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case study · physiotherapy · blue mountains
The website was a
placeholder. Now it ranks.
First Choice Spinal & Sports Physiotherapy runs two clinics in the Blue Mountains, led by an APA Titled Musculoskeletal Physiotherapist who worked the 2018 Commonwealth Games. When we started, their website said "our Website is getting a Massage. Please stretch while you wait" and every page inside it returned a 404. We rebuilt it and put it live the same day. In the 65 days from 1 July to 3 September 2026, Google sent it 245 clicks across 4,719 impressions, at position 1.08 for "physio lawson".
the brief
A serious clinic
with nothing to show for it.
The brief came in on 30 June 2026 and was four words long: "do a new site but better." What we found when we looked was worse than a dated website. There wasn't one.
The live site was an apology
The domain served a WordPress under-construction placeholder. Its title tag misspelled the practice's own name, and the body text asked visitors to stretch while they waited. That is what a patient searching for a physio found.
The old content had already gone
Every inside page of the previous page-builder site returned a 404, so nothing could be recovered from the live domain. The only surviving copy of the practice's own words was a set of 23 screenshots taken four days earlier. The rebuild was reconstructed from those.
Real credentials, invisible
Master of Physiotherapy (Musculoskeletal) from the University of Queensland, APA Titled Musculoskeletal Physiotherapist, GLA:D® accredited, member of the Australian College of Physiotherapists, physiotherapist at the 2018 Commonwealth Games. None of it was reaching anybody.
what we did
Rebuilt from screenshots,
live the same day.
- Reconstructed the practice's own content.
Every condition, treatment, session format and funding pathway was recovered from the 23 screenshots and rewritten for the page: back and neck pain, sciatica, shoulder, hip and knee injuries, osteoarthritis, headaches and post-surgical rehab, plus the treatments actually used, from manual therapy and dry needling to running and ergonomic assessments.
- Built it static, mobile-first, and put it live.
Hand-built rather than dropped into a page builder, so it loads fast on the patchy mobile coverage the Blue Mountains actually has, and deployed to the client's own cPanel host the same day the build finished, with Cloudflare in front of it.
- Gave both clinics their own page and their own schema.
Lawson and Warrimoo each get a real page with address, hours, parking and accessibility, and the site carries
MedicalBusinessstructured data so Google can tell there are two locations rather than one ambiguous business. - Put the credentials where search can read them.
Jason's qualifications, APA title, GLA:D® accreditation and Commonwealth Games work were moved out of a paragraph nobody scrolled to and into the page structure, the trust strip and the markup. That is what makes "jason wheeler physio" resolve to the practice rather than to a directory.
- Then audited it properly before anyone saw it.
Five separate review passes across design, AI-search readiness, accessibility, copy and performance produced a 35-item punch list. Every P0 and most of the rest were fixed before launch, not after a client complained.
- Grew it from one page to eleven.
The site now carries dedicated pages for services, sports and musculoskeletal physio, the GLA:D® hip and knee program, clinical Pilates, runners, WorkCover, NDIS, both clinics and contact, each targeting a search someone actually makes.
the result
First result
for the search that matters.
Measured in the practice's own Google Search Console over the 65 days from 1 July to 3 September 2026. Every figure below is read from that account, not estimated.
- 245clicks from Google search65 days, 1 July to 3 September 2026
- 4,719Google impressionsan average of 73 a day
- 1.08average position, "physio lawson"effectively the first result, every time
- 1.72average position, "lawson physio"29 clicks from 75 impressions
- #1for "jason wheeler physio"26 clicks, 57% click-through rate
- physio lawson211.08
- lawson physio291.72
- jason wheeler physio261.0
- sports physio near me11.22
- physio springwood16.6
- physio blue mountains111.4
- physio near me214.2
what a local sees
Eleven pages,
two clinics,
one accurate answer.
Search intent in the Blue Mountains is short and local. Somebody types "physio lawson" and decides in about four seconds. The site is built so that the answer to that search is a page about the Lawson clinic, not a homepage that mentions it.
- The clinic pages are the landing pages.
Lawson and Warrimoo each have their own page and their own Google Maps directions link, so the person searching lands on the address they were looking for rather than being asked to work it out.
- The programs are pages, not paragraphs.
GLA:D® hip and knee, clinical Pilates, runners, WorkCover and NDIS each have a page. "Lawson pilates" alone earned 67 impressions in the window above, off a page that only exists because the program was given one.
- Booking is a phone number, and that is deliberate.
The practice takes bookings by phone. Rather than bolt on a booking widget nobody would staff, the number is a tap target on every screen and the tap is tracked, so the clinic can see the site producing calls.
why it works
Local search rewards
the specific answer.
There is no trick here. A two-clinic practice in a small market wins by being unambiguous: one page per clinic, one page per program, real credentials in the markup, and a fast site that loads on a phone halfway up the mountain. That is the whole strategy, and it put a practice that had no website at all into first place for its own town in about two months.
- Rebuild
- Local SEO
- Schema
- Two locations
- Mobile-first
- Hosting
- Tracking