Water's Edge Counseling
A website her team can actually run — and 31% more search visibility for Water’s Edge Counseling
Water’s Edge Counseling is a growing group therapy practice in Savannah, Georgia, with a second office on Wilmington Island and online therapy across the state.
The Challenge
Whitney Owens had built a practice that was working. The website underneath it had stopped keeping pace.
Water’s Edge Counseling has been serving Savannah for more than ten years, and the site had grown right along with it, passing through the hands of several different designers over that decade. Each one worked in their own way and layered their own decisions on top of the last, and what had been a perfectly reasonable build when it launched slowly became a patchwork. By the time we came in, it sat on an outdated page builder that made every edit a fight, so much so that our own SEO team struggled to publish the work we were doing for her. New service pages couldn’t be laid out the way they needed to be laid out to convert, and ten years of accumulated plugins were slowing the site down and dragging on SEO.
The design itself wasn’t the problem. Whitney genuinely liked the look and feel of her site, and the brand had equity in Savannah.
The problem was that a practice adding a second location, adding clinicians, and investing in SEO had a website that couldn’t keep up with any of it. Traffic was arriving. The site wasn’t built to do anything with it.
What Water’s Edge needed wasn’t another round of patches on a decade of layered fixes. It needed one coherent build, with all the accumulated junk cleared out.
Project Goals:
Whitney partnered with Private Practice Elevation to support several key business goals:
- Give Whitney’s team and her SEO partners a website they can update quickly and confidently, without a developer.
- Protect and build on the SEO gains already earned, with no ranking losses through the rebuild.
- Convert more of the existing traffic into scheduled clients, with the phone call as the primary action.
- Present both office locations and the full clinical team clearly, in a structure that scales as the practice grows.
- Modernize the design without losing the brand Whitney’s clients already recognize.
Before:
After:
Our Approach
We started with the page builder, because it was the root of everything else.
Rebuilding the site on a modern builder wasn’t a technical preference. It was the difference between a website that improves every month and one that freezes the day it launches.
Whitney’s team needed to edit pages themselves, and our SEO team needed to ship new pages that were actually designed, not assembled around the tool’s limitations.
We also stripped out the plugin stack the old build had accumulated so the site loads on its own merits.
We designed the whole site around one action: picking up the phone.
Whitney had done the hard analytical work of tracking her intake process and knew exactly what converted: a phone call to her intake coordinator. So the phone number lives everywhere.
On desktop, the header carries a permanent “Call 912-319-5552 To Schedule” button and calls-to-action route to a contact page built to convert. On mobile, those same buttons read “Call” with the number and tap straight through to the intake coordinator. No form-fill detour between an anxious visitor and a human being.
We stayed inside Whitney’s existing brand on purpose.
She liked her site, and her audience recognized it, so this was a refinement rather than a reinvention. Same palette, same coastal identity, same shell mark. What changed is the flow.
The hero moved from text-over-photo to a cleaner split layout that leads with the promise and the call button, and each page now walks a visitor through a deliberate sequence (what we do, why us, how to start) instead of stacking sections.
We built the structure for a practice that’s still growing.
Separate Savannah and Wilmington Island location pages, so visitors can find a therapist by location, bio page templates for every clinician, and a clear organization of service pages so users can find what they’re looking for.
When Whitney later expanded into a new building, the site was already built to absorb it.
The Results (So Far)
| Metric | Before | After | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Search impressions | 138,260 | 181,346 | +31% |
| Average Google position | 28.3 | 18.2 | 10.1 higher |
| Average time on site | 3:22 | 5:14 | +56% |
| Pages viewed | 21,981 | 29,040 | +32% |
| Sessions | 7,536 | 7,161 | -5% |
| Search clicks | 3,047 | 2,977 | -2% |
Where it stands today
Most recent 90 days (May 20 to Aug 17, 2026), roughly 10 months after launch, compared with the 90 days before launch.
| Metric | Latest 90 days | vs. before launch |
|---|---|---|
| Search impressions | 153,017 | +11% |
| Average Google position | 15.2 | 13.1 higher |
| Average time on site | 5:37 | +67% |
| Engagement rate | 67.0% | +8.8 points |
Source: Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console, Water's Edge Counseling.
“When I first started my private practice, I didn’t know how to build a quality website or afford to hire someone. After creating a simplistic version myself, I hired a marketing grad student to improve it. As my practice continued to grow, I hired multiple designers who kept making updates. Over time, it became slow, confusing, and difficult to manage. It needed a reset. That is when I hired Private Practice Elevation. Not only did they create an amazing look, but the site was also easier to navigate, ran faster, and more clearly showcased our team and services. Now, we are booking more clients than before. It was worth the investment.”
Whitney Owens
Grow your private practice with a new website strategy.
Get more traffic. Get more clients. Scale your practice.
Whether you’re looking to level up your private practice website’s design, or need help navigating SEO so that your clients can find you, we can help.