SEO case study: how a chess coach got clients from Google

TL;DR Six weeks after we finished rebuilding his website, a chess coach started getting new students from Google, ChatGPT, and LinkedIn. This SEO case study covers what his old site was missing, what we changed, and how we know exactly where every student came from.

Slaven Pastar is a chess coach and my client. I built his website, knight-jump.com, and we stayed in close contact after launch. He tests my CMS, reports problems, and has helped me improve it a ton.

When the site was done I asked him for one thing. Whenever a new client reaches out, ask them how they found you and tell me, so we can both be sure the website is working.

Six weeks later the answers started coming in. One new student found him through Google search. Another found him through ChatGPT. A third came from a LinkedIn post he wrote with the blog writer built into my CMS and published on my recommendation. Three students, three different channels, one body of SEO work behind all of them.

His domain is brand new, so authority is still building and these are early results, not the peak. In this SEO case study I go through what his old website was doing wrong, what we changed, and which parts of the work actually brought students in.

Why his old website brought zero students

Slaven is my childhood friend, I have known him since we were kids. He was a chess prodigy. Junior champion of Bosnia and Herzegovina, twice runner-up in the junior championship, and a regular at European and World Youth Championships. The newspapers wrote about him constantly while we were growing up. Today he is an International Master and FIDE Instructor with more than 20 years in chess and over 7 years of coaching behind him.

From a professional standpoint he had it all. But he had one struggle. He could not find clients organically. He had plenty of students and word of mouth kept them coming, but he has room for more, and he always felt like he had to hunt for them.

So he approached me. He knew I build websites, and that I do not stop at websites, I develop online businesses. We struck a deal to improve his SEO.

Then I visited his website and noticed something was off. It ran on a random free WordPress theme made for resumes, not for coaching. Users could not find the information they were looking for, and mobile was no better. Plenty of links were dead, and some pages still carried placeholder text from the theme. There was zero information about his coaching services, so Google had nothing to present on search.

I told him directly that even if I did SEO on that website, it would not work, because users would leave immediately. So we decided to build him a brand new website on my platform.

I also had to train Slaven on something that has nothing to do with code. Your website is your authority. If a client does not feel like your website is right, they will not trust you. Clients like to feel safe. Your credentials mean nothing if they are not presented the right way.

What we changed on the site

Everything. We did not patch the old site, we replaced it.

The business plan came first

No development starts before a business plan. I build one for every client, and I use it as the context for how the website gets built. The plan gave me insight into how the chess coaching industry works, who the clients are, who the competition is and what they do right and wrong, and how clients actually search for a new coach. Every page on the new site is built on that context.

Design that does not look like AI slop

I spent countless hours on the design. I did not want it to look generic or like an AI slop website, which most modern sites are. I wanted all information to be easily accessible and readable. The website is also extremely fast, so Google's crawl budget is not wasted.

A brand, not a personal page

The website is focused on the Knight Jump brand, not on Slaven Pastar as a personal brand. It is branded more as a chess school than a personal site. I believe that is more scalable. If he ever grows enough, he can hire other coaches and scale the business under the brand. And his name still helps Knight Jump grow, because he is known in the chess world.

Pages built around how clients search

The heart of the site is an entire cluster of pages dedicated to coaching, sitting at the top of his navigation menu at knight-jump.com/coaching. A potential client can learn everything about his coaching services there. This is exactly the content Google had nothing of before. Now it has pages to rank for the searches his clients actually type.

Structured data, languages, and AI engines

Under the surface, the site tells search engines exactly who Slaven is. Structured data links him to his FIDE profile, chess.com, lichess, and Wikidata, so Google and AI engines can verify he is a real International Master and not just a claim on a landing page. His student reviews are real and marked up with structured data, which earns him star ratings in Google results. And the site is not English-only, other languages get their own pages, so clients can find him in more than one market.

One more thing most people miss. Cloudflare blocks AI crawlers by default. If we had left that on, ChatGPT could never have read his site, and the student who found him through ChatGPT would never have found him. We made sure AI engines can read everything.

The results

Let me be upfront about scale. This is the first three months of a brand new domain, so the absolute numbers are small. For a coaching business that does not matter. Slaven does not need ten thousand visitors, he needs a handful of the right ones.

Search Console for the last three months shows 181 clicks and just over 3,000 impressions, with an average CTR of 5.8 percent and an average position of 8.6, which means page one on average. The impressions curve bends clearly upward through August, right after we considered the site done.

The clicks split tells the real story. The query "slaven pastar" brought 114 clicks. His name was known in the chess world long before the website, but that reputation finally has somewhere to land that actually presents his coaching. And "knight jump" showed up in search 48 times and earned 5 clicks, a brand that did not exist as a search term a few months ago.

The non-branded discovery is coming from the educational pages. How much do chess lessons cost alone earned 1,099 impressions, more than the homepage. Is a chess coach worth it earned another 239. These are strangers, people who have never heard of Slaven, seeing his site while they research coaching. Most of them do not click yet because the pages are still climbing the rankings, but impressions are what ranking growth looks like before the clicks arrive.

In total, Google now shows the site for 145 different queries, and not only in English. Serbian queries are in the mix, and non-English pages already collect clicks. Six weeks ago Google had nothing to present for him.

And the part that matters more than any chart. Three new students, each traced to a channel, because Slaven asks every new client how they found him. One typed a search into Google. One asked ChatGPT. One was a woman who contacted him after the LinkedIn post he wrote with the blog writer in my CMS. Traffic is a means. Students are the result.

What actually moved the needle

Everything I listed above, but collectively. No single trick produced these students. If I had to name the one thread that runs through all of it, it is proof.

Slaven had no proof of his credentials, at least not online, and I know from experience that Google needs proof. So every claim on his website is verifiable at the source. When the site says he is an International Master, that title is checkable on his FIDE profile, and the site links straight to it. His entire online and media presence is synced with the website, so everything we say is true and everything true is connected. I strictly follow E-E-A-T, Google's own standard for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trust. Previously he had none of that in place. My own blog is proof of the same approach, it reached 333K impressions with hand-written posts.

The other half of proof is who points at you. Slaven has had profiles on chess.com and lichess for many years, established pages with real history. We made sure they link back to his website. For a brand new domain, backlinks from old trusted profiles that carry his exact name mean a lot.

All of that together is what improved his trust with Google. Not one trick. Every claim backed by a source, and every profile pointing at the same place.

Frequently asked questions

How long does it take for SEO to bring clients to a new website?

In this case, about six weeks from the moment we considered the website done to the first students we could trace back to it. A brand new domain still has to build authority, so the early months show growing impressions before they show many clicks. Treat the first quarter as the ramp, not the result.

Can people really find a business through ChatGPT?

Yes. One of Slaven's three new students found him through ChatGPT. For that to happen, AI engines must be able to read the site, and Cloudflare blocks their crawlers by default. The site also has to prove who you are with structured data and verifiable credentials, because AI engines favor sources they can trust.

Is it better to fix an old website or build a new one for SEO?

It depends on what the old site is. If it has a solid structure and just needs content, fix it. Slaven's old site ran on a free resume theme with dead links, placeholder text, and nothing about his services, so SEO on top of it would have been wasted. Visitors would have left the moment they landed.

What is E-E-A-T and why does it matter for a small business?

E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, the standard Google uses to judge content quality. For a small business it means every claim on your website should be checkable at the source. Slaven's titles link to his FIDE profile, and his long-standing chess.com and lichess profiles link back to his site.

How do you know if your website is actually bringing clients?

Ask every new client how they found you. It is the simplest attribution system there is, and it catches what analytics cannot see, like someone who heard about you from ChatGPT or a LinkedIn post. Combine those answers with Search Console and you know exactly what is working.