Web design for Malua Bay businesses
Ten kilometres is far enough that people stop driving into town for small things. That is the whole basis of trading here, and most local websites are written as though it is not true.
Far enough out to be its own thing
Every suburb around the bay is close to the town centre. Malua Bay is the one that is far enough out to have stopped behaving like a suburb.
Ten kilometres does not sound like much until you think about how people actually shop. It is far enough that a quick errand is not quick, which is why there is a local centre here at all, and it is why a business here is not really competing with the same business in the town centre. You are competing with the decision to bother driving.
The town's own surf club settled this argument years ago. The club that carries the Batemans Bay name patrols the beach here, on George Bass Drive, because this is where the surf is and where the people are. When an institution moves out to the place that actually needs it, that place has stopped being an outer suburb.
That changes what the website is for. It is not persuading somebody to choose you over a rival, it is persuading them that they do not need to go anywhere. Which means the things people check before giving up on a trip are the things that have to be right: are you open, do you have it, is it worth walking down. Website design
Two completely different customers, six months apart
In summer the beach fills and so does everything near it. For a good part of the rest of the year the trade is residents, and there are about two thousand of them.
Most businesses here already understand that in their bones. Very few websites reflect it. A site built entirely for the visitor reads as irrelevant to the person who lives four streets away and buys from you fifty weeks a year. A site built entirely for the resident gives a visitor nothing to go on at all.
The version that works usually carries both without shouting about either: the practical resident information where a local would look for it, and the visitor answers where somebody planning a trip would. Social advertising is the cheap way to reach the second group while they are still deciding, weeks before they arrive. Meta ads
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.
They are the ones who keep you open in June. Tell us what the mix is and we will quote a site that serves both without pretending to be a tourism brochure.
The quote is free, fixed in writing and yours to sit on. Nobody here will ring you every Tuesday about it.