Deep Wave

Where this all started

Before Bloom Street there was Deep Wave, a red light therapy studio in San Diego running LightStim equipment. I built the business, I built the site, and I did every piece of the search work myself. No agency, no contractor, no budget for either.

That’s the part worth knowing about me. I didn’t learn local SEO on someone else’s business. I learned it on my own, where being invisible on Google meant an empty room and rent still due at the end of the month.

What it did

Over nine months of trading in 2025, Deep Wave pulled 1,991 clicks from 72,597 search impressions, averaging 7,751 impressions and 213 clicks a month. What I’m proudest of is how flat that line was: every full month from April to November 2025 landed between 195 and 248 clicks. A stable search channel, not a lucky spike.

It reached number one for twelve searches that weren’t its own name, verified in Search Console as full days at exactly position 1.0. “sauna near me” held the top spot on 52 separate days. “infrared body wrap san diego” held it on 115.

Two that still surprise me:

“red light therapy” with no city attached hit number one on twelve separate days and averaged position 5.3 across the whole window. That’s a one-room San Diego studio outranking national brands on a national head term.

“red light therapy san diego”, the phrase that drove more traffic than any other at 289 clicks, sat in a sustained top three for nine straight months, with a monthly average between 1.9 and 3.1.

Seventy percent of it was mobile, which is the whole reason I build mobile first now rather than treating it as a checkbox.

The work

A site built by the person answering the phone

Everything on Deep Wave was built by someone who also had to explain the treatment to clients, take the bookings, and clean the room afterwards. It’s a different discipline from designing for a client. You find out very quickly which parts of a website actually produce appointments and which parts just look good in a portfolio.

The answer, in my case, was blunt: the homepage carried 86% of all clicks, and the memberships page was the only interior page pulling real traffic. I built plenty of pages that did nothing. That’s why I now spend the budget on the two or three pages that decide whether someone books.

The handoff

Deep Wave isn’t taking bookings any more. I transitioned the business, and the LightStim equipment with it, to Sculpt by Rind, a holistic facial spa in Bankers Hill run by someone I trust completely.

The site is still live and still ranking, so it now does one job: catch the people still searching for red light therapy in San Diego and send them somewhere good. A referral page rather than a storefront.

On the numbers

Every figure here comes from Search Console with owner access, pulled on 7 August 2026, and covers the trading window only. I’ve left out the eight months after closing, because averaging those in would describe a wind-down rather than a working business.

The number-one count is twelve, not fifteen. Deep Wave also held the top spot for three searches for its own name, and I don’t count those. Ranking first for your own business name is table stakes, and padding the number with it is exactly the kind of thing I’d want to catch if someone were pitching me.

One caveat I’d rather state than have found: Google only keeps sixteen months. Deep Wave traded from 2022, so everything before March 2025 is permanently deleted, and I checked directly rather than assuming. The numbers above are the tail end of the business, not its best years. Whatever the site did in 2023 is gone, and I’m not going to claim it from memory.

It’s also still ranking. Eight months after the doors closed the site still collects around 4,400 impressions a month, which is its own small lesson: real search equity outlives the business that built it.

For what the same approach looks like on a client’s site with month-by-month measurement behind it, see Sculpt by Rind, which is, fittingly, where Deep Wave’s equipment ended up.