Website design advice

SensibleSarah

LessImpecunious said:

None of that sounds very money saving... Probably the best (and free) way you can help your local visibility is to create a Google Business Profile (https://www.google.com/intl/en_uk/business/) - ideally you'd add links to your website from that, but no need if you haven't yet got one, the profile will act like a free mini website especially for people searching for businesses in your local area. If you know nothing about SEO I wouldn't advise googling it - since practically everyone who has a website wants to improve its visibility there is an enormous industry built around encouraging website owners either to pay for advice on SEO or to visit websites which will tell you how to improve your online visibility (the more people that visit the website the higher the visibility of that website will be, hence that website wins the SEO for SEO websites race... :-)). You'd probably do best to start with Google's own guide to SEO (https://developers.google.com/search/docs/beginner/seo-starter-guide) which includes advice on whether or not you might want to hire a professional SEO adviser.

I've worked in SEO for the last 15 years and totally agree with this advice. This is a good resource for info on local SEO too - https://moz.com/learn/seo/local 
If possible, I would take over the old website from the current owners and even if you change literally everything, including the domain name, and build a totally new site, you can 'redirect' the old site to the new one when it goes live so it passes on a bit of search engine authority to your brand new site and you're not starting completely from scratch on that front. A decent web developer should be able to handle this without any issues.