Looking for some guidance for SEO for a small business
Hi Tildes!
My significant other works in a mom and pop veterinary practice (litteraly : one manages cattle care and the other manages pets (i. e. cats and dogs)) . They are going to retirement, so she's gonna take over along with a colleague (only for the pets part though). The practice is located in a mid-sized town (for Switzerland at least) ; it's big enough to support a couple more practices, not enough to feel that much competitive pressure (in fact all but one practice share the night and weekend on-call duties).
I volunteered to build her a new website, since the name doesn't match the new structure they're creating (it basically goes from "John and Jane Smith Veterinary Practice" to "VetPun Ltd" ), and also because the old website has a dated early 2000s vibe.
There no plan yet to integrate their practice management software to the website (it's also an ancien piece of tech, they are keen to replace it some day), so it's going to be a couple of static pages for now.
This is technically well within my range (I'm a full stack dev, for such a small thing it's probably going to be a Github Page; although a small Digital Ocean droplet is not out of question), but I mainly work on B2B and have no idea how to do SEO.
Here's what's in my checklist
- Redirect the old website to the new one
- Register in the Google Business directory
- Register in the local business directory
- Register in Google Maps
- Modify the entry in Openstreet Map
- Follow those guide for the website itself:
- Ads: we plan some ads on local newspaper, and adwords for a limited time (and targeting people local to the area of course).
- I guess I should also do Facebook? Does that overlap with Instagram? (I'm not a regular user of either of them, although I do have to use Facebook for some LARP event)
- Analytics : say that I integrate Google Analytics, what kind of actionnable item can I expect out of it? Can I get the same kind of data using a self hosted solution? It has been years since I used it in my now defunct blog back in my teenage days, so I expect some change compared to 2008.
Am I missing something?
Unrelated to SEO, but what's the maintenance story here?
Are you signing up to be the IT guy they call whenever something goes wrong? Or whenever they need to make a change to the website?
It's been a while since I've worked with SEO, but I recommend reading through Search Engine Land's guide to go over the fundamentals. Search Engine Journal also has a list of useful articles to go through including recommendations for tools you might want to use.
I haven't worked directly with ads but I've worked with teams who run paid advertising and you should manage the budget carefully. You'll likely have to test the ads you're running (text, layout of images, information you're communicating, etc.) to find the most effective version to keep your costs low. If you know your competitors, you can find ads they're running on Google Ads Transparency Center and Facebook Ad Library.
You'll need to set up a Facebook Business page linked to a personal account to run ads on Facebook and Instagram through Facebook Business Manager. You'll likely have to do some verification with business documents.
There are alternatives to Google Analytics, but if you're running Google Ads, it might be good to have one that integrates directly with it, like Mixpanel. There are more privacy-friendly ones and free ones with limited functionality. Matomo and Simple Analytics are two others I come across often. Matomo can be self-hosted. Google Analytics still gives you the most for free, but this is in exchange for privacy. The GA4 update was a big overhaul from what it used to be, and I haven't used it since so I can't comment on what you can get out of it now. I've heard grumblings about the data not being entirely accurate, but this might depend on how it's set up.
I think you will regret building it as static pages unless you are building it with a dynamic template system and then mirroring. Nobody wants to be manually editing headers across even two pages when you can be making those changes in just one place. Also, you don’t want to be the only person who can edit the content. Basically, use a pre-built CMS of some kind.
Probably goes without saying that you should configure Google Search Console Tools. Pay attention to all the errors that show up there, they are mostly important.
Make sure your redirect is a 301 and not a 302.
A good place to start is moz.com:
https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo
It’s a pretty comprehensive guide, and Fishkin is very into testing and proving the theories so it’s, while sometimes speculative, mostly solid.
The biggest real factors are: