This week I won a job building some raised beds in a garden 2 miles down the road from me.
So what ? I hear you say.
Well, the raised beds were a gift for a disabled lady from her son. They should enable her to do some gardening again from her wheelchair.
Her son lives in China. He 'discovered' our website via a search engine. We arranged that I would visit his mother and he would deal with the money side of things and pay via internet banking.
I feel this story is a great example of how a small business can reach a global marketplace. Without the web this would have been difficult if not impossible.
Comments
Great to read Paul.
From a web techie viewpoint do you think the customer arrived on your site after doing a search based on location?
If so it shows the value of having locations featured naturally through your website, for example when describing a ' garden design project near Chesterfield'.
It is something others should take a look at on their own websites, for a start include your actual address as well as postcode on every page as this straight away puts a marker down for location searches.
But also if you are able to update the website easily I'd feature images and write-ups of recent jobs with a mention of the area where the work was undertaken.
Craig
I'm on the first page of both Bing and Google if you tap in 'gardener Chesterfield' so I must be doing something right. I believe the search was based on location.
I find that my website qualifies my advertising - many people look at my website after seeing one of my print ads - the most popular search term for my site is 'Ashgate Garden Care'.
I've taken on your comments regarding recent projects. My work is 90%+ maintenance so don't have many photo's of projects, but your right from a web optimisation point of view to put the location and a decent description in the alt tag. (I designed the site myself, I've been designing sites since the nineties and first used e-mail back in 1987).