Web design for Coolagolite businesses
Six kilometres inland is enough to be a different world commercially. The money is on the coast and the work is up here, and a website is what joins them.
The coast is the market and you are behind it
Three hundred and nine people live in the locality. A short drive away there is a coastal town with a visitor economy, and that is where the spending is.
For a business based up here that is a straightforward proposition and it is worth being clear-eyed about it: you are selling into somebody else's town. Your customers are down there, or they are visitors down there, and almost none of them are on your road.
The site therefore has to be findable on the coastal town's name as well as your own, and it has to be obvious that the distance is nothing. Both are ordinary things to do and hardly any hinterland business does either, which is the opportunity rather than the problem. Website design
Your quiet season is somebody else's peak
If any part of your trade touches the visitor economy, and up here a surprising amount does, whether through accommodation, produce, trades working on holiday houses or services to the people who run them, then your year has the coast's shape rather than a farm's.
That is worth designing around rather than absorbing. The work that generates enquiries for summer has to be done in autumn, because search takes months to move and nothing you publish in December helps December. The single most common mistake is starting when it goes quiet, which is exactly one season too late.
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.
That is when this work is cheapest and most effective. Tell us what the trade is and where the customers actually are, and we will quote it properly.
The quote is free, fixed in writing and yours to sit on. Nobody here will ring you every Tuesday about it.