My buddy asked me to build a new website for their mental health practice since the old one was a 2-page GoDaddy Airo site. The old site had a homepage and a services page, both very sparse. I mean less than a paragraph per service, and only three services listed.
I rebuilt the site using Astro. Every page is a static page. I expanded the site from 2 pages to 42 pages: the two original pages with expanded content, 7 new pages for the different conditions they treat, 5 new pages for the different services they offer, and a few miscellaneous pages like a privacy policy, a reviews page that pulls from Google reviews, and a booking page that links to their booking software. I then duplicated those pages in Spanish. Since they're static, they don't take much work. A lot of my buddy's patients are Spanish speakers, so the thought process was that I could target them with these pages.
Each Spanish page is a real translation at its own URL (e.g. /depression-treatment-[city] ↔ /es/depresion), titled "[Service] en Español en [City], [State] | [Clinic Name]" so it reads as local and in-language in search results. English/Spanish pairs are linked with hreflang, and each page canonicals to itself.
I'm no SEO expert, but I didn't want to break my friend's SEO. I'm not trying to improve it, just maintain what they had. According to GoDaddy's analytics, the old site gets around 1,000 visitors a month, while Google Search Console says they receive around 200-300 clicks. I'm not sure why the discrepancy is so large, but I suspect it's bots hitting the site directly, or people visiting the site directly vs. clicking a search result. He was very surprised when I told him 1,000 people were visiting the site a month. The vast majority of the GSC clicks are from people searching the name of the clinic directly, not finding them through "clinic near me" type searches. Either way, based on GSC there were only two indexed pages, and those have the exact same URLs on the new site, so no redirects needed.
I have not rolled out the site yet. Here is a list of changes. Please give me feedback with the goal of just not breaking their SEO.
- Existing homepage title was just the bare domain name. New one is "[Clinic Name] | Psychiatry & Therapy in [City], [State]"
- Existing services page title was just "Services". New one is "Psychiatry Services in [City], [State] | [Clinic Name]"
- Every page has a unique title with service + city, kept under 60 characters; descriptions under 160
- Canonical tags on every page (old site: none)
- hreflang tags linking each English/Spanish pair (old site: none)
- Plan on submitting a sitemap.xml. The old site never had one submitted
- Cumulative Layout Shift fixed to zero
- Images served as AVIF/WebP with JPEG fallback
- Clean robots.txt, sitemap, and internal linking between related conditions/services
- PageSpeed mobile: performance 98, accessibility 100, best practices 100
- PageSpeed desktop: performance 99, accessibility 100, best practices 100
- SEO score says 68 because I have a noindex/nofollow tag on it. I hosted it on a staging URL so my friend can review it. Before I switched it to noindex, the SEO score was 100
I am really concerned that I might break my friend's SEO. Is there anything on this list that's a red flag, or anything I'm missing before I flip the DNS?
Source: r/SEO · by /u/banana_funk