How we built The Dog Geezer website

• Business: Dog walking and dog training, with adventure days from February 2027
• Area: Heywood, Rochdale, Middleton and Bury
• Pages: Homepage, dog walking in Heywood, dog walking in Bury, dog training, adventure days, privacy and terms
• Enquiries: A separate waiting-list form for each service, saved to a spreadsheet, with a confirmation email to the enquirer and an alert to James
• Built on: A fast static site served by a Cloudflare Worker, with automated tests run before every release

The brief was short. A fast, static site with a premium local-business feel: warm, practical and northern in tone, not cartoon or pet-shop. One clear action on every page. Guide prices, so the site was useful without locking in rates too early. And no claims about training qualifications that could not be backed up.

Exact prices, not “call for a quote”. A 30-minute walk is £12, an hour is £19 and a full day is £100, and the walking page says so. Solo and group walks cost the same, and collection and drop-off are included. The brief started with “from” prices; once the rates were settled, they went on the page in full, because price is the question a walking page has to answer first.

A waiting list instead of a booking button. The business is not taking new clients yet, so every form says so: an enquiry joins a waiting list and is not a confirmed booking. James checks suitability and availability first. Saying that up front avoids promising slots that do not exist.

One form per service. Walking, training and adventure days each have their own waiting list, and enquiries land in separate spreadsheets. James knows what someone wants before he replies.

Proof that is real. There are no reviews yet, so the site uses what is true and checkable: James has run Hareshill Boarding Kennels in Heywood for six years, he is fully insured and DBS-checked, and the dog in the photos is Rogue, his own Belgian Malinois. No stock photos of other people’s dogs, no borrowed testimonials.

Local pages where the searches are. The site launched with one walking page, for Heywood. Keyword research pointed to more searches for dog walking in Bury, so a Bury page followed, built around five real local walks: Burrs Country Park, Clarence Park, Chesham Woods, Kirklees Valley and Elton Reservoir.

Answers to the questions owners ask. Every service page answers the same practical questions in plain words: how long a walk is, what it costs, whether dogs are walked together, pick-up and drop-off, insurance, what happens if a dog is injured, and whether reactive dogs are taken on. The answers are also marked up so search engines can read them as questions and answers.

Launch with every contact route. The first version took enquiries by email only, to keep things simple. A phone number and a form on each service page came later. For a local service, we would launch with all three from day one.

Tell Google about every page on launch day. At first, Google only knew about the homepage. The service pages were picked up after the sitemap was submitted in Search Console and indexing was requested. Doing that on launch day would have saved the wait.

Next on the list. The first reviews on the Google Business Profile, and a photo of James on the site.

The Dog Geezer is owned by James Gornall, who also runs Collective Digital Media. This is an in-house project, not a client result, and no traffic, ranking or booking figures are reported here.