About Southpaw SEO
Built by a developer who works the floor at a boxing gym.
Two people, one specialism: local search for gyms, boxing and martial-arts studios and boutique fitness in Australia. One of us does the work and one of us gets the word out. Neither of us will promise you a ranking.
01The founder
I did this for the gym I work at first.
- Name
- Toby
- Role
- Founder. Does every audit, edit, page and report.
- Day job
- Works at a boxing gym in Sydney’s inner west
- Background
- Software developer
- Based
- Sydney. Works with gyms Australia-wide
I am a software developer, and I work at a boxing gym in Sydney’s inner west. The gym is good at the part that happens in the room. It was not good at being found, and nobody on staff had the time or the background to fix that, so I did.
There was no trick to it. The Business Profile got the right categories, real photos and a description written for someone who has never boxed. The timetable stopped being a screenshot. Beginners, kids and personal training each got a page, because those are the words people type. The coaches got a two-sentence routine for asking happy members for a review, and every review got a reply. An old address that was still on half the internet got cleaned up. Then, every month, I checked whether any of it had moved, from points across the suburb rather than from the front desk.
It moved. Calls from the profile climbed, trial enquiries from search climbed, and the gym now shows in the map pack across most of its catchment rather than only around the building. The owner is signing off the exact figures before we publish them, so you will not find a number on this site yet. The method is already written up in full — how we did it, phase by phase — and you are welcome to argue with it.
Southpaw SEO is that job, done for other gyms. The edge is not a secret technique. It is that I know what the front desk hears, what a trial class costs you to run, which enquiries are worth having and which are a waste of a coach’s evening. A general agency learns your business from a questionnaire. I already work in one.
TobyFounder, Southpaw SEO
The metrics we report at that gym — calls and direction requests from the Business Profile, trial enquiries from organic search, and map-pack coverage across the catchment — are named and sourced on the how we did it page. The figures themselves are with the owner for written sign-off, and they go up when they come back.
02How we work
Four rules, none of them negotiable.
They are in the terms as well as on this page, so they bind us whether or not anyone is reading the marketing.
Evidence over folklore.
Local SEO is full of confident advice with no source behind it. We work from what Google publishes, from what we can measure in your own accounts, and from tests we have run on a real gym. Every tactic in our internal playbook carries a citation and an evidence grade. When we recommend something we cannot back, we say it is a guess and we say why we still think it is worth trying.
The monthly report leads with enquiries, not rankings.
Rankings are a means. The first line of your report is the calls, form submissions, direction requests and trial bookings your gym received, read from your Analytics and your Business Profile. Grid positions, review counts and the AI checks come after, as the explanation. If enquiries are flat while positions climb, the report says so. Underneath it sits a worklog of every hour and what it went on.
No lock-ins.
An initial 3 months, because nothing in local search moves faster than that, then month-to-month with 30 days’ notice. No 12-month contracts. Your domain, Business Profile, Search Console and Analytics are in your name from day one; we are a manager you can remove in a click. If you leave, you leave with everything.
One gym per catchment.
Roughly 5 km. While you are a client we do not run this playbook for a direct competitor inside it, because you cannot both own the same map pack. First in takes the area, and if we are already working in yours we tell you in the first reply rather than after the teardown.
03The other half
One does the work. One gets the word out.
Southpaw is two people. Toby does the delivery: every teardown, every profile edit, every page, every report. A business partner runs promotion: the advertising, the outreach, the trade days, the conversations with local clubs and sponsors that put the name in front of gym owners in the first place.
Keeping the two apart is deliberate. The person spending on promotion never has to hit a number by promising work that someone else will have to deliver, and the person doing the work is never pulled off it to chase leads. You will still talk to Toby before you sign anything: the teardown and the discovery call are his, not a salesperson’s.
Two people also means a capped client list. When it is full we say so and run a waitlist, rather than hiring quickly and letting the quality of the work carry the cost. We would rather turn a gym away for a month than do a worse job for the ones already paying.
04Our tooling
We built our own instruments.
A developer running an SEO practice has one obvious advantage: when the off-the-shelf tool is wrong, expensive or measures the wrong thing, he can write a better one. These four read straight from your own accounts and from Google, and every one of them shows up in your monthly report.
Geo-grid rank tracker
What it does
Scans a grid of points across your catchment and records where your Business Profile ranks in Google Maps from each one, for each search that matters, on the same day every month.
Why it exists
Because ranking first from your own front desk means nothing. The heat map in your monthly report comes from this, and so will the before-and-after grids from the boxing gym once its owner has signed them off.
AI-visibility checker
What it does
Asks ChatGPT, Gemini and Google’s AI answers the questions people actually ask, such as the best boxing gym in your suburb, and records whether you are named and whether what they say about you is true.
Why it exists
Because more people are asking assistants instead of searching, and most gyms have no idea what the answer is. This is a check, not a placement: nobody controls those answers, and we will not pretend to.
Review alerts
What it does
A new Google review reaches us within seconds of being posted, with a reminder attached, because Google’s own notifications arrive late or not at all.
Why it exists
Because a review answered within days reads very differently from one answered three months later, and the unhappy ones are the ones that most need a reply.
Monthly report generator
What it does
Merges Search Console, Analytics and Business Profile data with the grid scans, the AI checks and the worklog into one report, delivered in a private portal you log into.
Why it exists
Because a report assembled by hand once a month is a report that gets rounded up. Code reads the same numbers the same way every time, and you can see them yourself whenever you like.
Everything is read from accounts you own and can be exported at any time. Clients see their reports and the worklog in the client portal; nothing is locked inside a dashboard we rent.
05What we will not do
The short list of things we turn down.
Every one of these has been pitched to a gym owner we know as “the way it is done”. Each one is either against Google’s policies, against Australian law, or just bad for the gym. Usually all three.
Buy, incentivise or gate reviews.
No discounts for five stars, no free week for a mention, no filtering unhappy members away from the review link. Google’s policies and Australian Consumer Law both forbid it, and a wall of identical five-star reviews posted in the same fortnight fools nobody, least of all the people you want as members.
Guarantee rankings, leads or members.
We do not guarantee rankings, leads or member numbers. Nobody legitimately can — Google says so, and so does the ACCC. We commit to the work, in writing, and to showing you every month what it produced. First movement usually shows in 60–90 days; meaningful lead flow takes 3–6 months. Anyone quoting faster is quoting from hope.
Build doorway pages.
No stack of “boxing gym Marrickville”, “boxing gym Newtown”, “boxing gym Enmore” pages that say the same thing with the suburb swapped. Google filters them, they embarrass you when a member reads one, and they are a poor substitute for a real page about the beginners’ class people are actually searching for.
Buy links.
Paid links breach Google’s spam policies and put the whole site at risk to save a few weeks. The links we go after come from the clubs, councils, physios, schools and local media that would plausibly mention a gym anyway, because you gave them a reason to.
Hold your accounts hostage.
We never register a domain in our name, route your enquiries through a number we control, or set up a profile you cannot get into. Everything is in your name, and the terms say so.
Send you, or anyone, spam.
Every email we send identifies who sent it and how to stop receiving it, as the Spam Act requires. If you request a teardown you get the teardown and a single follow-up. You do not get added to a sequence.
Next step
See what we would fix at your gym first.
A free recorded teardown of your Google profile, website and AI visibility, back within two business days. Yours to keep whether or not we ever speak again.
Plans from $750–1,000 AUD a month, 3-month initial term, then month-to-month. Everything on the pricing page.