Case study
How a St. Louis food pantry went from a Facebook page to being found on Google
This is a small nonprofit food pantry in the St. Louis area. Until 2025 its only presence online was a Facebook page, so when someone searched Google for a food pantry, there was no pantry website for Google to show them.
Everything lived on Facebook
The pantry's opening hours and the list of what it needed both lived on its Facebook page. Followers saw it. Someone searching Google for a food pantry wouldn't find it, though, and the pantry had no control over the platform it all sat on.
What we built
We designed and built the pantry's website in 2025, and we host it on AWS. There's no server behind it for the pantry to patch or pay to scale up.
In mid-2026 we rebuilt the site in Astro, a newer tool for building fast static sites. Before the switch, we audited the old site and wrote 33 automated tests from that audit, screenshot comparisons included, so we could prove the new build matched the old one instead of eyeballing it.
We added Google Analytics after that. The site also does things a Facebook page handles badly, like an event page with buttons to add the event to your calendar.
How people find the pantry now
Measured over 28 days in August 2026. Before 2025 there was no site, so each of these started at zero.
- Clicks from Google search
- 70
- Times shown in Google results
- 514
- Average position in those results
- 6.0
- Sessions in Google Analytics
- 212
What the numbers mean
An average position of 6.0 means the site showed on the first page of results, on average. Lighthouse scored it 100 for SEO on mobile, and it scored 100 on our security scan, with A+ grades for its TLS setup and its security headers.
If your business only has a Facebook page
Facebook is good at reaching people who already follow you. It's much worse at reaching someone who has never heard of you and is typing what they need into Google. That's the gap a website fills, and it's the same gap for a law office or a small accounting practice.
Questions about this project
Is a Facebook page enough for a small business or nonprofit?
For keeping your followers up to date, it does the job. For being found on Google, it's weak. The food pantry in this case study had only a Facebook page until 2025, and over 28 days in August 2026 its website drew 70 clicks from Google search.
How did this food pantry start showing up on Google?
By having a website for Google to show. We built the pantry's site in 2025 and host it on AWS. Over 28 days in August 2026, Google showed it in search results 514 times at an average position of 6.0, and people clicked through 70 times.
Why isn't the client named?
We keep clients anonymous in our case studies. The search numbers come from the site's own Google Search Console and Google Analytics, and the scores come from tests we ran on the live pages.
Hard to find on Google?
Call +1 (636) 362-6221 or send us a note, and tell us what you sell and where. You can also see the rest of our work, or read our reviews on Google.