17 / 17
pages returning 200, all 11 legacy URLs 301-redirected
Dental practice · 17 pages
The word a thousand patients search for wasn't on the site
The situation
A dental practice with 4.8 stars from 46 reviews, on a site built in a page builder the practice was paying for indirectly. Before the rebuild, the site's own root address served the platform's "This Page Does Not Exist" message — with an HTTP 200 status, so search engines were being told the error page was a perfectly good page.
What I did
Looked up what patients type.
Keyword Planner for Bosnia, twelve months. The colloquial word for a dentist returns 100–1,000 searches a month. The clinical word the site used throughout returns no measurable data at all. The word patients actually search for did not appear once anywhere on the site. Four page titles and descriptions were rewritten and the word worked into the body copy.
Fixed email that was failing silently.
The host's built-in mail function returns success and then quietly discards the message when it is sent from an address that does not exist. Sender authentication was set up properly — SPF at the registrar, then the domain authenticated with DKIM and DMARC through a transactional provider. Deliverability went from 3.2 to 9.8 out of 10, rated "properly authenticated": DKIM pass, DMARC pass, SPF pass.
Why that fix mattered more than it looks.
A good share of this practice's patients live abroad and come back to Bosnia once a year for treatment. They cannot drop in, and everything is arranged in advance, through the site. So the patients most affected by a contact form that silently failed were precisely the ones with no other way to reach the practice. A broken form is an inconvenience for a local patient; for a patient in Germany planning a trip home, it is the whole channel.
Set up analytics that will still be legal next year.
Consent Mode v2 with a banner and a cookie policy page, verified by watching the network: zero requests to Google before the visitor chooses, GA4 only after acceptance, nothing at all after refusal.
0.56s
desktop LCP, CLS 0
3.2 → 9.8/10
mail-tester deliverability score, properly authenticated
Deliberately not done
A vertical crop of the promo video. The source was 1280×720 with captions burned in and people standing at the edges of frame — any crop to a phone-shaped frame would have cut faces and text. It sits full width in a 16:9 card instead, with the text underneath. The right answer was to change the layout, not to damage the footage.
What is being measured next
Search Console history from end of September 2026.
Search Console history from mid-October 2026 will go here.