The practice
Charleston Hand Therapy Center specializes in therapy for the hand, wrist, elbow and shoulder: what clinicians call the upper extremity. Patients are treated at four locations across the Charleston area: Summerville, West Ashley, James Island and North Charleston.
Specialist clinics have a particular marketing problem. Patients rarely search for “upper extremity rehabilitation”. They search for what hurts, such as carpal tunnel, trigger finger or a frozen shoulder, or for “hand therapy” plus the name of their town. A website that does not speak that language is invisible to the people the clinic is best placed to help.
The problem: a specialist clinic that patients could not easily find
The practice came to us with an outdated website and low visibility online. In practice that meant:
- An outdated website. The design no longer reflected a specialist clinic.
- Low visibility on Google. The practice was hard to find when patients searched for a condition, or for hand therapy in their town.
- Hard to act on. The site was not built mobile-first, and the route to booking was not obvious.
The goal was medical practice local SEO done properly: be found for the condition and the town, then make booking the easy next step.
What we built: condition pages, location pages and Google Business Profiles
We treated the project as a healthcare website redesign with search built in from the first wireframe, combining our web design and SEO services.
Condition-led pages for a hand therapy website
Each common condition has its own page: carpal tunnel, trigger finger, tennis elbow, cubital tunnel, rotator cuff injuries, frozen shoulder, arthritis and fractures. Each page is written to explain the condition in plain language, how therapy can help and how to book, so it can rank for that search and turn the visit into an inquiry.
A page and a Google Business Profile for each location
Summerville, West Ashley, James Island and North Charleston each have a dedicated page with location schema, and each clinic’s Google Business Profile was optimized to match it. Consistent names, addresses and services across the site and the profiles help Google connect a search like “hand therapy Charleston” to the nearest clinic.
Mobile-first, fast and easy to act on
The redesign is mobile-first, with speed work, simpler navigation and two clear calls to action on every page: “Book an Appointment” and “Find a Location Near You”. You can see the same approach in our guide to web design for South Carolina businesses.
Results
- new-patient website inquiriesafter the rebuild
- +300%
- on Google for “hand therapy Charleston”within 4 months
- Top 3
- locations, each with a page and a Google Business Profile
- 4
Figures confirmed by the client for publication, October 2026.
After the rebuild, Charleston Hand Therapy Center saw a 300% increase in new-patient inquiries through the website, and a top-three Google ranking for “hand therapy Charleston” within four months. The practice also saw more traffic from Google, higher local rankings and more bookings.
Both figures are confirmed by the practice. They show what condition pages, location pages and well-kept Google Business Profiles can do for a specialist clinic.
We have done similar work for Rehab Carolina, a four-clinic physical therapy practice in the same area. Both projects are summarized on our page about healthcare marketing in South Carolina.
