Six Things Worth Doing for a Havana or Colfax Business — and One You Should Skip

This is written for the businesses along Havana Street and East Colfax — the restaurants, grocers, salons, repair shops, clinics and professional services that make Aurora the most linguistically diverse city in Colorado. It is deliberately short on sales and long on things you can do yourself this afternoon.

**First, the honest part**

If most of your customers come from your own community, they are probably not finding you through Google. They find you through word of mouth, through WhatsApp and Facebook groups, through community radio, through church and mosque and temple networks, and by living nearby. Those channels are stronger than search, and no amount of SEO replaces them. Anyone telling you otherwise is selling something.

What search adds is a different set of customers: the second generation who grew up here and search in English, people from other communities in Aurora who have heard your food or your work is good, customers who will drive across the metro for something specific, and the writers and creators whose coverage brings more of all three. Plus the person standing on Havana right now with a phone, choosing between you and the shop next door.

That is worth having. It also mostly costs an afternoon rather than a monthly fee.

**1. Fix your category. It takes ten minutes and it matters most.**

The primary category on your Google Business Profile is the single most powerful setting you control, and it is very often set to something too general.

Google has specific categories for a great many cuisines, trades and services — far more specific than most people realise. If you run an Ethiopian restaurant and your category says "Restaurant", you are invisible for the search that would have found you. If you are a halal butcher listed as "Grocery store", the same.

Go into your profile, look at the category list properly, and choose the most specific one that is genuinely true. Add secondary categories for the other things you really do. This one change does more than anything else on this page.

**2. Make your hours true, including your holidays**

Wrong hours cost you customers and earn you the reviews that say so.

This matters more here than in most places, because the days you close are not the days the software assumes. Ramadan and Eid, Lunar New Year, Ethiopian and Eritrean holidays, Orthodox Easter, the days you close for a family event. Google has a special-hours field for exactly this and hardly anyone uses it. Set them in advance for the year.

**3. Photographs beat words in your categories**

For food, retail and personal services, pictures do the persuading. Take them on a recent phone, in daylight, and keep them real:

- The inside of the room, so people know what they are walking into. - The food as you actually serve it, not as a stock photo imagines it. - The shelves, if you are a grocer — people scan for the specific thing they cannot find elsewhere. - The storefront from the street, so they recognise it when they arrive. - The parking, which is a genuine question on both corridors.

Add a few more every month. It is the cheapest ongoing thing you can do.

**4. Ask for reviews in your customer's language**

Google shows reviews in the language they were written and translates them for everyone else. A review in Amharic, Vietnamese, Somali or Arabic counts fully, and it reaches further than you would expect.

So ask in the language the conversation is already happening in. And reply — briefly, in the same language. Those replies are read by every customer who comes afterwards, and they are one of the few places where the character of a business shows through on a screen.

**5. Deal with the spelling of your name**

This is the one almost nobody thinks about, and it is specific to businesses whose names come from a language that does not use the Latin alphabet.

Your sign might be in Amharic, Arabic, Vietnamese, Nepali or Burmese script. But when a customer types your name into Google, they type a transliteration — and there is rarely just one. The same name can be plausibly spelled three or four ways. A reviewer used one spelling, a food blogger used another, your own Facebook page uses a third. Your presence ends up split across variants, none of them strong.

What to do:

- Set your profile name to the real name exactly as it appears on your sign. That is the only name Google's guidelines permit, and it is also the right answer. - Write the common alternative spellings into your page or your description naturally — a sentence about what the name means and how it is said does this and is genuinely interesting to read. - Include the original script too. It costs nothing and it serves the customers who search that way.

The goal is that every spelling someone might reasonably try leads to you.

**6. If you have a website, make it fast and skip the translate button**

Your customers are on phones, often older ones, sometimes on a weak signal. A fast page with your address, hours, phone number, menu or service list and good photographs beats an elaborate site every time.

And if you want the site in more than one language, do not use the translate-widget dropdown. It usually leaves nothing for Google to index, so no version of your site ranks in that language, and it produces translations nobody has checked — which for a menu, a clinic or a legal service is a real risk, not a cosmetic one.

Do fewer pages properly instead. One real page per language, at its own address, written or checked by a person. For most businesses on these corridors, one page per language covering who you are, what you sell, where you are and when you are open is the entire job.

**Do you need to hire anyone?**

Honestly, most businesses in this segment do not need a monthly fee. The work above is setup plus habits. If you would rather someone did the setup properly and handed it over with a written guide, that is a small one-time job — in our practice, generally USD 1,500-4,000 depending on how much is there already.

Ongoing help makes sense if you have several locations, are running a real content programme, or are a professional service competing on search where the competition is serious. Otherwise, take this page and do it yourself. That is a perfectly good outcome.

**Getting help**

If you want a second pair of eyes, we will look at your profile, your categories, your name variants and how your business appears on a phone, and tell you the few things worth fixing — including if the answer is that you do not need us.

SEO for Aurora's Multilingual Small Businesses

Search help for the immigrant-founded restaurants, grocers, salons, clinics, repair shops and professional services along Havana Street and East Colfax — written with the limits stated honestly, because most of these businesses do not need a retainer.