SEO Help Needed

[Wanna-Be-FI-Bri]

My brother-in-law was struggling to create a website for his podiatry office that is just getting off the ground so I decided to help him out by using my newly acquired TeamTreehouse and CodeAcademy skills.  The website domain is schererdpm.com. 

When you google certain words an old cached version of schererpodiatry.com still pops up every once and a while (which shouldn’t be).  How do I stop this? 

Not to mention, his website doesn’t appear anywhere need the top of google.

I am trying to avoid paying for google adwords as we don’t have funds to advertise.  I registered his business to google business and used the search engine submission feature of a friends IT company: http://miconsultant.com/search-engine-submission. I would really like his website to appear earlier on the search engines, but I don’t know that much about SEO to accomplish my goal.  Any advice?

[CowboyAndIndian]

Yes, do not play the SEO game. Black Hat/Gray Hat/White Hat, all do not make sense. The next update to Google algorithms will penalize those who try to game Google.

Create awesome articles with a lot of information. Every question that a patient has asked, could be answered.
With this volume of information, Google will quickly put him on the map.

[kudy]

When you google certain words an old cached version of schererpodiatry.com still pops up every once and a while (which shouldn’t be).  How do I stop this? 

You'll need to implement a blanket 301 redirect on the old website, so that any requests for pages at the old domain are directed to the new domain.

Not to mention, his website doesn’t appear anywhere need the top of google.

One simple thing, and one complicated thing:

• Change the "title" (contained in HTML <title> element) to emphasize service + location, rather than his name: e.g. "Podiatrist in Monterey Park, CA | Dr. Benjamin Scherer, DPM"
• Research "local SEO" or "local business listings" - these are the most important factor in ranking a locally targeted business. A paid service that helps organize this effort, which I use and like is MOZ Local: moz.com/local

Unfortunately, the last thing will be patience... search engines often don't rank brand new websites for related terms. After the site has been online for a year, you will likely see more traction.

If you're able to expand the content with more useful information, you might increase the relevance of the website, and therefore increase search rankings. For example, would your brother in law be able to write a few paragraphs about each of the "services" and how his office generally treats patients with the specific medical problems? This content might be valuable, and would add additional useful pages for search engines to crawl and serve to search users.

[Mr. Frugalwoods]

Don't try and play SEO games.  You might get a short term boost, but the end will be swift and brutal.

The one exception?  Make sure the physical address of the practice is at the bottom of every page, properly marked up with the business location microformat (https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/146861).  You want Google to know that for podiatry in that town your brother-in-law's site is relevant.

• Get rid of the stock photos and hire a photographer to take good photos of the office and the staff.
• Have your brother-in-law write up a bunch of interesting / useful articles on podiatry.  Every single thing under the "specialties" heading should be a link to a great original article about that particular thing.
• You should have a Q&A page that has common questions that someone might type into a search browser along with well written answers.
• Do a reddit "I'm a podiatrist, AMA (about feet)"
• Use the novelty of reddit to generate local news media coverage.  "Local podiatry practice goes online to spread the word about modern podiatry..."
• Do custom insoles for free for local running bloggers to get them to talk about the practice.

You get the idea.  Good SEO is just good marketing.  Anyone who tells you otherwise is trying to sell you something.

[Nudelkopf]

I'm young (23) and the first place I go is to Facebook to find businesses, and then that often links to legit websites.

I didn't actually click on the link to see if you already have this.

[jpvt128]

There is no magic recipe to ranking higher on Google. I have had on-site training from Google on SEO, nothing is disclosed. All you can do is build the best site possible, however there are a few things that Google looks for.

The key to good SEO is quality content. I would recommend writing everything in your normal voice, while thinking about some of the keyword phrases you would like to rank for. Target your content towards these keywords without keyword stuffing, or typing anything that seems unnatural. Also, think about some of the geographic areas you want to rank for. It is typically best to have your primary geo (most likely the office's location) and 3-4 secondary geos mentioned throughout the site. You'll find that many searches will include a geo tag, example "Foot Doctor Honolulu". Check out Google Trends to get an idea of the search volume in your area. It doesn't really help to have the top spot on the search results page if no one is conducting searches for that phrase. I am not sure what the demand for Podiatry is in your area, but there may not be a lot of volume to begin with.

Your offsite strategy is also important. Focus on creating a few quality backlinks to your site through well known directories with good reputations. Do not just buy up backlinks- this is black hat and will hurt you, but having a solid directory on a site like yelp or yellowbook that links back to your site will definitely help.

I also echo the push towards SEO Moz. They have a ton of beginner articles that can be very helpful. I also know that you mentioned an aversion to running some paid search through Google Adwords. I would reconsider that if I were you. It will typically take at least 3 months before you are going to see major jumps in rankings. Running an Adwords campaign can help bring in traffic while you wait for Google to crawl your site. Run some test searches in your area to see if other offices are running campaigns. If not, the cost would be extremely low, and a small budget could have a major impact on your site performance. You could also limit yourself to just a couple of months until your organic traffic rises to a better level.

I hope this helps!

[vagon]

Check out http://www.theshortcutts.com/ and you probably want to start with the "Redirects and Canonicalization" category.
There's a lot of info and work in SEO, so the more specific you can be about what you want the better.

More importantly what is the purpose of this website?
I am assuming its to just have a presence so people can look up company details rather than trying to be a super-popular podiatry site.
what does achieving that purpose look like? I would consider hard the ROI on your time spent here.