Web design for Tathra businesses
People come here for one thing on the end of a jetty, look at it, and leave. Turning that visit into a transaction is the whole commercial problem of this town.
A famous object is not the same as a customer
Tathra has something genuinely rare: a timber wharf from the 1860s coastal shipping era that is state heritage listed and recognised as a national engineering landmark, and it is the reason a great many people put the town on a list at all.
A landmark like that reliably produces visits and does not reliably produce spending. Somebody drives in, walks out along it, takes a photograph and drives on. The town gets the traffic and the businesses get whatever they can catch of it.
Which makes the commercial question specific and rather unusual: how do you convert a person who has already arrived, for a reason that had nothing to do with you? Not how do you get found, since they are here. The answer is almost always about being visible and obviously open at the moment somebody is deciding whether to stay another hour, and that decision is made on a phone, standing up, within about fifty metres of where they parked. SEO
Design for somebody standing outside with a phone
That is a different design brief from the usual one and it is worth taking literally. The person is outdoors, in bright light, on a phone, with a limited amount of time and no patience.
What they want is knowable: are you open now, where exactly, how long will it take, is there anything for the children, and is it worth walking. A page that answers those in the first screen will outperform a much handsomer site that makes somebody scroll for opening hours.
The most valuable thing most Tathra businesses could do to their website costs nothing and takes ten minutes: make the current opening hours correct and obvious. It is unglamorous and it is where the money is. Website design
Fifteen hundred people who are here in July
The day-trip trade is seasonal and the town is not. A business built only on visitors has a very long winter, and the residents are the ones who decide whether you get through it.
Serving them is mostly a matter of not writing them out: a plainly stated local offer, winter hours, and enough on the page that somebody who lives here does not conclude the whole thing is aimed at tourists.
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 where your customers come from and what time of day they arrive. That shapes the site more than anything about your industry does.
The quote is free, fixed in writing and yours to sit on. Nobody here will ring you every Tuesday about it.