On the 25th of June, the Laraworks team headed through to Bathgate to take a stroll around the town centre. Our goal for the day was simple: get out on the street, deliver some of our personalised offer letters, and take a look at local digital footprints to see where we could add real value.
Before we dive in, let’s make one thing clear: this series isn't about shading local businesses or pointing fingers. It’s a purely investigative look at how tiny, overlooked User Experience (UX) tweaks can make a massive difference to a business's bottom line. It's also an opportunity for us to get inspired by established local brands, see what they are doing right, and bring those ideas back to our own clients.
While crossing Jarvey Street, one business immediately caught our eye: SK Makeup Studio.
The Good: A Masterclass in Elegant Design
When we looked up their website, we were genuinely impressed. The design is excellent—it’s clean, modern, and incredibly elegant.
They have nailed the aesthetic perfectly for the beauty industry. The typography is refined, the spacing gives the content room to breathe, and the high-quality imagery instantly showcases their artistry and professionalism. It feels premium and welcoming the second the page loads. It’s exactly the kind of sleek, high-end layout we love to see, and we took a few screenshots for our own inspiration folder!
The Critical Local SEO Red Flag: Disconnected Addresses
However, during our quick audit, we spotted a major local search engine optimisation issue that is likely hurting their visibility right now.
It looks like the studio relocated at some point. While they are physically operating on Jarvey Street, their website text still explicitly states they are located on Glasgow Road.
In the world of Local SEO, this is a massive red flag. Google relies heavily on data consistency across the web. When your website address doesn't match your physical location or your Google Business Profile, it confuses search engine algorithms, damages your local rankings, and—worst of all—confuses actual customers who might drive to the wrong place. We'll be reaching out to the team at SK Makeup Studio to let them know about this, as fixing this single text string could instantly stop them from missing out on local clients.
The Bigger Growth Opportunities
Beyond the address mismatch, we found a few classic UX and performance opportunities that could take their digital presence from great to completely dominant.
1. The Power of Staff & Service Landing Pages
To show you what's possible, we look at a similar strategy we implemented for one of our own agency clients—an Elite Spa studio. To help them completely dominate local search rankings in one of the busiest city areas in the UK, we didn't just list their services on a single page.
Instead, we built dedicated, hyper-optimised landing pages for individual staff members and specific location zones. Each page lays out the details flawlessly:
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Exactly what the service is and what it costs.
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Who the specific staff member is with a "Book with X" button.
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Deep location context: embedded maps, explicit "Get Directions" buttons, and a few lines about the surrounding local landmarks.
This granular structure gives Google massive amounts of local context to index, which skyrocketed our client's rankings. Applying this same framework to a high-end makeup studio would be a game-changer.
2. The Broken Navigation Habit
On the usability front, we noticed that clicking the studio's logo in the navigation menu doesn't take you back to the homepage. While it sounds minor, it’s a standard web convention that almost all internet users expect. When it doesn't work, it adds friction to the user journey.
3. The 1-Second Loading Bar
Finally, the site takes about 2 to 3 seconds to load. In today's fast-paced mobile world, that feels like a lifetime to a user on a mobile data connection. Google actively rewards speed, and their algorithms love to see load times clocking in at under 1 second. Optimising the backend architecture and compressing media assets would give them a noticeable performance bump.
Wrapping Up the Day
All in all, it was a great day out on the ground. We wrapped up the trip with a quick stop at Maccy D's for a cheeky Big Mac before heading back to the office in Broxburn.
Bathgate has an amazing community of high-street businesses, and it’s clear that with just a few minor technical adjustments, local shops here can easily dominate search results across West Lothian.
Walking the empty streets of Bathgate, who'd have thought that same night, we'd experience such an amazing thunderstorm!