Marlow, Buckinghamshire
Web design and SEO for Marlow's High Street, tables and venues
Marlow is a small, prosperous town with more good restaurants than its size suggests and a High Street of independent shops. People find its businesses in two quite different ways, and a site has to work for both.
How Marlow gets searched
Visitors search by name, locals by need
The visitor
A couple booking a birthday dinner in Marlow has usually chosen the restaurant before they open Google. They type the name, perhaps with the town after it, and want the menu, the date they need and a button to book.
Anything slower sends them back to the list a friend forwarded and on to the next name on it.
The local
A resident whose boiler has stopped, or who needs an accountant who understands a small partnership, types the problem and the town and chooses from what the map shows.
They have never heard of the firm and do not need to. They need a clear page and a profile that looks alive.
The first group is served by speed and clarity on a page you already own. The second is served by pages written around the work, one for each thing you do.
A quick test for a Marlow owner. Search your own business name on a phone, then search your service and the town. If the first result looks right and the second never shows you, the site has done half its job.
The High Street
A town of independents with changing windows
The suspension bridge, the church beside it and Higginson Park give Marlow its postcard riverside. The trading happens in the High Street and the streets off it, where independent shops change stock weekly, close on odd days and take on the colour of the season.
Google only knows what it has been told. A shop that posts a photograph of this week's window, keeps its bank holiday hours right and answers the questions people leave on its profile looks open for business. A bigger neighbour that has not touched its listing in a year looks shut.
The town fills for its own events too. The Marlow Town Regatta and Festival comes round every June, and a short what's-on page published a few weeks ahead catches the people who are planning their weekend around it.
Lunch and shopping run into each other here. Someone who has booked a long lunch will wander the shops afterwards, so a restaurant's page and a boutique's Business Profile are doing joint work whether or not their owners have met.
Destination dining
Tables people plan for weeks
Marlow's restaurants draw diners from well beyond Buckinghamshire, and a person who travels to eat plans the trip. They check the menu, look for the booking window, read how to get there and sometimes look for a room nearby.
Getting there is worth a paragraph of its own. Marlow sits at the end of a single-track branch line that leaves the main line at Maidenhead, and the journey from London can involve a change at Bourne End. A page that says so plainly saves a phone call and a missed reservation.
Our venue and hospitality work is built around exactly this, and Hattie Clarke's checklist for a riverside restaurant's site covers the basics in the order a Saturday service needs them.
Who we help
Three kinds of Marlow business
- Restaurants and pubsDestination dining lives on the menu page and the booking button. We build both to load quickly on the phone someone is holding on the train.
- Wedding venuesVenues along the river between Marlow and Henley sit in a crowded set of searches, and couples compare them by season, capacity and price before they ever ring.
- Estate agentsThe portals own the listings. A Marlow independent wins the valuation by knowing which roads sell and why, and by writing about the villages in the hills behind the town.
For a sense of how a venue project runs, read the composite case study A Thames wedding venue between Marlow and Henley.
What fits
Starting small, then adding the pages that earn their keep
A shop or a single restaurant usually starts with our Towpath package at £2,400–£3,800 before VAT, with local SEO and the Google Business Profile set up properly. A venue or an agent with several audiences tends to outgrow that and move to Reach, at £4,500–£8,500 with pages for each audience.
Ongoing work is optional. The Form, from £95 a month, keeps the site current, and SEO retainers run from £650 a month.
Nearby
Up and down the river from Marlow
Bourne End is the stop before Marlow on the branch from Maidenhead, with Cookham one stop earlier. Henley is the next town upstream along the Thames.
Marlow
Tell us what Marlow should find
Describe the business and the customers you would like more of. We will reply within a working day, and if the honest answer is a smaller job than you expected, that is the answer you will get.
