An audit before a single pixel
We crawled the live site and mapped every URL, title and heading against the searches that had dropped: ten issues ranked by impact and a URL map of what to keep and redirect.
Case study · The Cat Hotel, Johannesburg
A boutique cat hotel, found again.
We moved The Cat Hotel off a slow page-builder site and onto a fast, hand-coded one, fixed the reasons it had slipped in Google, and wrote it to be quoted by AI search. It now keeps itself fresh with real guests from Petwyse, the booking software we built.
10SEO issues found and fixed in the rebuild
100%of real pages kept at their old addresses
0plugins or page builders to maintain
4.9★from 237 Google reviews, shown where people decide
The challenge
A great cattery with a website that had stopped pulling its weight.
The Cat Hotel is a family-run cattery where every family of cats gets its own private, heated villa, indoors or with a garden and loft. It's also where Petwyse was born. Its reputation is excellent, but the old WordPress site, built with a page builder and a stack of plugins, was slow to change and losing ground in Google.
- "Cat hotel near me" had dropped 97 places and "cat kennel" had fallen 90. The page built for "near me" searches had lost its menu link.
- The site never said "Johannesburg" where Google weighs it most, so it read as a one-suburb business.
- No structured data at all, about nine junk pages indexed, broken phone and email links, and a blog quiet for over a year.
What we did
Fix the causes first, then build something worth finding.
A boutique hotel look
A warm serif, the hotel's own reds and rusts on cream, handwritten notes like "Do not disturb: napping", and a cat tree down the side with cats that climb as you scroll. Real photos and video, all shot on site.
Hand-coded and fast
Plain HTML and CSS on Cloudflare's global network. No plugins, no page builder. Every change is reviewed before it goes live, can be rolled back in seconds, and the owners update the site just by asking.
SEO fixed at the root
- Titles and headings aimed at cat hotel Johannesburg, cat boarding, cattery and cat kennels.
- A full location page with map, suburbs served and drive times.
- LocalBusiness, FAQ, article and breadcrumb schema, every old URL kept and junk redirected.
Written for AI Overviews
New guides answer the questions cat parents actually ask, such as "What is a cat hotel?" and "How to choose a cat hotel". Each opens with a short answer, facts read the same everywhere, and an llms.txt file summarises the business for AI assistants.
Wired into Petwyse
A "Guests of the week" carousel loads real cats staying now, straight from Petwyse. Staff pick the photos, or Petwyse picks ten every Friday. Book buttons go to the Petwyse client portal, and Google Analytics 4 tracks every booking click.
The result
A website as good as the care behind it.
Fast on every device, easy to find in local and AI-powered search, and full of real cats. It keeps itself current through the booking system, and the owners can change anything by asking. Cat-parent tools, from a cat age calculator to a villa matchmaker, give visitors a reason to come back and share it.