Web design for Dolphin Point businesses
Three hundred and fifty people at a lake entrance, and one of the younger addresses on this coast. Almost everything here is run out of a house.
A locality of houses, which means a locality of home businesses
At a median age of forty-seven, this is a working-age locality rather than a retirement one, and at three hundred and fifty-four residents it is small enough that there is no commercial land in it at all.
Both of those point at the same thing: the businesses here are people working from home, and their customers are in the villages and the town around them rather than on their own street.
The specific problem a home-based business has is credibility, and it is a problem a shopfront solves for free. Somebody choosing between you and a company with a yard is trying to work out whether you are a real, ongoing business or somebody doing it on the side.
The things that settle it are unglamorous and cheap: photographs of your own finished work, a named person, a stated service area, an ABN, and a form that actually gets answered. Website design
Most of your first impressions happen before your website
For a business with no premises, the map listing is usually seen before the site is, and it is usually the thing nobody has updated. Hours, category, photographs, description, reviews. Getting that right is a shorter job than building anything and it changes more. 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 what the work is and who rings you about it. That is enough for us to say what is worth building and what is not.
The quote is free, fixed in writing and yours to sit on. Nobody here will ring you every Tuesday about it.