Web design for Moruya Heads businesses
Five minutes from a town that works all week, at the mouth of its river. Your busiest trade is people who live twenty minutes away, and that is not who most beach village websites are written for.
A beach village with a working town behind it
Most beach villages on this coast live on visitors from a long way off. This one has something better and less obvious: a substantial administrative town a few minutes up the river, full of people employed all year who come down here on a Saturday.
That is a fundamentally more reliable trade than tourism and it is routinely under-served, because the website was written for a visitor from Sydney and the actual customer drove eleven kilometres.
The local weekend customer wants different things. They are not planning a holiday, they are deciding at ten in the morning where to have breakfast. They need today's hours, whether there is a queue, whether the surf is worth the trip and whether there is parking. Those are quick, practical and mostly missing from sites in villages like this. Website design
The visitors are the second market, not the first
There is a genuine holiday trade here too, at the river mouth with a surf beach, and it matters particularly over summer.
The mistake is letting it define the whole site, because it is the seasonal half of the business and the local half pays for June. A site that carries the practical local information prominently and the visitor content properly underneath serves both, and does not have to change twice a year. 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.
They are closer, they come back, and almost nobody is writing for them. Tell us how your trade splits and we will build for the larger half.
The quote is free, fixed in writing and yours to sit on. Nobody here will ring you every Tuesday about it.