Web design for Mirador businesses
You are two and a half kilometres from Merimbula. Everyone in your position wonders whether they are allowed to say Merimbula on their website, and the answer has a rule to it.
Can you put the bigger town's name on your website?
This comes up constantly and it deserves a straight answer rather than a wink.
Yes, if you genuinely serve it. A business two and a half kilometres from a town centre plainly does serve that town, and saying so is accurate. Nobody is being misled and no rule is being bent. The address is where you sleep. The service area is what the customer is asking about, and they are different things.
No, if you do not. Listing twenty towns you have never worked in, in the hope of catching a search, is the oldest trick in local marketing and it does not work any more. Search engines got good at spotting it, and more to the point customers do: a page claiming to be local to everywhere reads as local to nowhere, and the reader draws exactly the right conclusion about the business.
The workable line is honest and simple. Name the places you will actually go, in the order you actually go to them, and say how far out you travel. That is defensible, it is what the customer wanted to know, and it happens to be what performs. SEO
No shops here, which changes what the site is for
Five hundred and nineteen people, residential, no commercial strip. Every business at this address runs from a house, which means the site is doing the job a premises would otherwise do: proving there is something real behind the number.
That is achieved with unglamorous things. Photographs of your own finished work rather than stock. A named person. A service area. An ABN. A form that actually replies, and a phone number that somebody answers. Nothing there is expensive, and its absence is why capable people lose jobs to less capable ones with tidier websites. 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.
Tell us the honest service area. That one answer shapes the whole site, and getting it right is worth more than anything else you could spend the same money on.
The quote is free, fixed in writing and yours to sit on. Nobody here will ring you every Tuesday about it.