A new brand, a new website, and 9,305 search impressions from a standing start.
What We Did
01 . Client overview
The client
Theralife Clinics Ltd offers low-dose radiotherapy for benign conditions from Alderley Edge Medical Centre in Cheshire, serving patients across Greater Manchester and the North West. The service covers osteoarthritis, plantar fasciitis, tendonitis, bursitis, Dupuytren’s contracture and Ledderhose disease, for self-pay and insured patients alike.
Care is led by Dr Richard Shaffer, a consultant clinical oncologist, and Theralife is the third brand he has brought to Pulse Digital Health. The remit was the brand and the site together: an identity designed from the logo up, and a website built to carry it.
There was no brand, no website, no reviews, no search history and no demand for the clinic’s name. Everything measured further down this page was built from that.
Sector
Private healthcare. Low-dose radiotherapy for benign conditions is offered by a small number of UK providers and is unfamiliar to most people searching about these conditions. Self-pay and insured, with no GP referral required.
Starting position
A new trading name with nothing to inherit. No identity, no website, no reviews, no local history and no search presence. The only recognition in the category belonged to the clinicians personally, not to the clinic.
Remit
Design the brand, then design and build the site it lives on: six condition pages, the clinical team, the location, the pricing position and the enquiry route, built mobile-first on WordPress and kept in service since launch.
02 . The challenge
The challenge
None of the difficulty here was technical. It was that the clinic needed people to consider a treatment they had not heard of, from a name they had no reason to trust, for conditions they were already searching about somewhere else.
A treatment with no search demand of its own
Patients search for the pain, not the procedure. Almost nobody types “low-dose radiotherapy”. They type the condition and a place name. The site had to be organised around what people are worried about rather than around the service the clinic sells.
Proving a new name is real
With no reviews and no history, the brand had to answer scepticism before it could answer clinical questions. “Is theralife legit” is a query the site now appears for, which tells you exactly what the first job of the design was.
Six conditions, one clinic, one domain
Dupuytren’s contracture, Ledderhose disease, plantar fasciitis, tendonitis, bursitis and osteoarthritis are six separate patient groups with six separate vocabularies. Each needed a page of its own without the site collapsing into six near-identical templates.
Regulated claims, anxious readers
Radiotherapy for benign disease sits squarely in ASA and CAP territory. Every line had to describe the service without promising an outcome, while still giving a reader in pain enough to act on. Those two pulls work against each other on every page.
A Cheshire address chasing Manchester intent
The clinic sits in Alderley Edge. The searches come from Manchester, Stretford and Old Trafford, alongside postcode-level queries for the clinic itself. “Dupuytrens manchester” alone returns 542 impressions. One address had to carry demand spread across a whole city region.
Terms already held by others
Queries like “radiotherapy for Dupuytren’s contracture” were long since occupied by established private providers and NHS pages. A brand new domain would be competing for them from the second and third pages of results.
03 . Our strategy
Our strategy
Two pieces of work, run in order. The brand had to exist before a website could express it, and the website had to be built around the way patients actually search rather than the way the clinic describes itself.
01
Built the identity first, and the website second — A new logo on rounded, healing forms in calm blues and whites, then a single system for colour, typography and iconography applied across the site, the clinic environment and the patient-facing documents. The reasoning was simple: someone arriving from a search about foot pain reads the page as calm or alarming before they read a single word of it. For a treatment involving radiation, that first read is the whole ball game.
02
Structured the site around conditions, not around the service — Six condition pages, each on its own URL with its own language and its own risk information, rather than one radiotherapy page with six paragraphs. All six now earn search impressions. The Dupuytren’s contracture page alone reaches 2,721 impressions, more than any page on the site except the homepage, from a term the brand had no claim to at the start.
03
Answered the scepticism the brand had not yet earned its way past — A team page carrying the clinical leadership by name, a first-appointment explainer written for someone who has never had radiotherapy, transparent self-pay and insurance information, and risk detail given the same weight as benefit. The team page is the second most visited page on the site, with 51 clicks from 1,569 impressions, and the individual clinician pages beneath it now return impressions in their own right. For a name nobody had heard of, that is people checking who would be treating them before they enquire.
04
Wrote to ASA and CAP limits from the first draft, not the legal pass — Benefit language kept factual, no outcome promises, clinician review before publication, and honest risk information on every condition page. Writing to the limit at draft stage costs a fraction of what it costs to rewrite a live medical site after a complaint, and it removes the temptation to walk copy back towards the line later.
05
Built mobile-first, then kept the site in service — Layout, load speed and a single-tap enquiry route were designed for a phone before a desktop, and 56% of clicks have come from mobile since. The site has stayed on a monthly maintenance cycle through the pre-launch period, covering plugin and security updates, image optimisation and a spam protection upgrade, so the estate that was built is the estate that is still running.
04 . The results
The result
The site started with no rankings, no brand demand and no history to build on. Everything below was built from there. Impressions have grown across the period while clicks have not, because the growth is coming from condition terms that currently rank on the second page rather than the first.
The Numbers
Weekly search impressions and clicks
Google Search Console, web search, all countries and devices. The first and last weeks of the period are partial, at 3 days and 4 days.
