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Orchard Close Fishery — Business Website & Booking System
Orchard Close Fishery is a well-established coarse fishing venue in the English countryside with four stocked lakes and day-ticket access. They relied entirely on phone bookings and word-of-mouth, missing out on the growing number of anglers who search online for local fisheries. We built a professional WordPress website with online booking, interactive lake maps showing peg positions, live weather feeds, and a strong local SEO strategy to help them compete with larger commercial fisheries in the area.
Challenges
- The fishery had no web presence at all — anglers could only find them through local tackle shop flyers or Facebook posts, limiting their reach to a 10-mile radius.
- Phone-only bookings meant the owner spent 2-3 hours daily answering calls, often missing bookings from anglers who called during early morning or late evening hours.
- Anglers frequently asked which pegs were available on which lakes, but this information changed daily and was only known to the bailiff on site.
- Larger competing fisheries with professional websites dominated local search results for terms like 'fishing near me' and 'day ticket fishing [county]'.
Our Solution
- Designed a clean, nature-themed WordPress site with high-quality photography of each lake, catch galleries submitted by anglers, and clear pricing and rules pages that answer common questions.
- Integrated a booking calendar plugin customized with lake and peg selection, allowing anglers to book and pay for day tickets 24/7 with automatic confirmation emails and SMS reminders.
- Built interactive lake maps using Google Maps with custom overlays showing numbered peg positions, depth markers, and feature descriptions — updated weekly by the bailiff via a simple admin form.
- Implemented a comprehensive local SEO strategy including Google Business Profile optimization, structured data markup for local businesses, location-specific landing pages, and a regularly updated catch report blog.
Results
- Online bookings accounted for 68% of all day tickets within three months, reducing phone booking time from 2-3 hours to 30 minutes daily.
- Organic search traffic grew from zero to 1,400 monthly visitors, with the site ranking on page one for 12 local fishing keywords.
- Weekend occupancy increased from 55% to 89% due to improved visibility and the convenience of online booking.
- The catch report blog became a customer engagement tool, with returning anglers checking weekly — average session duration reached 4 minutes 20 seconds.
Project Details
- Client
- Orchard Close Fishery
- Duration
- 5 weeks
- Category
- Business Website
Technologies Used
WordPressPHPJavaScriptGoogle MapsSEO
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