Growth Strategy & Website Build
Five surf school locations, zero online bookings. Built from scratch in eight weeks.
Transforming a local surf school's website into a conversion-focused booking system, built for tourists, locals, and institutional partners.
Context
The Bodysurf School teaches bodysurfing across five locations on the Portuguese coast, from Costa da Caparica to Ericeira. The founder is a national bodysurf vice-champion, and demand was growing across three very different audiences: tourists with high booking intent, locals with more questions than urgency, and schools looking for institutional partnerships.
The existing website could not convert that demand. There was no online booking, no payment processing, and every lesson required a manual back-and-forth over WhatsApp or email. The site was English-only in a market where half the audience searches in Portuguese, and there was no structure for search visibility, either in traditional engines or in AI-powered search.
The engagement covered three integrated phases: growth strategy and planning, full website UX/UI and build, and SEO and AEO implementation.
Strategy
Growth Strategy First, Build Second
Before touching design, I mapped the three personas and their booking behaviour. Tourists needed instant booking and payment. Locals needed answers and lesson packs. Schools needed credibility and a low-friction enquiry path. Every page and flow decision followed from that mapping, including the platform choice: WordPress, for booking flexibility and content scalability.
Booking and Payment Infrastructure
Implemented a full online booking system covering individual lessons across all five locations, with location-based travel surcharges calculated automatically at checkout. Payments run through the methods Portuguese customers actually use: MB Way, Multibanco, card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. Lesson packs were built as a voucher system, letting returning students buy multiple sessions upfront and redeem them when booking.
Conversion-Focused Site Architecture
Structured the site around booking intent rather than information hierarchy. Dedicated pages for private lessons, group sessions, and Little Surfers (parent-child sessions), a separate B2B section for schools with its own enquiry flow, and a persistent WhatsApp contact point for visitors not ready to book online.
Bilingual by Design
Full Portuguese translation layered over the English site, covering every page, form, and checkout step. Place names and the brand name stay in English; everything else reads natively in European Portuguese.
SEO and AEO Foundations
Keyword research across English and Portuguese, mapped to intent clusters per persona. On-page SEO with structured metadata, Organization schema, and internal linking architecture. For AI-powered search, content was structured answer-first: visible question-and-answer sections written to be cited by answer engines, prioritising content structure over deprecated schema types.
Compliance and Measurement
GDPR-compliant consent management, GA4 with conversion tracking, Google Search Console with sitemap submission, and transactional email infrastructure so booking confirmations reach customers reliably.
Results
A Complete Booking System
Visitors can now select a lesson type, location, date, and time slot, and pay online in one flow, with local payment methods and automatic travel surcharges. No manual scheduling required.
Built for Two Languages and Three Audiences
A fully bilingual site with dedicated conversion paths for tourists, locals, and institutional partners, each matched to how that audience actually books.
A Search-Ready Foundation
Bilingual keyword strategy, technical SEO, and answer-first content structure position the school to capture organic demand from both traditional search and AI-generated answers as the site matures.
What the client said
We are very happy with the website Maria created for us. She listened to our needs and wishes and really took us by the hand from beginning to end. She constantly came with recommendations that took the website to the next level, and for any tools we needed, she explained the pros and cons of different add-ons, which made our decision-making a lot easier.
What stood out too is that she thought along with us on a much broader level, beyond just the website itself. She considered what would work for our customers, and even suggested different services we could consider offering. It felt like having someone thinking with us on marketing and branding, not just building a website.
We now have a website that sells our different services well, with clear calls to action and an easy way to book and pay. Something we thought would be pricey and difficult to create, she built in just one month, and our monthly costs are low. On top of that, we're now ranking number one on search engines and AI tools whenever you search for bodysurf.
Maria handed over the website in such a professional way that we're now fully equipped to manage it ourselves.
It was truly a pleasure working with Maria. She's easy to work with, super hands-on, and delivered exactly what she promised, within the timeframe she promised.
Turning a website into a booking engine takes strategy before design.
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