The Situation
A dental practice in Zug had been running on a WordPress site built in 2018. The site was slow, scored 48 on Lighthouse mobile performance, and had almost no visibility in local search. The practice was relying entirely on word-of-mouth and existing patient referrals, with no meaningful digital presence.
The Google Business Profile was claimed but incomplete — no photos, no services listed, no posts in over two years. There were 11 reviews averaging 4.3 stars, mostly from long-term patients.
New patient enquiries through the website: fewer than five per month.
What I Did
Website rebuild. I replaced the existing WordPress site with a static Astro build. No plugins, no database, no PHP. The new site has five pages: home, services, team, insurance, and contact. It loads in under 800ms on mobile and scores 100 on Lighthouse across all categories.
I rewrote the content to reflect how patients actually search — “dentist Zug,” “Zahnarzt Zug city centre,” “dental hygiene Zug” — without keyword stuffing that makes copy feel unnatural.
Technical SEO foundation. Every page received a properly structured title tag, meta description, canonical URL, and Open Graph data. I added structured data for the practice (LocalBusiness schema with opening hours, address, and services) and submitted a sitemap to Google Search Console on day one.
Google Business Profile overhaul. I completed the existing profile in full: primary category set to “Dentist,” 18 services listed with individual descriptions, opening hours including public holidays, 24 photos of the practice interior and team, and a 750-character business description targeting local search intent.
I set up a weekly posting schedule and briefed the staff on how to request reviews from patients after appointments, using a direct link added to appointment confirmation emails.
Performance and hosting migration. I moved the site to Cloudflare Pages. Global CDN, automatic HTTPS, zero hosting cost. Deploy time from a GitHub push: under 30 seconds.
Results — Four Months Later
- Lighthouse mobile performance: 48 → 100
- Google local pack ranking for “Zahnarzt Zug”: not ranked → position 2
- Google Business Profile reviews: 11 → 47 (avg. 4.7 stars)
- Monthly new patient enquiries via website and GBP: 4 → 31
- Hosting cost: reduced from CHF 49/month to CHF 0
The practice now ranks in the local pack for the three most-searched dental terms in their area. The majority of new patient enquiries mention finding them on Google.
What Made the Difference
Two factors drove most of the improvement.
First, the combination of fast load times and clean HTML gave Google something it could actually index and understand. The previous site relied heavily on JavaScript to render content — a search engine crawler sees a blank page until the JavaScript executes. The new static site serves fully rendered HTML immediately.
Second, the Google Business Profile work. The practice had been invisible in local pack results not because it was a bad business but because its profile was incomplete and inactive. Forty-seven reviews and a complete profile moved it from invisible to second position in four months without any paid advertising.
The lesson applies to almost every local business: organic local visibility is not primarily about advertising budget. It’s about profile completeness, review volume, and site performance — all of which are one-time or low-cost investments.