The situation
Linda had been treating feet in North Wales for 29 years. HCPC registered, a Fellow of the Institute of Podiatrists, and a decade as its president. If you already knew her name, you knew she was good.
The problem was that almost nobody could find her unless they already knew her name. Every patient came through word of mouth, repeat visits, a small advert in a local magazine or a flyer left in a nearby business. There had never been a website.
Search "chiropodist near me" anywhere around Holywell and you would find four of her competitors and no sign of her. Anyone new to the area, or anyone who woke up with a painful ingrown toenail and reached for their phone, was going to end up somewhere else. Twenty-nine years of expertise, invisible to everyone outside her existing circle.
What the site needed to do
The brief was refreshingly direct: "I need to be listed in Google search results and on Google Maps."
Underneath that sat a practical constraint. Linda runs the clinic on her own, with two fixed clinic days a week and appointments by arrangement outside them. Anything we built had to bring in new patients without adding admin she did not have time to do.
What we built, and why
A dedicated page for every treatment, rather than one long homepage
People do not search for a podiatrist. They search for the thing that is hurting them: verruca, ingrown toenail, cracked heels, diabetic foot care.
A single homepage cannot realistically rank for a dozen different conditions. Separate, detailed treatment sections can, and they gave us room to explain what each treatment actually involves, what it costs and how long it takes. That last part matters more than it sounds. A lot of people put off seeing a chiropodist because they have no idea what they are walking into.
An enquiry form instead of an online booking calendar
Linda wanted to take booking requests through the site. She did not want to digitise her diary and then keep it synchronised with an online calendar forever.
So requests arrive by email and she follows up by phone. It keeps her in control of what gets accepted and when, it does not display gaps in the diary that are not really gaps, and it added nothing to her weekly admin. The right answer for a sole practitioner is not always the more automated one.
Clinical content written against NHS guidance, never invented
Linda is a registered professional. Anything published under her name is something she is accountable for.
So every clinical explanation on the site is paraphrased from current NHS guidance with a real link to the source, and nothing goes live until she has read and approved it. No invented statistics, no confident claims about treatment outcomes, no citations that do not exist.
For any business in a regulated sector, this is the part that matters most, and it is the part most likely to be got wrong by someone who has not thought about it.
Cookie consent handled properly from day one
The site embeds a Google Map so people can find the clinic, which is inside a craft village and genuinely hard to describe in words. That map sets cookies.
Rather than adding a banner later once someone noticed, consent was built in from the start and the map only loads once a visitor agrees. Doing it in the right order costs an afternoon. Doing it in the wrong order costs a rebuild.
A verified Google Business Profile
Not appearing on Google Maps was the specific frustration Linda raised first, so it was the first thing addressed.
The clinic now has a verified profile showing opening hours, the address, reviews and a link through to the website. For a local service business, the map listing is often what people see before they see the website at all.
What changed
The site went live in July 2026.
Within the first five days it was already appearing in local search results for the things people actually type: "chiropodist holywell", "podiatrist and chiropodist near me", "chiropodist near me". Thirty-four impressions at an average position of 3.9, and every one of those searches was somebody looking for the problem rather than the practice by name.
More importantly, Linda has since had enquiries from new patients who found her through the website or the Google listing. After 29 years of new patients arriving through personal recommendation, they are now arriving from a phone search by people who had never heard of her.
"Since working with First Site Studio, I have received enquiries from multiple new patients who have found me through the website or Google My Business. I am excited to be able to have my business's first website and was very happy with how quickly the site was created and is being maintained."
Linda's site is looked after on an ongoing basis, which is what she means by "is being maintained". That is our Care plan: hosting, backups, security and small changes handled every month so she never has to think about it.
On timescales: this build took under a month from the first conversation to going live. How quickly any project moves depends mostly on how fast photos, copy and approvals come back, which is worth knowing before you start.