— Case Study

One hundred and ten sessions in four weeks. Ten new athletes.

A full website rebuild, technical SEO pass, and companion iOS app for kathy-butler.com, the site for Kathy Butler, 2× Olympian and running coach, who trains athletes online worldwide as well as in person in Boulder, Colorado. Four weeks of real Google Analytics data, no rounding up.

Website design: bold, high-contrast type over real race photography, a story-led layout that leads with Kathy's Olympic credentials, and a coaching-intake flow with no unnecessary steps. The copy and structure carry both sides of the business equally (online coaching plans for remote athletes anywhere, and in-person 1:1 and group training for Boulder locals) rather than defaulting to one and treating the other as an afterthought. Built mobile-first with technical SEO baked in from day one, not bolted on after.

Run Foundations app design: 25+ drills organized into warm-up, strength, form, and cool-down categories, each with a video demonstration, coaching cues, and a built-in timer, so a remote athlete gets the same instruction Kathy would give in person. A coach-share feature lets an athlete send a summary of their training activity straight to Kathy, so remote coaching doesn't stop at "here's what to do."

And it's working: weekly sessions grew from 9 to 110 in the four weeks since launch, converting into 10 real athletes now coaching or waiting to start. Full breakdown below.

🔒 www.kathy-butler.com

Client — Kathy Butler Coaching Site — kathy-butler.com Window — Jul 29 – Aug 25, 2026, four weeks post-launch, still gathering data Written by — the phoe.be team

— Reach

Where the real visitors came from

Raw pageviews were rejected as a metric here: bot and scraper traffic inflates that number for free. A city only counts if it showed a returning visitor, a multi-page browsing journey, or both. Not every real connection shows up here either. Google Analytics 4 (GA4) does not log data blocked by user privacy settings, ad blockers, or active internal traffic filters. That's also why this map won't line up one-to-one with the athlete map below.

— What we did

The specific work behind the numbers

Every number on this page traces back to the redesign and SEO, not a vague "we redesigned it."

✓Rebuilt kathy-butler.com: a full technical SEO pass, not just a cosmetic redesign.
✓Built and maintain the Run Foundations iOS app, Kathy's own drill library with video and coaching cues, so remote athletes can be pointed straight to the exact drill they need instead of a description over email or a mid-call demo.
✓Kept the infrastructure vanilla: AWS S3 behind CloudFront, TLS via ACM, a CloudFront Function handling the apex-to-www redirect, and a secured Lambda function that issues QR codes and registration keys for the Run Foundations trial flow.

— Traffic

Real, sourced growth, week by week

Pulled directly from Google Analytics 4 (GA4). Bars are weekly sessions; the line is average engagement time per session, plotted on its own scale.

Sessions Avg. engagement time

On the yellow line: engagement time nearly doubled week over week as returning-visitor share grew from 1 to 6. That's a small number, but the trend is real and moving the right way.

Show the underlying weekly numbers

Week	Sessions	Active users	New users	Returning	Avg. engagement
Jul 29 – Aug 4	9	9	8	1	6s
Aug 5 – 11	90	74	71	3	7s
Aug 12 – 18	90	65	62	3	17s
Aug 19 – 25	110	81	75	6	32s

Search Console totals for the same four-week window.

44Distinct ranking queries

8.5Avg. position

129Clicks

4,250Impressions

3.0%Avg. CTR

Distinct ranking queries — different search terms the site showed up for in Google, whether or not they got clicked. It's a breadth measure, not a quality one; Avg. position below is what tells you how well those queries actually ranked.
Avg. position — the average spot in Google's results across those queries; lower is better, 1 is the top result.
Clicks — times someone clicked through from a Google result to the site.
Impressions — times the site appeared in Google's results, whether or not it was clicked.
Avg. CTR — click-through rate: clicks divided by impressions. For an average position in the high single digits, that's in line with typical CTR at that spot on the results page, not an outlier in either direction.

— Still ahead

What hasn't been fixed yet

The honest part. Progress isn't the same as done.

✕#32 for the primary local search term, not yet ranking for the equivalent online-coaching term. Both are core commercial phrases (one for the in-person side of the business, one for the online side), and branded search is strong (#3 for "kathy butler"), but neither money keyword is there yet.
✕Too early to judge a returning audience. 6 out of 81 active users returned in the strongest week, just four weeks after launch. That's expected this early: growth so far is new-visitor discovery, and returning share is worth revisiting once the site has had a full quarter to build one.

No Google Business Profile: that's on purpose. A GBP listing is built for map-pack visibility around a fixed address, and most of Kathy's roster trains with her online from wherever they live, not in a storefront in Boulder. Setting one up would tie the brand to a single city, invite the review-management overhead that comes with a public storefront listing, and risk the site ranking for local, near-me-style searches instead of the online-coaching terms it's actually targeting. That's the opposite of what the keyword strategy above is aiming for. If the in-person Boulder side ever grows enough to justify it, a GBP listing is easy to add later.

— Business outcomes

Sessions that turned into real athletes

Supplied directly by Kathy: 5 athletes currently committed to coaching, 5 more waiting to start or wait-listed, a mix of online coaching clients scattered across the map and in-person athletes training with her in Boulder.

110sessions→10customersPeak-week sessions converted into 10 athletes now coaching or waiting to start

Same map widget as above. Solid blue lines and pins are committed athletes; muted dashed lines are the five still waiting to start. The spread from Zurich to Brazil is the online coaching business at work; the Boulder (local) pin is the in-person side.

Denver and Boston show up in both lists: the real-visitor map above and the committed-athlete roster here. That's a real, traceable point of overlap. Every new client this period came directly through the website, with no referrals or word of mouth involved, so the overlap isn't a coincidence.

— FAQ

Want a site like this one?

The questions that come up before every project like Kathy Butler Coaching's.

How much does a website like kathy-butler.com cost?

A single, focused page starts at $150, with custom design, technical SEO, and a year of hosting included. Multi-page business sites, like Kathy Butler Coaching's, are quoted after a quick call once the scope is clear.

How long does a project like this take?

Timelines depend on scope, but the process is the same for every project: a no-commitment conversation to define the goal, a design and build phase with technical SEO baked in from day one, then launch with a year of hosting already included.

Is four weeks of data enough to trust these numbers?

Four weeks is enough to show real, verifiable movement: exact session counts, real Search Console rankings, no rounding up. It's not enough to call anything finished, which is why the "Still ahead" section above lists what's still unproven instead of only reporting the wins.

One hundred and ten sessions in four weeks. Ten new athletes.

Where the real visitors came from

The specific work behind the numbers

Real, sourced growth, week by week

What hasn't been fixed yet

Sessions that turned into real athletes

Want a site like this one?

How much does a website like kathy-butler.com cost?

How long does a project like this take?

Is four weeks of data enough to trust these numbers?

Want numbers like these for your site?