Web design for Central Tilba businesses
People do not drive here for any one business. They drive here for the street, and your job is to be the reason they stop walking.
The street is the drawcard and your shop is a detail in it
This is a conservation-listed village and it has been since the 1970s, which is why it looks the way it does and why people come. The attraction is the whole street rather than anything in it, and that is an unusual position for a business to trade from.
It is mostly an advantage. The traffic arrives without any individual business having to pay for it.
The disadvantage is subtle and it costs real money. Visitors research the village, not the businesses, so a great many people arrive knowing where they are going and nothing at all about who is there. They then make every purchasing decision in about ninety seconds each, on foot, comparing shopfronts.
Which means the website's job here is not to be found by somebody searching your name. It is to be found by somebody searching the village, and to give them one specific reason to look for you once they are standing in it. A business that is named in advance gets visited. One that is not gets whatever is left over. Website design
The most famous name in this village belongs to a building
There is a lesson here that applies well beyond one village. The best-known name in this street is a historic factory building with a long co-operative history behind it, and the business trading there today operates under a different name entirely.
Visitors routinely search for the old name expecting to find a company, and what they find is history. That is a live problem for the actual operator and it is a version of something that happens to a great many small businesses: the name people remember is not the name you trade under.
If that is your situation, it is fixable, and it is fixed with clear naming, consistent listings and a page that connects the two rather than by pretending the old name does not exist. Graphic design
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 what you make or sell. In a village this size that one sentence, put where visitors do their planning, is worth more than the rest of the site.
The quote is free, fixed in writing and yours to sit on. Nobody here will ring you every Tuesday about it.