{"id":10047,"date":"2025-09-22T13:50:21","date_gmt":"2025-09-22T13:50:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/seobuddy.com\/blog\/?p=10047"},"modified":"2025-09-25T14:56:32","modified_gmt":"2025-09-25T14:56:32","slug":"my-seo-journey-coastline","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/seobuddy.com\/blog\/my-seo-journey-coastline\/","title":{"rendered":"My SEO Journey: Renaud Delaquis from coastlineacademy.com \u2013 From Local Pages to National Reach: Scaling a Driving School with SEO, AI & Brand Fundamentals"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

My SEO Journey is a series where entrepreneurs and Indie makers share their honest SEO Journey filled with failure and success, and most importantly, proven results.<\/em> Episode #169 features Renaud Delaquis <\/em>from Coastline<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Renaud<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n


Hey I\u2019m Renaud Delaquis and I run marketing at Coastline<\/a>, the first national driving school in the U.S. It still surprises a lot of people that a national driving school didn\u2019t exist before us. Our main product is simple but important: high-quality driving lessons. We help teens who are just getting started, adults who waited until later in life, and international residents who need U.S. licenses. All of our lessons are taught by certified instructors and scheduled online, which makes the process way more convenient than most local schools. The mission is straightforward. We want to create safer, more confident drivers and make learning to drive consistent no matter where you live.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What’s your backstory and how did you get involved with Coastline?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I didn\u2019t grow up dreaming of working in driver education. What pulled me in was the scale of the challenge. Driving touches almost everyone\u2019s life, yet the industry felt like it was stuck in the 2000\u2019s. Coastline had already spotted the opportunity to build something national and modern. When I joined, I saw right away there was a huge role for marketing to play in shaping the brand and reaching people who had never thought about driving schools in this way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For me, the appeal was clear. I had worked on brands before, but usually in industries where the market was already crowded with polished players. Here, we had the chance to create a national brand in a space that had no clear leader. That felt both exciting and intimidating, which is usually a good sign.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So I didn\u2019t invent the idea for Coastline, but I knew I could help grow it. I came in with the mindset that marketing could be a major differentiator. If we told the story well, if we showed parents and students that Coastline was different from the outdated local schools they were used to, we could change how people thought about learning to drive.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since launch, what has worked to attract more organic traffic?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

People don\u2019t search for just \u201cdriving school\u201d, they search for \u201cSan Diego Driving School<\/a>\u201d or \u201cDriving Lessons in Los Angeles<\/a>.\u201d We leaned into that by creating thousands of localized landing pages that weren\u2019t just generic copies but unique enough for Google to consider it as such. This was early AI days and some of the \u201cuniqueness\u201d is pretty rough in today\u2019s standards, but it did its job. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Even if 95% of these pages didn\u2019t bring in meaningful traffic, combined they did. It allowed us to capture traffic from small suburbs that didn\u2019t have a driving school and be the most relevant page for their query. For example, Los Angeles has over 80 granular landing pages. We didn\u2019t win the \u201cdriving school in LA<\/a>\u201d query for a long time, but we did rank well for some of these smaller places which eventually allowed us to have a presence in the entire metro area.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Partnerships were another lever. By collaborating with high schools and community groups, we got listed on resource pages, which gave us backlinks from trusted local sites. Those backlinks helped us rank better, but they also brought in direct referrals from people who trusted those organizations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And then there\u2019s the fun stuff: optimizing the customer journey. One of the first major strategies I implemented was a full journey optimization. Making sure the pages converted well, that we had enough touchpoints, that happy customers were leaving positive reviews, and, most importantly, that we had tactics in place to stimulate the ultimate organic channel: word of mouth. This holistic approach did not lead to a significant increase in organic traffic, but it did increase the value of the traffic by a lot and solidified our brand as a trusted driving school. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Have you learned anything particularly helpful in your SEO journey?<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The biggest mistake we made early on was chasing the big flashy keywords. Ranking for \u201cdriving school\u201d sounded cool, but the leads were weak compared to more specific searches like \u201cdriving school near me\u201d or \u201croad test practice in Dallas.\u201d Once we focused on intent instead of volume, everything got easier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I also learned pretty quickly that SEO advice online doesn\u2019t always apply to our context. A lot of it is targeting affiliate marketers, dropshippers, or other e-commerce websites that require advanced SEO tactics<\/a> to gain an edge against their competitors. Our business is half online, half in person, giving us a wider range of tools to work with. For example, a local partnership is worth more to Coastline than just the backlink they provide. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another lesson was patience. If you\u2019re used to paid ads, SEO feels painfully slow. But once the compounding effects kick in, it\u2019s powerful. Every page that ranked well lifted the whole site\u2019s authority, which meant the next page ranked faster. You just have to trust in the process and be willing to wait for the results.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And maybe the most important lesson: don\u2019t freak out when Google changes things. We\u2019ve been hit by updates that tanked our traffic overnight. It\u2019s frustrating, but you can\u2019t control it. We were doing all the right things in 2023 and organic traffic was going down. But we kept at it and shifted our attention to things we could control instead. <\/p>\n\n\n

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\"Organic<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

(SEMrush numbers are not accurate, but the trend is)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What you can control is going back to marketing fundamentals: Create relevant and useful content, offer a great service or product, and have an efficient funnel. Remember that Google is only looking for signals that you are doing these things. Their updates are just them trying new ways of finding these types of businesses. I\u2019ve been slowly deprioritizing SEO-centric tactics in favor of these things and have seen our revenue grow even when organic traffic dipped like in 2023 and again in 2024. Paradoxically, the 2025 traffic increased significantly, which meant even more revenue from this channel. I truly believe focussing on these fundamentals will be more beneficial to your business and will indirectly increase your search rankings.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n

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There\u2019s more\u2026<\/div>\r\n

Now it\u2019s time to discover the other 102 steps that will get more organic traffic flowing to your website. Get the SEO Checklist here.<\/a><\/p>\n

Want to get a sneak peek of what it looks like?<\/strong>
\nEnter your email and get a free demo version of the SEO Checklist.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\r\n

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