Web vocabulary, in everyday words

Everything we do so Google understands your site and shows it to the right people. Clear headings, one page per service, copy using the words your customers actually type, a fast site, consistent contact details.

It is not magic and not a subscription: it is construction. A well-built site starts with the right foundations. Nobody can guarantee you the first spot — be wary of anyone who promises it.

When someone searches “excavation Saint-Hyacinthe” or “snow removal near me”, Google tries to find nearby businesses. Local SEO is everything that helps Google understand where you work: your service areas written plainly, your address and phone identical everywhere, your Google listing tied to your site, pages by area when it makes sense.

For a small business, it is by far the SEO that pays. Your customer is not looking for the best contractor in Quebec — they are looking for someone who can come to their house.

It is free, and it is often the first thing a customer sees of you — before your site. It shows your name, phone, hours, photos, reviews and a button to call or get directions.

A neglected listing with an old number costs more than people think. That is exactly what our GPS Package fixes.

You pay to appear at the top when someone searches a specific term, and only when they click. A “campaign” is a budget, a list of keywords and ads that get monitored and adjusted.

It can work very well, but it is a full-time trade. We do not run campaigns — we would rather be excellent at our own work and refer you to someone good.

Same principle as Google Ads, but with an important difference: on Google people are looking for you; on Facebook you appear in front of people who were not looking for anything. Excellent for showing your work, less so for catching someone whose basement is flooding right now.

More and more people ask an assistant instead of Google. Ad formats are beginning to appear in those tools, and this will move fast in the coming years.

What does not change: those assistants read websites to answer. A clear, well-structured site with your services and areas written plainly is what makes you quotable — by Google and by an AI alike.

WordPress lets you edit your own site from an admin panel. That is its advantage, and also its weakness: to offer that, it adds a database, a theme, and often fifteen to thirty plugins.

The result: a heavier, slower site that needs constant updates and becomes a target the moment a plugin stops being maintained.

We write your sites directly in HTML, CSS and JavaScript — the native language of browsers. No database to query, no theme to load, no plugins to maintain. The server sends the page, the browser displays it. Done.

In practice: where a plugin-heavy WordPress takes five to eight seconds to open on a phone with poor reception, a hand-built site opens in a fraction of a second. And since nine visitors out of ten are on a phone, often in a truck, that is exactly where it counts.

There is also security: with no database and no plugins, there is almost nothing to hack. And durability: your site will still work in ten years without a single update.

The same page has to be flawless on a phone, a tablet and a desktop. That is not an extra: it is the baseline. We check every page with real taps in mobile emulation before each delivery.

The domain name is your address: yourbusiness.ca. You lease it yearly, and it is in your name. Hosting is the space on a server where your site's files live, powered on around the clock.

Both are included in Web Care if you take it. Otherwise we hand you your files and you host them wherever you like.

The SSL certificate encrypts what travels between the visitor and your site. When it is in place, the address starts with https and the browser shows a padlock. Without it, Chrome prints “Not secure” in red next to your name — and half of your visitors close the page.

The certificate expires and must be renewed, usually every three months. That is one of the things Web Care watches for you.

A cookie remembers something from one visit to the next: your language, your cart, your dark-mode choice. Some are also used to measure traffic or to follow you from one site to another for advertising.

In Quebec, a site must ask for your consent before storing non-essential cookies — that is what the banner at the bottom of the page is for. Our sites use only what is strictly necessary.

“Call us”, “Request a quote”, “Book a call”: the call to action is the button that turns a visitor into a customer. A site can be beautiful and bring in nothing if it has none, or if it is buried at the bottom of the page.

On a well-designed site, you find it at every point where a visitor might make up their mind — and on a phone, your number always stays within thumb’s reach.

A keyword is a search: “snow removal Saint-Hyacinthe”, “emergency electrician Laval”, “bathroom renovation cost”. The work is to know which ones your customers use, then to write your pages with those words — in headings, in copy, in page addresses.

Without stuffing: Google penalises pages that repeat a word ten times. Clear copy, written for a human, with the right terms in the right places, is what works.

Every page has a title (the blue link in Google, about 60 characters) and a meta description (the two grey lines under it). Those two texts decide whether someone clicks on you or on the next result.

Many sites leave them empty or identical on every page. We write them page by page, with the service and the town in them.

Inside the code of your pages, we add a standardised description of your business: name, address, phone, hours, services, service area. Google and AI assistants read it directly, without having to guess.

It is what lets Google show your hours or your rating in its results, and what helps an assistant quote you correctly when someone asks it a question.

Google measures every site’s speed and factors it into ranking. Your visitors measure nothing: they wait two or three seconds, then go back.

Speed depends mostly on how the site is built: light pages, images compressed to the right size, no unnecessary systems running in the background. It is the main reason we build in HTML.

Reviews left on your Google listing are often the first thing a customer looks at — before your site, before your photos. A few recent, sincere reviews weigh more than a whole page of copy.

Asking a satisfied customer for a review is allowed. Buying or inventing them is not, and Google is getting better at spotting it. We can link your reviews to your site so they appear there.

A redesign is not a coat of paint: we start from what you have — your copy, your photos, whatever brings you people — and rebuild the site so it is fast, clear and readable on a phone.

The delicate part is not losing your place on Google along the way: old addresses are redirected to the new ones, page by page. See our FAQ on that point.

A server can fail, a file can be deleted by mistake, a site can be hacked. The backup is the complete copy that lets everything be restored in minutes instead of rebuilt from scratch.

It does not happen by itself: it has to be scheduled, checked and kept somewhere other than the same server. It is included in Web Care.