D2C · Bakery (UAE)5 months· 4 min read

Ranking a UAE cake shop #1 for 40+ local searches.

Built by Timewheel

Occasion Cakes · Strategy, design & engineering

The Challenge

Invisible in local search.

Occasion Cakes baked beautifully but was invisible in local search. Orders came from walk-ins and aggregators that ate the margin, search for 'birthday cake near me' surfaced everyone but them.

A crowded, fast-moving Dubai market
A bilingual audience (English + Arabic) to serve
A small team with no dedicated marketer

The Strategy

Own local intent end to end.

Treat Google Business Profile as the storefront, build occasion-and-location landing pages, and engineer review velocity, instead of chasing one generic 'cake shop Dubai' term.

Rebuilt and optimised the Google Business Profile with categories, photos, and posts
Shipped 30 occasion + location landing pages (birthdays, weddings, corporate)
Added LocalBusiness + FAQ schema and a review-request system
Localised key pages for Arabic search intent

The Results

From invisible to first result.

Figures come from the client's own analytics, Google Analytics 4, Google Search Console, and the relevant ad-platform dashboards, tracked over 5 months. Before and after windows are like-for-like.

How the numbers moved

Item · Function · Why it matters

Local pack rankings

40+ terms in the top 3

Up from 0 terms

Online orders / month

~70 → 218

+212%

GBP calls / month

90 → 252

+180%

Aggregator dependence

65% → 36%

−45%

Key Learnings

Occasion intent beats generic terms.

Occasion-intent content ('1st birthday cake Dubai') outperformed generic head terms by a wide margin. We'd start the location-page build in week one next time.

Results

+0%

online orders / month

+0%

GBP calls / month

local keywords in top 3

−0%

aggregator dependence

“We went from invisible to the first result customers see. Most of our orders now come direct, not through aggregators.”
Fatima A. · Owner, Occasion Cakes

Questions people ask

+212% online orders per month. Local pack rankings went from 0 terms to 40+ in the top 3; online orders per month from ~70 to 218 (+212%); GBP calls per month from 90 to 252 (+180%); aggregator dependence fell from 65% to 36% (−45%).

5 months, on a ₹3L total budget.

Local SEO, content, and Google Business optimisation.

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