Local SEO & UX audit

The prototype keeps the clinic’s public routes and familiar identity, while making urgent care, routine visits and first-time enrolment easier to understand. This report separates what was observed from what still needs confirmation.

Decisions that matter first

1. Repair the booking journey: the header’s preserved URL identifies Wainui Dental Clinic, its phone and address. The footer’s legacy URL reaches a generic practice lookup. Both prototype calls to action use the verified header destination and open a preview dialog first.
2. Resolve Tuesday hours: the website and its source schema say 9am to 5pm; the public Google listing says 9am to 7pm. The prototype keeps website hours until the practice manager confirms the correct schedule.
3. Keep enrolment distinct from booking: the new-patient page now explains the two tasks and links to payment options. All demonstration fields are disabled, with no submission endpoint.
4. Retain recent work: September team portraits, October articles, recently revised treatment copy, and the August Privacy Policy and Website Terms were included in the source capture and local route mapping.

Priority meanings: P0 is a patient journey or factual conflict to resolve before launch; P1 supports primary local search and patient understanding; P2 improves maintenance, discoverability or performance after the core issues are resolved.

Clinic identity and audience

The source site uses a bright blue Wainui Dental wordmark, blue/white colour palette, a patient examination hero, reception and facade photographs, treatment imagery and current staff portraits. Its tone is friendly and welcoming. The About page describes the 2019 idea of bringing dental care into the Wainui Valley rather than making residents travel away for care.

The prototype retains the actual wordmark and existing photography. Blue remains the accent, with darker navy body headings and a darker blue for legible buttons and links. Subtle pale-blue gradients replace the busy slider composition. No new people, testimonials, credentials or treatment results were invented. Existing illustrations remain associated with their treatment pages; real photographs lead the featured services. Small navigation, phone, map and list icons use Lucide only.

For patients who are older or less confident online: the base body text is 18px; content uses plain first-step explanations; telephone numbers are written out and clickable; buttons are large; keyboard focus is visible; menus open by button activation rather than requiring hover. There is no time-limited content or automatic carousel.

Inventory and preservation method

The audit combined the sitemap index, its five child sitemaps, header and footer navigation, internal links, article/category/author pagination, contact links and page source. Each successfully retrieved HTML route has a corresponding local index file. Original and proposed public paths remain identical. Local index.html files let the ZIP work offline; they are not proposed new public URL suffixes. HTTP navigation removes that suffix locally.

The five child sitemaps contain 99 URL entries: 39 posts, 31 pages, 13 testimonial entries, 15 categories and one author. Additional public routes were discovered from internal navigation, bringing the successfully captured HTML set to 104. The crawl also encountered media URLs; these are catalogued separately from HTML routes. It is a public crawl, not a WordPress database export: unlinked pages absent from the sitemaps, authenticated content and unpublished drafts cannot be proven complete without internal access.

The captured robots.txt returned HTTP 200 with an empty body. This is not proof of Google index coverage. The alternate sitemap URLs returned the same sitemap index. One sitemap entry, /gift-vouchers/, returned HTTP 404; three discovered calendar-date URLs also returned HTTP 404. Local placeholders identify these limits without inventing page content or recommending that they become indexable pages.

All 104 original HTML snapshots are included as inert .html.txt reference files, alongside source sitemap data and asset hashes. They are not executable preview pages. The refreshed pages retain article copy and inline images, treatment details, team names/roles and legal-page content, with layout and navigation rebuilt. The homepage, About introduction, contact and payment summaries have editorial changes listed in the change log. The seasonal page and existing forms have explicit review treatments rather than live offers or data collection.

Recent content protected

• Team portraits from September 2026, including Dr Manish Kumar, Dr Maria, Susan, Erika, Johanna, Monique and Aaditya.
• 39 article routes, including the four October articles about cracked teeth, extraction, root canal treatment and fillings.
• Current treatment detail captured for each URL, with raw source and modified timestamps in the inventories.
• Privacy Policy and Website Terms dated 20 August 2026, with their existing URLs.

Raw sitemap lastmod values are preserved in sitemap-inventory.csv. They are publisher-supplied metadata, not independently verified edit times. A final content diff against the then-current WordPress site is necessary before any future theme conversion.

Titles, descriptions, H1 and internal links

Observed in the 104 captured HTML pages: 102 have one H1; /home-christmas/ has none; /author/mediagiant/ has two, including “Nothing Found”. There are 21 missing descriptions. Four Manish author pagination URLs share the same title. Those are source observations, not claims that Google will penalise the site.

The source emergency title includes “Same-Day Appointments”, while its body qualifies appointment availability. The local title avoids that promise. The contact title “Contact Us | Wainui Dental Clinic Today Now” is replaced with a clear location/contact title. The term “Maintenance” becomes “Check-ups & hygiene” in navigation while the existing /maintenance/ route is retained.

The prototype contains one H1 on each page, unique numbered author pagination titles, descriptive archive snippets where missing, consistent local clinic data, and contextual next-step links. The complete original/proposed metadata comparison is in url-inventory.csv. Search terms below are intent hypotheses, not measured search volumes.

Useful connections between informational and appointment intent

The cracked-tooth article already has an in-body emergency link. The improvement is to make that route obvious at the top with a written telephone number, so a patient in pain does not need to read the whole article. Existing links and copy remain. Other articles have an explicit end-of-article next step to their relevant treatment page.

The general navigation uses “Everyday care”, “Repair & replace teeth” and “Straighten & brighten”. The real /treatments/general-dentistry/ and /treatments/orthodontics-cosmetics/ pages remain reachable. No new suburb doorway pages or duplicated Lower Hutt treatment pages were created. Wainuiomata is foregrounded naturally, and the full Lower Hutt address remains visible.

Local data and public Google profile

The public Maps profile was inspected on 2 November 2026 via the clinic’s existing Google directions link. This is public profile observation, not access to the owner’s Business Profile dashboard.

Future owner-dashboard checks: special/holiday hours, appointment links, service list, primary/secondary categories, current exterior/team photographs and duplicate listings. Confirm access and factual changes before editing. The public listing displays an accessible-entrance attribute; the prototype asks patients to call about access rather than making a physical-access guarantee from that third-party field alone. This audit did not measure local-pack position, competitor rankings, profile enquiries or search demand.

Indexing, structured data and mobile performance

Observed source index directives

103 captured source HTML pages have an index/follow directive; /author/mediagiant/ is noindex/follow. Canonical and robots values for every source page are included in source-seo-audit.csv. A public 200 response, index directive or sitemap entry does not prove that Google has indexed the URL. Search Console URL Inspection, Page indexing, chosen canonicals and sitemap reports are required for that conclusion.

The prototype intentionally applies noindex, nofollow, noarchive to every HTML file and is not publicly deployed. Its robots file allows access so an accidental crawler can read noindex; robots exclusion is not a substitute for noindex. See Google’s noindex guidance. An approved staging environment should also use access control. Before a later production launch, remove the prototype directives only through the release checklist and restore page-specific indexation choices deliberately.

Local structured data

The existing home has five JSON-LD blocks, including MedicalClinic, WebPage, service offers and Product/review markup. It also includes topic annotations such as “Holistic dentistry”, whose relevance requires confirmation. The prototype uses a conservative Dentist entity, stable clinic ID, verified public phone/email, address and website hours. It contains no invented prices, clinician credentials, review rating or treatment guarantees. Website hours are still subject to the Tuesday conflict.

For WordPress conversion, reconcile the SEO plugin’s graph with theme markup to avoid competing clinic entities, validate the final production graph and preserve relevant Article/Breadcrumb data from the current SEO plugin. Do not duplicate a clinic rating as a Product to seek review stars. Google’s LocalBusiness documentation is the implementation reference. Rich results or ranking changes are not guaranteed.

Mobile and payload observations

The payload comparison below records the initial local build. The refinement adds a local stylesheet, a local font stylesheet with licensed font files, and the documented interaction enhancements. It is not a fresh Core Web Vitals result.

Hypothesis: removing the slider and plugin front end should reduce render complexity and third-party work. This has not been established by a controlled production performance test. Browser timing APIs were unavailable in the validation surface, so no LCP, INP or CLS result is claimed. For the approved build, run Lighthouse/PageSpeed on the final hosting, test a lower-powered phone and mobile connection, then monitor field Core Web Vitals at the 75th percentile: LCP ≤2.5 seconds, INP ≤200ms and CLS ≤0.1. See Google’s Web Vitals reference. Convert/compress responsive image variants where useful, retain originals, and verify quality and image rights before replacing files.

How to measure calls and booking clicks

No analytics were added to the prototype. The following is a production measurement proposal. It requires the analytics owner, suitable consent/settings and access to the booking provider for any confirmed-appointment reporting.

Keep event payloads limited to non-patient interaction metadata. Do not send names, email addresses, phone input, dates of birth, NHI, messages, medical conditions, treatment details tied to individuals or appointment IDs into analytics. Use CTA location and clean page paths; avoid sending arbitrary query strings.

For the Google profile website link, propose utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=gbp_wainui, after checking the existing reporting convention. The observed link currently has only utm_source=gmb; do not break historical reporting without an agreed mapping. Keep the booking provider URL and clinic ID intact. Review consented aggregate referral data, appointment data and reporting definitions with the provider.

Baseline plan: export 28 days of organic landing-page performance, device mix and current CTA counts before launch, then compare a similar 28-day period and annotate the change date. Segment Wainuiomata/Lower Hutt branded and non-branded search queries where Search Console permits; account for seasonal and campaign effects. Primary KPIs: phone clicks, outbound booking clicks, provider-confirmed appointments if available and conversion rate by landing page/device. No traffic, revenue or uplift forecast is asserted.

Claims and operational facts for review

The prototype adds plain-language definitions and a three-part introduction to treatments: why a patient might visit, what to expect and the next step. These summaries are based on Wainui’s own current material. Existing longer treatment and article content remains available for clinician review; retaining it is not a new clinical endorsement.

clinical-review-register.csv contains 92 exact source excerpts selected for review. It is a targeted triage register, not an exhaustive clinical or legal assessment. All treatment summaries should be signed off by the clinical lead before publishing. The site avoids adding the word “specialist” as a clinic marketing claim.

Photographs still worth obtaining

No missing photograph prevents the primary prototype journeys. All 405 downloaded source assets/variants passed local decoding checks. The current facade photograph is retained beside directions, and the current staff portraits are retained on About. Future optional photographs: a wider high-resolution entrance/access route, clearly identified current clinicians with consent, and an original treatment-conversation photograph. These should be obtained from the clinic rather than replaced with generic people. Some inherited older treatment illustrations include embedded stock markings; their source is retained, and licence/clean-master confirmation is future work rather than removing a watermark.

Validation and precise limits

The review tools include site/responsive-review.html, which lets you switch among phone, tablet, desktop and the explicitly labelled enlargement simulation. All content remains scrollable; the long phone treatment menu expands in normal page flow rather than being cut off in a fixed-height overlay. The optional external booking link is clearly marked; any activity after leaving the prototype is governed by that external provider.

Files and the next approval stage

• url-inventory.csv: original/proposed public URLs, local file paths, metadata, H1 and source snapshot mapping.
• source-seo-audit.csv: original titles, descriptions, canonical/index directives, H1 counts and resource counts per URL.
• image-inventory.csv and asset-manifest.csv: image placement, source URLs, variants, local files, sizes and hashes.
• link-inventory.csv and form-inventory.csv: observed contact/booking/navigation links and form field inventory.
• prioritised-opportunities.csv and clinical-review-register.csv: prioritised actions and claims for confirmation.
• sitemap-inventory.csv, public-observations.json and static-validation.json: supporting audit and QA records.
• approval-guide.html: a short review route and the decisions required before the next stage.

Approval of this design is separate from permission to convert WordPress or publish. A later release should reconcile current content, confirm clinic facts/clinical copy, implement secure enrolment and analytics, test WordPress templates/SEO-plugin output, validate redirects and production status codes, complete native zoom/physical-device checks, back up the live site and obtain explicit publication approval.

Sources and access notes

Primary evidence: current Wainui public pages and sitemaps (retained as inert snapshots), rendered booking-provider destinations, and the public Google Maps profile. Reference clinics: the three linked primary websites above. Technical references: Google Search Central and web.dev linked in the technical section. No competitor copy, offers, prices or photographs were reused.