How to mount and name a volume if it’s not already mounted with a startup script

I'm trying to do something I thought would be simple, but after researching it I feel like I'm half way towards shaving a yak, so I'm asking for advice. I want to create a script that lets me and my colleagues do normal spolight searches on a shared drive, which from research seems to not be easy and is best solved with a script that:

• Runs on startup (it sounds like the simplest way to do this is to make shell scripts launch on startup using Automator)
• Checks if a volume of a certain name is mounted (a directory on an smb shared drive on an active directory Windows-based shared company drive)
• If it's not, mounts it to that specific name
• Then, index it in spotlight, using its volume name. I think I've got this part covered: mdutil /Volumes/name -i on, apparently

The bolded parts are the parts I'm having trouble with.

Particular problems I'm having:

• I've found an AppleScript way to mount a drive if it's not already mounted – check name of every disk then mount volume "path://to/volume" – but it doesn't allow me to specify the name, and I'm cautious about how consistent the Mac will auto-name a path on a non-Mac shared drive. I want to set the volume name so I can refer to it when telling Spotlight which volume to index, which seems to be impossible in AppleScript?
• I've found a shell script way to mount a drive to a specific volume, but I read (can't find the source now, am looking for it) that the volume has to already exist, which confuses me (do I need to create an empty volume? I don't quite understand what an empty volume would be); and I can't see how to check that it hasn't already auto-mounted.

My level of knowledge of Mac volumes etc is quite low, so I'm aware I may have misunderstood any of the above.