Web design for Greigs Flat businesses
Two hundred and six people, and an address most customers could not point to on a map. That is a solvable problem, and it is solved with words rather than with design.
When the address means nothing to the customer
Some place names locate you instantly. This one does not, outside the valley, and there is no point pretending otherwise. Somebody reading it has no idea whether you are five minutes away or fifty, and in the absence of information people assume the worse of the two.
So the page has to say it. Between Pambula and Eden. Fifteen minutes from wherever. In plain words, high up, where somebody skimming will actually see it. That single sentence does more work on a page like this than anything else on it, and it is the sentence that is almost always missing because it feels too obvious to the person writing it.
Build on what you do, and let the address follow
In a locality of two hundred people the business is never really about the address. It is about a trade, and about how far you will drive to do it.
Which means the pages worth having are the ones named after the work rather than the place: the specific things you do, described the way a customer describes them. The service area then sits underneath as a plain list of the towns you cover. That structure gets found by people searching for the job, which is what they actually search for, and it does not depend on anybody having heard of where you live. Website 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.
Two sentences, in the right place, fix most of this. Tell us the trade and we will show you where they belong.
The quote is free, fixed in writing and yours to sit on. Nobody here will ring you every Tuesday about it.