Skegness is a relatively small seaside town with a population of around 20,000 people. Despite the small population it is possible for website designers to build a business around building websites for local Skegness businesses.
Walk down any small towns high street and side roads close to the high street and there’s dozens of local businesses.
For Skegness the main shopping street is Lumley Road and there’s side streets/roads like Algitha Road filled with small local businesses.
Lots of these small Skegness businesses have or want a website, most won’t have the in-house skills to build and maintain a website etc… That’s thousands of opportunities for design work. For example on Algitha Road in Skeg alone, every day I walk by at least 4 dentists, a few solicitors, an estate agent, 2 child care businesses, a pub, a couple of hair dressers, a newly opened salon, there’s even a marketing business called DPOM – DP Online Marketing Ltd which offer some of the marketing services I offer.
That’s 15 possible Skegness websites on one road which require building/maintaining/content/SEO etc…
Skegness Apartments is a typical small business website that’s either been built by a small local Skegness website design company (there’s quite a few in the Skegness, Boston and Lincolnshire area) or someone within the business with basic HTML/design skills, it’s what my first websites looked like 20 years ago!
I worked with a lot of small businesses in this sort of situation when I first started on a career path as an SEO consultant, I see the usual SEO/webdesign mistakes.
What’s disconcerting is the Skegness Apartments website is so poorly built I can’t tell if it’s an amateur website designers first attempts at building websites or a local Lincolnshire website designer which charges hundreds of £s to build websites!
Some paid local web designers are so bad I can’t tell the difference between their work and an amateur/hobbyist!
Local website designers can get away with shoddy websites because local Google SERPS can be REALLY easy. Even with no SEO skills at all a targeted LOCAL business can generate a fair number of highly specific local SERPs.
I live in Skegness, my business is in Skegness, if I change My Google Business listing (My Google Business is a free Google business service) to include Web Design (in January 2020 I don’t offer web design, BUT in a few months time I will: new SEO service I’m working on) and add a few articles about Skegness web design to this site, then when a local business owner searches Google for phrases like:
- Skegness Web Design for Hotels
- Skegness Web Design for Apartments
- Skegness Web Design for Plumbers
- Skegness Web Design for Electricians
- Skegness Web Design for Business
There’s a very good chance my business will be within the first page of results, you might even see a Google map with SEO Gold (my business) at the top.
Google literally shows local business results, the local web designers tend to be listed in the top 10 even when they are rubbish at web design.
If a business owner in Skegness makes these searches while located in Skegness: on a mobile phone or desktop PC in Skegness-
- Web Design for Hotels
- Web Design for Apartments
- Web Design for Plumbers
- Web Design for Electricians
- Web Design for Business
They will tend to see mostly local Skegness web design businesses.
Make the same search from a device (mobile phone, Desktop PC) in Boston and they will see Boston web design businesses.
Make the same search from a device in London and they will see London web design businesses.
This is how Google local search results work.
Local businesses should be very careful hiring local web designers, don’t assume because they are in the top 10 in Google for search phrases like the ones above they are good at what they do.
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