Web design for Bodalla businesses
This town has been known for one product for well over a century, and what happens here has changed inside the last two years. A great many websites have not noticed.
What to do when the thing you were famous for stops
Bodalla is a dairy town and has been described as one for generations. The detail of what actually happens here has moved recently, and the version of the town that exists in most people's heads, and on a good deal of the internet, is a couple of years out of date.
That is the most ordinary problem in small business and almost nobody treats it as urgent. You stopped offering something. You added something better. The premises changed. And the website, the listings and the third-party pages still describe the business you were in 2021, because updating them was never anybody's specific job.
The cost is not that people think less of you. It is that they arrive expecting something you do not have, or do not arrive at all because what you now do was never mentioned. Both of those are silent. Nobody rings to tell you their impression of your business was three years stale. Website design
Your website is not the only page about you
The part that catches people out is that correcting your own site fixes maybe half of it. Search results, map listings, directories, tourism pages and other people's articles all carry their own version, and several of them rank above you for your own name.
Working out what is actually being said about a business, and then correcting the pieces that matter, is unglamorous work with a genuinely high return, and it is usually cheaper than a new website. For a business in a town whose identity is shifting it is the first thing to do rather than the last. SEO
Questions about working outside your own town.
The same five come up wherever we are on this coast, so they are answered once here rather than eighty slightly different times.
Will people in the next town along still find us?+
That depends on whether your site ever mentions them, and most do not. Search results shift with where the person is standing, so a business that only ever names its own town tends to vanish about fifteen minutes up the road. The fix is usually structural rather than a rewrite.
How do you decide which towns are worth a page and which are not?+
On whether we can write something true about that town that would not also be true of the one next to it. If we cannot, we do not build the page, because a run of near-identical pages with the name swapped is something search engines actively demote, and the damage lands on the whole site rather than the pages that caused it. Where the honest answer is one page instead of five, we say so.
We are the only business of our kind for half an hour in either direction. Does any of this matter?+
It matters differently. You are not fighting a competitor down the street, you are fighting the assumption that nobody nearby does this at all, which sends people further afield before they ever look properly. Being unmistakably present across the whole stretch is worth more to you than outranking anybody.
Our customers drive to us rather than the other way round. Does that change anything?+
Yes, and it is the thing most sites have backwards. If people travel to you, the page has to lead with where you are and how long it takes to get there. If you travel to them, it has to lead with how far you go. Very few sites answer either question at all, which is why the ones that do get the call.
What happens if we stop covering an area?+
Tell us and we take it down properly, which means the page, the internal links and the service area list all change in the same pass. Claiming somewhere you no longer go is a poor experience for the person who rings, and it eventually becomes a ranking problem as well.
Tell us the business and we will show you what a customer sees before they reach your website. It is frequently not what the owner expects.
The quote is free, fixed in writing and yours to sit on. Nobody here will ring you every Tuesday about it.