Case study
Leon Toppin
An independent skateboard instructor in New York had zero digital presence. Six months later, he ranks on page 1 of Google for 124 queries, converts 17.6% of website visitors into booked lessons, and gets found through ChatGPT.
Visit leontoppin.com →17.6%
Visitor-to-booking rate
124
Search queries ranking
6.5
Avg Google position
5.0★
Google rating (18 reviews)
The client
Leon Toppin teaches people how to skateboard for a living.
He is a certified instructor based in Westchester County, New York. He travels to students across all five NYC boroughs and a dozen Westchester towns, seven days a week. His students range from age 4 to 65. He has been skating for 33 years, teaching for 15, and has done background skating work on HBO's Betty.
When we started working together, Leon had zero active clients and zero digital infrastructure. No website. No Google Business Profile. No way to book online. No presence in local search. His business ran entirely on word of mouth, Instagram DMs, and text messages. A parent in Larchmont searching “skateboard lessons near me” would never find him.
The challenge
First, we had to understand who was actually looking for skateboard lessons.
Before building anything, we researched the market. The ideal client turned out to be specific: parents in Westchester County and upper Manhattan, ages 30 to 50, looking for structured activities for kids under 12. They search on Google, not Instagram. They want a real website with pricing, credentials, and a way to book. Leon had none of that.
The competitive analysis was encouraging. Skateboard instruction is a thin market. Most “competitors” are skate parks or camps, not one-on-one instructors. The few individual instructors with a web presence had weak sites and no local SEO. Leon's 15 years of teaching experience and his range (Westchester to all five boroughs) were real differentiators. Nobody else covered that geography.
The gap was clear: Leon had a strong service and no way for the right people to find it. The job was to build the entire digital side of the business from zero and put him in front of parents who were already searching.
Homepage
Lessons
Pricing
The work
Every deliverable came from the research.
The audience research told us parents search by location. So we built 18 location pages. The competitive analysis told us nobody owned “skateboard lessons” in local search. So we set up a Google Business Profile and structured data to claim that space. The ideal client profile told us these parents want to book quickly. So we built a fast site with a booking form above the fold. Nothing was built on a hunch.
Website
Custom website
Custom-built, responsive, fast, with a booking form that sends leads straight to Leon. Cookie-consented analytics. Structured data on every page. Not a template.
Local SEO
18 location pages
One page for each area Leon teaches: Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and 13 Westchester towns from New Rochelle to Tarrytown. Each has unique copy, local schema, and location-specific keywords.
Analytics
Full-stack tracking
GA4 events on every conversion point: phone clicks in the nav and footer, booking form submissions, and a generate_lead event. Meta Pixel firing Lead and InitiateCheckout events. All behind cookie consent.
Press
Local media outreach
Pitched four local publications: Westchester Family, The Journal News (lohud), Patch Larchmont, and News 12 Westchester. Each pitch written for the outlet's format and audience.
Content
Social and marketing assets
Produced a scrolling video of the site for Instagram Stories. Structured the lesson pricing into 7 tiers including 10-packs, monthly standing sessions, and 6-month commitments. Built the framework for an ongoing journal.
Six months later
The site that did not exist six months ago now converts at 3 to 8 times the industry average.
The domain had no history. Six months later, 68 unique visitors find Leon's site each month through eight different channels: Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, ChatGPT, Instagram, email referrals, and direct traffic. Organic search accounts for almost half of it. The numbers are modest in absolute terms because this is a solo skateboard instructor in Westchester County, not a national brand. What matters is what happens after people arrive.
Of those 68 visitors, 12 initiated a booking in the last 28 days. That is a 17.6% visitor-to-booking rate. The industry average for service businesses is 2 to 5%. The booking page alone accounts for 154 views and 17 conversion events, nearly half of all conversions on the site. The about page averages over 10 minutes of engagement from direct traffic. People who find Leon are reading his story, exploring his pricing, and booking lessons.
Google Search Console shows the compounding effect. In the first week after launch, the site appeared for 9 queries with 58 impressions. Six months in, it ranks for 124 queries at an average position of 6.5, which is the first page of Google. The click-through rate has climbed steadily from 5.2% to 5.9%. Forty-one percent of all clicks over the entire six months happened in the last 28 days alone. The curve is accelerating.
Leon also has five sessions per month coming from ChatGPT, with an 80% engagement rate and a 20% conversion rate. When someone asks an AI assistant about skateboard lessons in Westchester or New York, Leon's site shows up. The FAQ page and schema markup we built made it easy for AI systems to cite.
By the numbers
Monthly unique visitors
68
Visitor-to-booking rate
17.6%
Booking initiations (28 days)
12
Engagement rate
71.6%
Avg engagement time
7m 02s
Search queries ranking
124
Avg Google position
6.5 (page 1)
Organic search CTR
5.9%
Traffic channels
8 (Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, ChatGPT, Instagram, email, direct)
Google review rating
5.0 stars (18 reviews)
What compounds from here
The infrastructure is in place. Everything from here compounds.
Leon is listed on Google Business Profile with 18 five-star reviews, on Yelp in the top 10 for skateboard lessons in both White Plains and New York City, on Activity Hero with private and group listings, and on Macaroni KID's Southern Westchester directory. Each listing is a backlink and a discovery channel that builds authority without any additional spend.
Six months ago, a parent searching for skateboard lessons in Larchmont would never have found Leon. Now they find him on Google, on Yelp, on directory sites, and through ChatGPT. The site, the content, and the listings keep working whether or not anyone touches them.
“Maria redesigned my site from the ground up and gave it the professional look and feel it deserved. Every detail was handled with real care. Since working with ROZUM, my sales and bookings have gone up noticeably. Can't recommend her enough.”
Curious what this could look like for your business?