Hi ,
I guess this would be a question for any small business ,
My friend has a small business restoring 1940s-50s stoves , mostly "O'keefe and Merritt" and "Wedgewood" stoves.
He is over 70 years old and has been doing this most of his life .
But now he is wondering how he can get Google to notice his shop when someone types in "Vintage stoves" "O'keefe and merritt" "Wedgewood" etc
Does he need a simple website ? or something "Social Media"
Does he need a Domain name ?
How hard is it to find someone to do a simple website that can be updated when an item sells or new items are available ?
I am just trying to help him get a few more sales and service calls ,
Anyway thanks for your ideas and any help you can offer so he can stay in business another 10 years !
Yes, for Google to rank his business in any way, shape or form he'll need a website. I'd also go for a domain name that describes the business as that at least used to be part of the Google ranking.
If he is willing to the "social media game" and at least put together something about the items he restores, I'd look at WordPress. That's mostly the easy button these days, has some integration for SEO tools and isn't (quite) that overcomplicated. If he's not that interested in learning how to at least update the site itself he should be able to find some freelance "social media manager" or something along those lines, but I'd guess that would cost him more than the ROI, at least initially.
The simpler option is some kind of "placeholder" page that has a few photos of his work, a description of his work and contact details. A WP site that is updated from time to time is more likely to rank, though.
For that matter, Wordpress would be a reasonable option for setting up a website even without using social media. A Facebook page for a business can get some amount of hits, but doesn't carry the same sort of Googlejuice as an official domain name and site. Nowadays you don't see many business sites without domain names. The trick with domain names is that you don't want something ridiculously long, but it helps if the name carries some connection to what you want a search to find - e.g. bobsstoverestoration.com or fixmystove.com.
I did categorise in a bit of blogging under "social media", should have made that clearer. Google likes to rank sites that are updated regularly, hence the suggestion of maybe writing a little bit about the stoves he is restoring.
I've used Squarespace to make a website for our photography. It has a built-in store option. At least he could have a Google-searchable website and then have people redirect to an eBay store? Thinking out loud here...
Attach a blog to the site and add new material regularly. Use key words in the title and several times in the body of the essay. And a great way to find the words to use is by starting a Google search and seeing what the hints are. For example when I punch in woodstove restore I get eight suggestions. So I would pick one like "how to seal a cast iron wood stove" and blog about it.
Over time your site rises to the surface.
thanks for your ideas so far ,
Here is a simple random one that is on the first page when you Google search "O'keefe and Merritt" ,
http://www.relianceappliance.com/okeefe.html
its seems pretty simple , is there a template for something like this where you can add photos and when someone clicks on the photo it goes to the next layer with more information.
Thanks
That site actually looks fairly handcoded, but it shouldn't be a problem to find something along those lines amongst the number of free themes for WordPress.
BoxheadTim said:
That site actually looks fairly handcoded, but it shouldn't be a problem to find something along those lines amongst the number of free themes for WordPress.
Hi.......I did not look at the code because I would not understand it anyway :)
It just looked pretty simple and easy for the customer to get around it ,
I remember Google saying they were going to give higher rankings to Smart phone friendly sites , does wordpress do that ?
Thanks for your help
