Academy Marketing Platform

Parents need to find a class close to home, for the right age group, and book a free trial with as little friction as possible. Meanwhile the academy's small team needs to update programmes, venues, prices, testimonials, and blog content across multiple towns without developer involvement.

The existing client-rendered architecture worked against both goals. Search engines saw an empty shell rather than real content, a serious limitation when the business model depends on ranking for "football classes in {town}", and each town landing page was hardcoded, making geographic expansion a development task instead of a content task.

We migrated the public site to Next.js server rendering without a big-bang rewrite. An idempotent migration script converted image tags to optimized image components, replaced browser-side SEO tooling with Next.js metadata, and centralized the shared layout, while legacy routes stayed mounted through a catch-all until each page was migrated.

We made locations data, not code. A migration consolidated per-town collections and hardcoded pages into a single locations collection with admin CRUD, so the academy opens a page for a new town from the CMS. A URL rewrite serves each page at a keyword-rich address like /football-classes-in-barnet while one implementation renders them all.

We treated SEO and measurement as product features: structured data on every page type, canonical URLs with slug normalization and redirects, a database-driven sitemap, per-page titles and descriptions editable from the CMS, and named conversion events wired for Google Ads import, including the outbound click that hands a parent off to the booking platform.

A parent lands on the home page or a town landing page, opens the class finder, and types an address or shares their location. The finder geocodes the input through Google Maps, queries the API for classes within a 10 km radius filtered by the child's age, computes driving distance to each venue with a straight-line fallback, and lists classes sorted by miles. Radius search runs on a MongoDB 2dsphere geospatial index, so proximity filtering happens in the database rather than in application code.

The admin panel gives the academy control over effectively every word and image on the site: home page sections, programmes, holiday camps, birthday parties, school and nursery programmes, franchise recruitment, testimonials, FAQs, a blog with slug management, a hall of fame for player success stories, coupons, and the location pages themselves. A dedicated Page SEO module sets title, description, keywords, and social-share image per URL, merged over per-entity defaults at render time.

Around the core funnel we built the operational machinery of a production site: enquiry forms delivering templated emails per enquiry type, an S3/CloudFront media pipeline with presigned browser-direct video uploads and FFmpeg thumbnails, a bulk WebP conversion pipeline that rewrites stored URLs across the database with dry-run and restore paths, and scheduled jobs for coupon and membership expiry.