Case study: Premium sports coaching
Rebuilding a Swiss coaching studio's website, from blocked storefront to Google's first page
Premium sports coaching in Vevey. Full redesign, local SEO, nLPD / GDPR compliance.
Context
FENIX is a private and semi-private sports coaching studio that opened in early 2026 in Vevey, on
the Vaud Riviera, alongside an online running-coaching offer. Its founder had built a first site
himself, on Odoo, to get the business off the ground.
It worked, but he was clear from the start:
he wanted something more professional and more conversion-focused, to step up his brand and
communication. Before promising anything, I audited the existing site.
That's where the real
problems showed up.
The Starting Point
The Odoo site wasn't an aesthetics problem, it was a foundations problem:
- Only two pages indexed by Google — all but invisible to anyone searching for a coach nearby.
- The site returned an error to indexing bots, which explains its near-absence from search results.
- Descriptions duplicated from one page to the next: another negative signal for SEO.
- Nothing built for conversion: no clear path to getting in touch or booking a discovery session.
The diagnosis was simple: the site wasn't working for its owner. It existed, nothing more.
The approach
I didn't start by opening an editor. I started by understanding. Before a single pixel, I produced
a detailed scoping document (nearly 20 pages) covering architecture, UX, design, content, SEO,
migration and training.
The project was then structured into four milestones, with one simple rule:
nothing moves forward until the previous step is validated and settled. Everything was first built
in an isolated test environment, on my own infrastructure, before being migrated to the client's
hosting. Halfway through, a live walkthrough of the work in progress let us validate the design and
gather adjustments before going further.
What was built
An eight-page site, built entirely for FENIX:
- A dark, premium, bespoke design: charcoal base, gold accents, editorial typography. Nothing off-the-shelf.
- Hand-built components: a reusable video hero, a scrolling Google-reviews carousel, an animated word rotator, a brand-themed loading animation.
- Local SEO planned query by query: each page targets a different, complementary search, with no cannibalisation. Copy kept natural and human, never keyword-stuffed.
- Real Swiss and European compliance: nLPD privacy policy, terms, legal notice, and a working consent banner wired to the analytics tool.
- Privacy-respecting analytics: tracking the actions that actually matter, honouring consent, with no data handed to third parties.
- And above all: the client owns their site. Hosting in their name, their own domain, every access in their hands. No lock-in, no dependency.
Key screens
Results
A few weeks after launch, based on Google Search Console data:
- The site now ranks on Google’s first page for local, non-branded searches: sports coach, personal trainer, hyrox in Vevey. Exactly the people looking for the service who don’t yet know FENIX.
- A first enquiry even came in through an AI search (ChatGPT) — a sign the site is now clean and trustworthy enough to be recommended beyond classic search engines.
- Load time around one second, and real traffic that’s mostly local: its target.
From an invisible storefront blocked at two pages, to a site that's found, fast, compliant and built to convert.
What this project says about how I work
No disguised template. No dependency created to keep the client tied in. An audit before any promise, a bespoke design, clean code, sovereign hosting the client controls, and support until the site genuinely works for them.
A website isn't a set piece. It's a tool.
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