Web design for Mogo businesses
Three hundred and thirty people, and a wildlife park that brings a great many more. Those visitors arrive with a day already planned and paid for, which is a very particular kind of customer.
They booked something else, and you are competing for the edges
A ticketed attraction produces a completely different visitor from a landmark somebody looks at for free.
Somebody with a ticket has decided how they are spending the day, has paid in advance, and has allocated a block of hours to something that is not you. You are not competing for their day. You are competing for the ninety minutes before it and the hour after, and for whatever they decide to do about lunch.
That is a genuinely winnable contest and it is won early. The planning happens the night before or in the car, and the searches are specific and predictable: what else is in the village, where to eat, how long it takes, what is suitable for children who have just spent four hours walking.
Almost nobody local publishes for that search. A page written for the person planning the edges of somebody else's day out will be found by them, because there is very little competition for it. SEO
The village has to be worth stopping in on its own
Underneath the visitor traffic this is a small village, and its businesses are mostly retail, galleries, makers and food, which is a trade that lives on being browsed.
The practical implication is the same one that applies to any street where people walk: what you sell has to be visible before somebody commits to walking in, and current opening hours are worth more than any other single piece of information on the site. In a village this size a shop that looks shut is shut, whatever the sign says. 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 what you sell and who buys it. In this village the timing of the visit shapes the site more than the industry does.
The quote is free, fixed in writing and yours to sit on. Nobody here will ring you every Tuesday about it.