 2025. Facework repeated it in August 2025, taking that page from 92 to 4,309 annual sessions. Islington applied it to a physical location in June 2026, alongside 33 citations built for consistent name, address and phone details.
Proportionate technical work
On a site this size, technical SEO is a foundation, not a lever. Schema types the business as a health and beauty business with all three studios as one organisation, studio and treatment pages form two cross-linked hubs, and content-hiding transitions were stripped so nothing is hidden at render.
Sources
MASAJ is cited first, above Cleveland Clinic, for “pregnancy massage”, “prenatal massage” and “pre and post natal massage”.
04Results
We beat every target we set.
Organic revenue grew £270,064 year on year to £930,202, more than double the growth targeted. Across £21,600 of fees, the work returned 1,637%.
05Outranking the giants
More top-three rankings than every competitor combined.
Across the 118 tracked keywords, MASAJ now holds more top-three positions than Treatwell, Fresha, Urban and Cowshed together. It outranks Treatwell (DR 81) on 81 of them, Fresha on 95 and Urban on 99, all on a fraction of their domain authority.
Ranking top three for the searches that matter.
Top-three rankings across the tracked set grew from 40 to 74, including top three for all six treatments and both studios. Here are the highest-volume terms MASAJ now ranks for, and how far each one climbed.
06The Islington launch
A third studio that added rather than cannibalised.
MASAJ’s real worry was that a third London studio would just move customers from the existing two. It didn’t. Marylebone and Shoreditch combined held steady while Islington added £239,825 on top. Shoreditch, the studio nearest Islington and most at risk, actually grew 3.4%.
Top of the local map for massage islington.
From a standing start, Islington went from barely visible to owning the local pack across its catchment. For “massage islington”, the average local-pack position climbed from 7.6 in April to 1.1 by September 2026. “massage near me” told the same story, from 19 to 1.8.
“massage islington”, local pack
Average local-pack position across the Islington catchment, April to September 2026.
Claimed local packs
Google local packs claimed across the Islington campaign. 19 of 21 tracked terms rank, every one in the top three.
07The raise
Search that helped raise £1.5 million.
In July 2026, with organic its biggest growth channel, MASAJ raised £1.5 million from FIGR Ventures and Sorven Capital to double its London studios. The search strategy didn’t just grow traffic. It helped build a business investors wanted to back.
As featured in The Times · BeautyMatter · Retail Technology Innovation Hub · TheIndustry.beauty
08The win
Best Use of Search, judged on results.
In May 2026, this work won Best Use of Search in the Health category at the European Search Awards in Porto. It’s a category judged on results, and MASAJ’s spoke for themselves.
The same campaign went on to be shortlisted at the Global Search Awards and the Gather Brandland Awards. Not bad for a one-person consultancy and a studio team who let their therapists write the first draft.
09In their words
“Matt is an absolute wizard at what he does. He’s helped MASAJ build organic authority and structure our content strategy with surgical precision, but always brings warmth, curiosity and creativity to the process. Matt’s SEO led to a noticeable uplift in our bookings.”
Scarlet Amies ─── CEO, MASAJ
“A human-first approach is always our best route to authentic growth. Matt understood that from day one, and it’s why the results have felt so true to who we are.”
Alice Vaughan ─── Co-founder & COO, MASAJ
Want results like MASAJ?
If you’re a brand looking to grow through search, or an agency at capacity, let’s chat. I’ll always be honest. If SEO doesn’t fit the bill, I’ll say so.