What a Welsh business website needs: the six pages, the four Welsh details and the three things Google reads

A business website in Wales needs six kinds of page, four details that make it Welsh rather than a template with a dragon on the header, and three things under the surface that Google reads before it decides where the site appears. Most sites we audit in Wales have three of the pages, none of the details and one of the three. This guide is the list, in the order a customer meets it.

The six pages

The home page says what you do and where in the first line, in words a customer would type: not "welcome to our website" but "plumbers in Bangor and across Gwynedd". It carries a photograph of the actual business, the phone number as a button, and one clear ask. Everything else on it is a door to another page.

A page for each service, because searches are for services. "Wedding photographer Pembrokeshire" deserves a page about weddings in Pembrokeshire, with what is involved, what moves the price, how far you travel and three of yours. One page that lists everything you offer ranks for none of it. Four to six service pages is the smallest site we build; sixteen is normal for a trade covering a county.

A page of your work: projects, products, rooms, dishes, with your own photographs and a paragraph each in your words. This is the page a customer sends to their partner. An about page with faces, the years, the van and the certificates, because "are they real" is the second question on every phone. And a quote or contact page whose form reaches your inbox and your phone within seconds, with the number beside it for people who would rather ring.

The sixth is the areas page, and it is where most Welsh sites go wrong. It names the towns and villages you genuinely serve, as local people name them, with a sentence about each that could only be true of that place. It is not twenty pages for every settlement within thirty miles with the name swapped; Google's doorway policy names that pattern and filters the whole site for it.

The four Welsh details

Place names in both forms where both are used. A customer in Wrexham types Wrexham; their neighbour types Wrecsam; a page can say both without one being a translation of the other. Caerdydd and Cardiff, Abertawe and Swansea, Eryri and Snowdonia, Bannau Brycheiniog and the Brecon Beacons: the national parks changed their names in 2022 and 2023 and searches use both.

Fonts that carry the Welsh characters. Most web templates ship a font subset without ŵ and ŷ, so Tŷ Newydd renders as T, a box and Newydd in the heading. We load the extended character set on every site, and we check the grave and acute forms of w and y, which are rarer and missing from more fonts.

The Welsh language decision, made on purpose. Whether the site needs a Welsh version depends on who you are and where your customers are, and the answer is different for a council supplier in Cardiff, a farm shop in Ceredigion and a roofer in Newport. Our guide on whether you need a Welsh language website takes the decision in full; the point here is that it is a decision, not a widget.

The address and the border. The postcode area, LL or SY or SA or CF or NP or LD, ties the site to the place in Google's eyes, and a business in Wrexham or Monmouth that serves Chester or Hereford says so with the English towns named, or the Welsh address becomes the whole story.

The three things Google reads

Speed on a phone, which in Wales means speed on a weak 4G signal in the Dyfi valley or on the Llŷn. Google measures it with its own tools and rewards a site that loads in under two seconds; a page-builder site with a slideshow rarely manages five. Static pages, images sized for the screen and nothing loaded that the page does not use are how ours score in the nineties.

Structure: one heading per page, a title that leads with the service and the place, a description that says what the page is for, structured data that tells Google this is a business at this address offering these services, and a sitemap with a real date on every page so a change is noticed. None of it is visible and all of it is read.

Agreement with the Google Business Profile. The map pack for your town is decided by the profile, and the profile and the site must agree on the name, the address, the phone number and the services, in both languages if the profile is bilingual. A site that says one thing and a profile that says another is the commonest reason a business sits outside the three on the map.

What to leave out

Stock photographs of people who have never been to Wales. A welcome paragraph. A translation widget. Twenty town pages. A slideshow in the header. A form that goes to an inbox nobody reads. Each of these is on most of the sites we audit, and each is cheaper to sell than what replaces it. If you are choosing between two quotes, ask which of these each one includes.

The order we build in: the pages first, because they are what a customer reads; the Welsh details as we go, because they are cheap to do at the start and expensive to retrofit; the three technical things last, because they are the same on every site and take an afternoon.