Web design for Nelligen businesses
Four hundred people on a river, on the road between a capital city and the coast. You are the first thing one direction sees and the last thing the other remembers.
A village at the point where a long drive ends
The Kings Highway runs a hundred and thirty-seven kilometres from the ACT to this coast, and Nelligen sits on the river near the end of it. For anybody coming down, this village is where the mountain finishes and the coast begins. For anybody going up, it is the last thing on the flat.
Both of those are decision points and they are worth different things commercially.
Coming down, people are nearly there and are not stopping. Going up, they are at the start of a long drive and frequently are. That asymmetry is the single most useful thing for a business here to understand, and it means the trade is not symmetrical either.
Neither of those decisions is made at the roadside any more. They are made on a phone, at the coast, before the car is loaded, which is where a small amount of search work aimed at exactly the right phrases does a surprising amount of work. Website design
A river village, which is a slower kind of trade
Away from the road there is a river, and the businesses attached to it work at a different pace from anything on the highway: boats, accommodation, the things people do on a weekend rather than on the way past.
For those the customer is planning rather than passing, and the site has to answer planning questions. What is on the water, what it costs to get on it, whether you need to bring anything, what happens if the weather turns. Very few small operators write those down, and every one of them is a reason somebody chooses the operator who did.
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.
Coming down or heading up. It sounds like a small distinction and it changes what the site should say.
The quote is free, fixed in writing and yours to sit on. Nobody here will ring you every Tuesday about it.