Moving a practice site off an agency, without losing its search

The brief

Dr. Kamlur already had a site. Another agency had built it and was hosting it, which is a comfortable arrangement until the day you want to change something and cannot. He took the domain back into his own account and asked for the site to be rebuilt on infrastructure he owns.

The risk in a rebuild like this is not design, it is loss. A site that has been live for years has addresses people have bookmarked, links other sites point at, and pages Google has already indexed. Change the addresses and you throw that away. His decision was an exact rebuild plus improvements, and he left the backend choices to us.

What we built

• The same design and the same page addresses, so nothing he had shared or ranked for broke
• Timings, fees and booking for two clinics on one page, so a patient never has to guess which one to go to
• One page for each area of care, from depression and OCD to sexual medicine, de-addiction and rTMS, each answering the questions patients search for
• Physician structured data, so search engines read the clinic, the qualifications and the hours correctly
• A patient blog that search engines can read, with illustrated articles on depression, sexual health and rTMS
• An email sign-up for new articles, kept to email so that following a psychiatrist stays private
• A private admin with its own login, for articles, photographs, patient messages and comment moderation
• A matching A5 leaflet and visiting card that send patients straight to online booking

How it runs now

The domain sits in his own registrar account. The code, the database and the hosting are in accounts held for him. He writes an article and it publishes, without an invoice and without waiting on anyone. If he ever wants to move the site somewhere else, it moves, because none of it is locked in a cupboard we keep the key to.

That is the point worth taking away if you are in the same position. A practice site you cannot edit is not an asset, it is a rental.