Case Study
Calls from Google nearly doubled, and the school is number 1 for 13 local flight-training searches
A family-owned Pacific Northwest flight school and FBO at a regional airport. The old website put every training course, from discovery flights to multi-engine, on one page with the FBO services, published no prices and had nothing aimed at local searches. We rebuilt the site with a page for each course and each FBO service, then did the local search work for the home town and the towns around it. Year on year, the school now appears in Google search 3.5 times as often, and calls from its Google listing nearly doubled.
The challenge
What a Pacific Northwest flight school and FBO needed to solve
The business is family-owned with a lot behind it: a full single-engine training fleet, a twin for multi-engine training, A&P and IA maintenance on the field, and a career-education aviation partnership with the local school district. A first-time visitor saw none of it. The site put every training stage and every FBO service on one page, kept pricing behind a general contact form, and ranked for almost nothing in its home town or the towns around it. Local people who would have booked a discovery flight were leaving, because the site gave them no way to get from 'curious about flying' to 'book the first lesson'.
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Get in touchOur approach
How the engagement was delivered
Discovery
Mapped the path a local student follows, from a discovery flight to private pilot, instrument and commercial, then on to CFI, multi-engine, complex / high-performance, and recurrent training. Mapped the operator side as well: FBO, maintenance, rental and corporate-aircraft visits. Each training stage and each FBO service needed its own page, written for the person searching for it.
Site rebuild
Rebuilt the site on Astro 5.5, a framework that serves fast pre-built pages, with a dedicated page for every training pathway and every FBO service. Each aircraft in the fleet is listed with its hourly rate and avionics detail, and discovery flight and ground school prices are published openly.
Local search groundwork
Targeted the core home-town searches (flight school, flight training, flight lessons, learn to fly, discovery flight) along with students searching from the towns around it. Added the business details Google reads (LocalBusiness schema) tied to the home airport, named the regions served, and gave every training page a section on the towns it covers, so a search from a nearby suburb lands on a relevant page.
Regular publishing
Published a community pathway page for the school district aviation science partnership and a state training-funding page for adult learners exploring workforce-agency training support. Both link directly to the relevant training pages.
Timeline
Week 1–6: discovery and full site rebuild. Week 7–12: local search groundwork and pathway pages published. Month 4 onward: monthly site improvements and ranking work on the few remaining weak spots. With the home market held, the growth work is now the nearest city.
Results
What the work produced
Real engagement. The client's identity is withheld.
56 → 107
Phone calls from the Google listing, per quarter
Calls placed straight from the school's Google Business Profile: 56 from December to February, 107 from August to October 2026. Requests for directions to the airport rose from 202 to 249 over the same quarters.
3.5×
How often the school appears in Google search
Search appearances in the US grew from 7,336 to 25,656 between August to October 2025 and the same months of 2026. Clicks through to the site rose 43%, from 511 to 729.
13
Local searches where the school is number 1
Of the 43 searches we track for student pilots and aircraft owners, 13 sit at number 1, 20 in the top 3 and 28 on the first page, up from 22 on the first page a year earlier.
Published
Fleet, training and ground school pricing
Discovery flight pricing, an hourly rate for every aircraft, ground school and the maintenance shop rate are all on the site. Few schools in the area publish that much.
Where this case study is referenced
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Your sector
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