Case Study · Healthcare · Podiatry
Page two to the top of page one — and the practice's best new-patient month in two years
A leading Long Island podiatry practice came to us with a strong reputation and a website that Google was showing to thousands of people a day — just never high enough for them to click. Three months later, every page we rebuilt was ranking on page one.
- Industry
- Podiatry
- Market
- Long Island, NY
- Engagement
- 3 months & ongoing
- Scope
- Local SEO · Page rebuilds · Google Business Profile · AI call answering
The Results
What changed in three months
Site-wide, May to July. A 21.5% improvement — and still climbing in August.
Seven started there. All ten finished there, measured ~28 days after each rebuild.
179 in May to 282 in July — the highest month in the practice's 24-month record.
Roughly fourteen phone calls every day for 92 straight days.
Up 24.2% on the three months before the engagement began, and up 16.2% year over year.
332 of them while the office was closed. Two thirds ended in a real action, not a voicemail.
The Challenge
Plenty of visibility. Not enough of it above the fold.
This was not a practice with a reputation problem. It was a practice with a placement problem.
The site was already turning up in roughly three thousand searches a day. The practice already had a review profile few competitors in the market could match. On paper, everything looked healthy.
The problem was where it appeared. The pages built for each surrounding town were showing up in the right searches, but sitting at an average position of 21.6 — the middle of page two, where almost nobody scrolls. Someone in the next town over, typing the exact search this practice should own, was finding four or five competitors before finding them.
The real opportunity
When a practice already has the reputation, the reviews and the search impressions, you are not building demand from nothing. You are moving existing demand a few positions up the page — which is the fastest, most measurable growth available in a local account.
The Work
Nineteen pages rebuilt on a stronger foundation
Twenty-two documented work sessions across nineteen pages, fifteen of them complete ground-up rebuilds, plus three diagnostic audits to direct the next phase.
Fifteen complete page rebuilds
Town landing pages for each community the practice serves, plus procedure pages and patient-education articles — rebuilt with new layouts and expanded medical content.
Titles and descriptions rewritten
Every page touched was retuned to the specific search intent and location it targets, so Google and patients see an accurate summary in the results.
Structured data repaired and added
Medical practice and FAQ schema implemented so Google can read the practice's services, hours and answers directly.
Internal linking rebuilt
Links rebuilt between condition pages, town pages and service pages so authority flows to the pages that need it — and patients can find related care.
Contact details standardised
A single consistent phone format across rebuilt pages, so Google can match the site to the Business Profile and directory listings.
Three diagnostic audits
A reputation audit across fourteen profiles, a citation audit across twenty-two listings, and a competitive analysis of every practice in the local map pack.
Result One
Every page we measured moved onto page one
Rankings were recorded before each rebuild and again about 28 days later. Ten pages had both measurements. All ten finished on page one.
Google position before and after rebuild
Further left is better. Position 1 is the top result.
A 34.7% improvement in 28 days.
Every page measured before and after.
Five times as many, where the clicks actually happen.
The standout result
One town page moved from position 12.1 to position 5 — off the top of page two and into the middle of page one — in 28 days. The county-level page made a comparable move, 14.2 to 8. Both are competitive, high-value local searches, and both had been effectively invisible to searchers before the rebuild.
Result Two
The whole site moved up the page
Impressions held steady through the quarter — Google was showing the site to roughly the same number of people each day. What changed was where those people saw it.
Site-wide average Google position
Shorter bar = higher on the page. Position 1 is the top result.
Before and after
| Measure | May 2026 | July 2026 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Average Google position | 21.6 | 16.9 | 4.7 better |
| Clicks per day | 29.1 | 31.9 | +9.5% |
| Click-through rate | 0.96% | 1.05% | +8.9% |
| New patients | 179 | 282 | +57.5% |
Search figures from Google Search Console. May reflects 5–31 May, the period from which Search Console data is available. New-patient counts are the practice's own monthly figures.
Where the visibility sits now
| Search visibility | Result |
|---|---|
| Distinct search terms the practice appears for | 1,000+ |
| Search terms ranking on page one | 360 |
| Search terms ranking in the top three | 125 |
| Website pages ranking on page one | 202 |
| “Near me” searches on page one | 33 of 42 |
| Total search impressions, May–July | 266,281 |
Google Search Console, 5 May – 8 August 2026. Search Console reports a maximum of 1,000 individual search terms, so the true number the practice appears for is higher.
Mobile is where this practice wins
On mobile, where three of every four clicks come from, the average position is 8.2 — against 31.7 on desktop. Patients searching on a phone, close to the office, with a problem that needs attention, are seeing this practice near the top of the page.
Result Three
A Google profile that converts
For a podiatry practice, the Google Business Profile is the front door. It is where someone searching “podiatrist near me” decides whether to call. Over the quarter it produced more than two and a half thousand direct actions.
5,435 on Search · 755 on Maps
Calls, website clicks and direction requests
May – July 2026
What people did after finding the profile
| Action | Total | Per day | Share |
|---|---|---|---|
| Phone calls | 1,306 | 14.2 | 50.7% |
| Website clicks | 714 | 7.8 | 27.7% |
| Direction requests | 558 | 6.1 | 21.6% |
Google Business Profile, 1 May – 31 July 2026 (92 days).
Half of everyone who interacts with the profile picks up the phone. That is an unusually high proportion, and it says something important: the people finding this practice on Google are not browsing. They have a problem and they are ready to book. The 558 direction requests represent people who had already decided to come in.
Out-reviewing the largest competitor in the market
97.6% of them five-star. Not a single one-star review on the profile.
Against the market leader's 16.0 — adding reviews 36% faster than a competitor with a sixty-year head start.
Measured across thirteen locations. Ranks organically in six of the seven at an average position of 4.8.
Practice totals from the 6 August 2026 Business Profile pull; competitor figures pulled 7 August 2026 from Google Maps and Business Profile panels. Review velocity measured over the trailing 90 days.
Result Four
Better visibility only pays off if the phone gets answered
Every practice loses patients to the answering machine. Someone with heel pain calls at six in the evening, hears a recorded message, hangs up and calls the next podiatrist on the list. That call never appears in any report, because from the practice's side it simply never happened.
We closed that gap with our After Hours CallBot. It answers in a natural voice, works out why the person is calling, captures their details, and either transfers them straight through to the office during hours or logs a structured callback for the morning.
About eight every day across the quarter.
45% of all calls handled. Every one of these used to reach a recording.
488 calls transferred live, callback captured, or message taken — not a voicemail.
What happened on those calls
| Outcome | All calls | While closed |
|---|---|---|
| Transferred live to the office | 265 | 83 |
| Callback details captured | 222 | 124 |
| Message taken for the practice | 16 | 12 |
| Total converted to an action | 488 | 208 |
After Hours CallBot call log, 1 May – 29 July 2026, measured against the practice's published hours. Some calls produced more than one outcome, so the total counts each call once.
The busiest hour of the day is the one after you close
136 calls came in during the 5pm hour — more than any other hour of the day — and all but one of them after the practice had shut for the evening. Of the 332 calls answered while closed, 220 came on weekday evenings after closing, 53 on Saturdays, 34 before the doors opened, and 25 on Sundays.
58 callers identified themselves as new patients, 22 of them outside office hours. These are people actively trying to become patients at a moment when nobody was there to take the call. A further 29 calls were flagged as urgent, half of them while the office was closed, and routed accordingly rather than sitting in a voicemail box overnight.
The Outcome That Matters
Its best new-patient month in the entire record
Search metrics matter only insofar as they change who walks through the door. Here is what the quarter translated to in practical terms.
New patients per month during the engagement
July was the highest month across 24 months of practice records.
697 new patients across May, June and July combined.
Growth on top of the practice's own seasonal pattern.
Two of the three strongest months on record fell inside this engagement.
One note on attribution
New-patient volume is influenced by referrals, seasonality and word of mouth as well as search. What can be stated with confidence is that this practice's search visibility, local ranking and profile activity all improved materially over the same period — and that its two strongest months on record fell inside it.
What Happens Next
This is a starting position, not a finish line
Search rankings respond slowly and then hold. The pages rebuilt in May and June were still climbing in August — the site-wide average position improved again, to 14.2, without any further work on those pages.
That is the difference between renting attention and building it. The three months just completed established the foundation: rebuilt pages, corrected technical signals, and a measured, documented baseline for everything that follows. The work already done keeps gaining ground while the next quarter's work adds to it.
15 of them complete ground-up rebuilds.
106,402 impressions and 913 clicks from the rebuilt set alone.
Already on page one, and the cheapest available growth in the account.
Want results like these for your practice?
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