Cheshire Digital Marketing partnered with Athletes Untapped to build a scalable digital strategy from the ground up—and it’s still going strong three years later.
The Challenge: Breaking Through in a Crowded, Competitive Market
Athletes Untapped launched with a bold vision: to make high-quality, one-on-one sports coaching accessible to families across the U.S. By matching youth athletes with vetted private coaches in their area, the platform aimed to disrupt the traditional, word-of-mouth approach to finding a coach.
But the challenge was steep. The youth sports market is highly competitive, dominated by large training academies and well-funded platforms. Local SEO for search terms like “private basketball coach near me” was saturated—and expensive to break into with paid ads.
To make matters more complex, Athletes Untapped was an early-stage, bootstrapped startup founded by a passionate young couple. They had no domain authority, no existing website traffic, and a small digital presence—motivated by just a great idea and a deep belief in the value of their offering.
To grow, they needed a sustainable lead generation strategy that didn’t rely on massive advertising spend. That’s where Cheshire Digital Marketing came in.
The Strategy: Building a Scalable, Sustainable Marketing Engine
The Athletes Untapped (AU) journey began in the greater Philadelphia area with a proof of concept focused on soccer and basketball. To get early traction, we launched hyper-targeted, local Facebook ad campaigns—deliberately low-cost but high-converting. These ads were designed to stretch every marketing dollar, delivering what we believed to be the “biggest bang for the buck.”
To enhance ad performance and brand credibility, we assisted with photo and video sessions, creating evergreen commercial assets that could be repurposed across campaigns.
As AU grew beyond the local market, we expanded into Google Ads, using keyword research and intent-based targeting to reach users searching for terms like “private basketball coach near me.” This allowed us to scale efficiently into new regions and eventually nationwide.
When the business was ready to offer coaching in all 16 sports across the U.S., we needed a powerful yet manageable local SEO strategy that could scale. The solution was a custom website architecture that supported dynamic content generation.
We developed SEO-friendly, modular templates by sport, state, and city—allowing the generation of over 180,000 unique landing pages. Each page pulled in custom content relevant to its location and sport type, boosting organic discoverability without requiring manual updates. Thanks to this setup, system-wide edits and strategy shifts could be rolled out seamlessly across the entire platform.
To support long-term growth and trust-building, we implemented a blog and supplemental support site, facilitating the targeting of long-tail keywords and speaking directly to solving parent and coach pain points. We also conducted ongoing competitive research, optimized for page indexing, and continuously monitored performance through Google Search Console and Google Analytics.
We tracked traffic sources, purchase paths, and conversion rates using a robust Google Tag setup—ensuring every marketing initiative could be evaluated, adjusted, and scaled based on real data.
The Results: From Local Startup to National Player
The impact of Athletes Untapped’s digital strategy has been both measurable and transformational.
In its first year, Athletes Untapped averaged around 1,000 active users per month from organic traffic. But since launching a comprehensive SEO page strategy just 8 months ago, that number has skyrocketed to an average of 14,500 monthly users—a 1,350% increase. In the most recent 3-month period alone, the platform has exceeded 20,000 active users per month, underscoring the long-term impact of scalable SEO done right.The number of ranking keywords exploded from just 212 to over 4,400 in a single year. Even more impressively, Athletes Untapped now appears in the top 5 search results for highly competitive, conversion-focused phrases like:
- “sports lessons near me” – Rank #2
- “private coaching” – Rank #2
- “find a sports coach” – Rank #2
- “sports instruction” – Rank #4
- “sports coaching websites” – Rank #5
This organic dominance, paired with targeted paid ads, now generates a steady stream of qualified leads each month.
What began with two sports and roughly 200 coaches has now scaled to:
- 3,000+ coaches
- 50 states
- 16 different sports
The company has grown 5x year-over-year in bookings, remained fully bootstrapped, and recently hired its first in-house CTO to expand the technology platform—proof that sustainable marketing and SEO can drive long-term business success.
Final Thoughts: Strategy That Scales
Athletes Untapped is proof that you don’t need a huge budget or a head start to succeed—you just need the right strategy. What we built wasn’t a quick win or one-off campaign. It was a scalable, sustainable SEO and digital marketing foundation that continues to deliver long after launch.
For founders who feel buried beneath better-funded competitors, this is exactly the kind of strategic support I offer—growth without the guesswork, and visibility without breaking the bank.
If you’re ready for your business to be seen, let’s talk.