Case Study: Building a Therapy Website That Google Could Actually Find

What this is

I should be upfront about something. This isn't client work.

When I started ClearTop I had no clients, which meant I had nothing to show anyone. So I built a therapy website from scratch and did the SEO work on it myself, in public, where the results could be checked.

The site is londonanxietytherapy.co.uk. The therapist on it, Attie Hope, is a fictional persona, and the site says so in its footer. Everything else is real: a real website, real Google rankings, real search data, real problems that had to be diagnosed and fixed.

I'd rather show you honest work on a demonstration site than make claims about clients I can't name.

The starting point

In May 2026 the site was new and effectively invisible.

Google knew it existed. That was about it. Pages were showing up in search results at positions in the fifties, which is roughly page five or six. Nobody scrolls that far.

More importantly, across the entire site, nobody was clicking. Not a low number of clicks. Zero.

What changed first

Over the following weeks I worked on the things that decide whether Google shows a page at all: page structure, headings, content depth, internal linking, technical setup.

Between 8 July and 22 July, visibility moved:

The anxiety medication page went from showing up 71 times to 478 times in two weeks, sitting around position 4, which is on the first page of Google.

The problem that mattered more

Here's where it got interesting.

The site was now appearing in search results hundreds of times. And still almost nobody was clicking.

That combination tells you something specific. If Google is showing your page and people aren't clicking, the problem isn't your ranking. It's what your listing says.

The title and description that appear in Google results are the only thing a person sees before deciding whether to click. On this site they were technically correct and completely uninviting. They described the page instead of speaking to the person searching.

It's a common problem on therapy websites, and it's invisible unless you go looking for it. A site can look like it's doing well, appearing in search constantly, while quietly converting almost nobody.

What I changed

I rewrote the titles and descriptions across the site so they spoke to what someone was actually worried about when they typed their search, rather than describing the page contents.

Then I waited and measured.

What happened

The first clicks arrived, and positions kept climbing.

The home page reached position 1.3. For context, it had been at position 56 in July.

But the number that matters most isn't a position. It's where the visitors came from.

Comparing 22 July with 2 September:

• Visitors up 60 percent
• Time spent on the site up 32 percent, from 59 seconds to 1 minute 18
• Traffic source flipped from mostly direct visits to 62.5 percent from Google search

That last figure is the real result. Direct traffic means people who already knew the site existed, someone who was given the link or typed the address. Organic search traffic means strangers finding it because they had a problem and Google pointed them there.

For a private practice those two things aren't remotely equal. One is people you'd already reached. The other is new enquiries you did nothing to chase.

This is a young site with no advertising behind it and no links from other websites pointing to it, so the volumes are still small. What changed is the direction. Most of the people arriving now are people who were searching for help, not people who already knew the name.

What I'm still working on

This is a live project, not a finished one.

Some pages are performing well and others aren't. Search results move constantly, and part of the work is noticing when something slips and finding out why, rather than assuming it'll recover on its own.

I mention it because it's the honest version. Real search performance moves in both directions, and the job is responding to it.