Digital Vikingz
Our day spa SEO case study follows a US day spa and mineral pools brand with three locations in three states, offering outdoor mineral pools, cold plunges, saunas, massage and facials. Digital Vikingz ran a six-month semantic SEO program for the spa, November 2025 to April 2026. Non-branded clicks from Google Search rose 42%, from 5.5k to 7.81k, between two equal windows before and during the program.
Results at a glance
| Metric | Before | After | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Non-branded clicks | 5.5k | 7.81k | +42% |
| Non-branded impressions | 1.18m | 1.87m | +58% |
| Blog folder, non-branded impressions | 609,212 | 1,539,204 | +153% |
| Blog folder, non-branded clicks | 2,563 | 4,634 | +81% |
| All clicks, branded and non-branded | 74k | 92.8k | +25% |
The before window is 1 Aug to 29 Oct 2025 and the after window is 1 Feb to 30 Apr 2026, two windows of 89 days each, read in Google Search Console (Search type Web) on 13 November 2026.
The starting point
Non-branded queries brought a small share of the day spa's Google clicks before the program. Non-branded queries earned 5.5k of the 74k clicks between 1 Aug and 29 Oct 2025. The spa had the services people searched for, and its pages did not yet win those searches.
Demand for the treatments the spa sells already showed in Search Console. The query "lymphatic drainage massage" showed the site 97,732 times in the before window. The same query brought 102 clicks in that window.
Local experience queries showed the same gap. The query "couples massage [city]" brought 2 clicks in the before window. The couples spa day guide for the home city earned 4 clicks in the same window.
What we did
The four layers of the day spa SEO program are listed below:
- Technical SEO fixes. We fixed the technical SEO issues on the spa's site so search engines crawl and index its pages cleanly.
- A topical map and new guide content. We built a topical map with the day spa and its treatments as the central entity, from mineral pools and cold plunges to massage and facials, and wrote new guides, each from a content brief.
- Rewrites of existing service and category pages. We rewrote the service and category pages so each page answers the queries the topical map assigns to it.
- Internal links and schema. We linked the guides to the service pages they support and added schema markup that describes the business and its pages.
What changed in Google Search
Guide pages carried most of the day spa's non-branded gain. Blog pages earned 4,634 non-branded clicks in the after window, up from 2,563.
The guides with the largest non-branded click gains, each already live before the program, are listed below:
- Lymphatic massage guide: 169 to 745 clicks.
- Couples spa day guide for the home city: 4 to 724 clicks.
- Sound bath guide: 20 to 379 clicks.
- Guide to mineral hot springs in the home state: 819 to 1,064 clicks.
- Compression boots guide: 53 to 209 clicks.
- Cold plunge benefits guide: 80 to 133 clicks.
Treatment queries grew over the same windows. The query "lymphatic drainage massage" grew from 102 to 478 clicks. The query "what is a sound bath" grew from 8 to 182 clicks.
Local queries grew over the same windows. The query "couples massage [city]" grew from 2 to 257 clicks. The query "hot springs in [state]" grew from 178 to 240 clicks.
The gain was spread across the query set. Search Console shows 746 non-branded queries that gained clicks. Another 152 queries earned impressions only in the after window.
Non-branded figures use a filter that excludes the brand name, location names tied to the brand and the street address. Search Console notes that filtered totals may be partial.
What changed in AI search
Two reports measure how often AI search features show or cite the day spa's pages. Both reports, as read for this case, start in May 2026, after the program ended, so both figures describe where the site stood after the program, not a change. We do not compare the two reports, since each counts a different thing over a different window.
Google Search Console's Generative AI features report, in beta, counted 422k impressions for the spa's pages between 18 May and 10 Nov 2026. The most shown pages are the homepage, the pricing and offers pages, and guides on compression boots, cold plunges, lymphatic massage, hot springs and sound baths. Guides on lymphatic massage, sound baths, compression boots and cold plunges appear both here and among the Google Search gainers.
Bing Webmaster Tools' AI Performance report, which covers Microsoft Copilot and partners, counted 14.4K citations between 14 May and 11 Nov 2026. The report lists 72 cited pages across the period. The most cited are the homepage, the spa services page, a guide to balneotherapy, the offers, amenities and pricing pages, and guides to hot springs in other states.
What did not move
The limits of the day spa results are listed below:
- Average position. Google changed how Search Console counts results in mid-September 2025, before the program started, and average position jumped on that date across the site. The before window, 1 Aug to 29 Oct 2025, spans that change, so we make no claim on average position or on counts of queries in the top 10, which come from the same position data. Impressions also fell at that change, so the impressions figures compare windows counted partly in different ways.
- Click-through rate. Non-branded click-through rate moved from 0.5% to 0.4%, because impressions grew faster than clicks.
- Season. The before window covers August to October and the after window covers February to April, so the two windows sit in different seasons. The Search Console data read for this case starts in July 2025, which leaves no earlier year to separate seasonal demand from the program.
The pages that lost non-branded clicks are listed below:
- Guide to hot springs in another state: 535 to 450 clicks.
- City spa guide: 227 to 101 clicks.
- Spa services page: 401 to 119 clicks.
- Pricing page: 125 to 94 clicks.
- First-visit guide: 160 to 104 clicks.
The gains did not hold through the following summer and autumn. Clicks for 1 Aug to 29 Oct 2026 were 50.6k, against 74k for the same months of 2025. Daily clicks ran at about 1,200 a day from December 2025 to June 2026 and about 500 a day by October 2026.
What this means for your business
The points a day spa or wellness brand can act on are listed below:
- Give every treatment people search for its own guide. Guide pages earned most of the non-branded click gain in this case, which makes guides the center of a spa content strategy.
- Plan the topical map before the pages. A topical map gives each treatment, experience and question one owner page, and our guide on how to build a topical map shows the steps.
- Track non-branded queries on their own. Branded clicks hide whether SEO for day spas brings in new customers, and a non-branded filter in Search Console shows it.
- Set an AI search baseline in the first month. Neither AI report in this case had a before figure, and a baseline recorded early turns AI search visibility for spas into a change you can measure. Our guide shows how to check what AI says about your business before the work starts.
Wellness spa SEO rests on guides and service pages that answer one query each, written from a brief. Digital Vikingz plans and writes those pages through Semantic Content Writing.
