Web design for Congo businesses
Two hundred and fifty-three people, a national park next door, and no shops. Anybody selling you a website built around local foot traffic has not looked at the place.
A village with no commercial centre at all
Congo has no shops. That is not a criticism, it is most of the appeal, and it is the fact that decides what a business here can realistically be.
In practice it means one of two things. Either you are letting accommodation, and your customers are people who specifically wanted somewhere with nothing in it. Or you are running a business from home whose customers are somewhere else entirely and never come here at all.
Those are two completely different websites and neither of them is a local business site. The first is selling a place. The second is selling a service, and its address is close to irrelevant. Working out which one you are is the whole of the brief, and it is worth doing before anybody starts designing. Website design
Next to a national park, which sets the expectations
The village adjoins a national park with a campground in it, which shapes who turns up and what they expect.
For accommodation that is a specific and answerable set of questions: how far to the walking track, what the road in is like, phone reception, whether you need to bring food, what the campground means for noise and traffic in January. Every one of those is a booking decision and almost none of them appears on a typical letting page, which instead has photographs of the view and the word "tranquil".
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.
Whatever question you get asked most on the phone belongs at the top of the page. Tell us what it is and we will build from there.
The quote is free, fixed in writing and yours to sit on. Nobody here will ring you every Tuesday about it.