How People Actually Find Me, and What It Taught Me About Websites

I'll start with the thing I got wrong.

When I put my site together I assumed the traffic that mattered would arrive through search. Somebody types what they need, finds the page, gets in touch. That does happen. It's just not where most of my work has come from.

The page nobody plans for

Every client I film gets a code. They come to the site, type it in, and their session appears: the clips, the photos, a player, a download button.

That page exists for a purely practical reason. It beats sending twelve gigabytes through a transfer service that expires. But it's the page my clients open most, and often the only one they open twice.

And while they're there, they see the rest. A surfer who came for their session notices I also film properties. An agent collecting a listing video finds out I build websites. That has turned into real work, repeatedly, and none of it came from a search engine.

Why that changes how I build

Once you've noticed that, you build differently.

A site does two jobs. It's the shop window for someone arriving cold, and it's the place your existing customers pass through, and those ones arrive already trusting you. The second conversation is the easier of the two, and it's worth building for on purpose.

So: whatever brings people back regularly gets treated as a real page rather than a utility. A booking confirmation, an account area, a members' page, a form for returning customers. Those deserve as much attention as the homepage, because the person reading them has already said yes once.

For a surf camp that might be the page where a guest checks their week's schedule. For a hotel, the booking confirmation. For a restaurant, the menu people open on their phone at the table. Those are often the most-read pages on a site, and among the easiest to improve.

What this doesn't mean

It doesn't mean search is a waste of effort. I write here regularly, the site is structured so a search engine can read it, and that work pays over time.

But nobody can promise you a position on Google, and I'd rather point at something you can act on this month. Look at your own numbers and find the page your existing customers actually open. Then make that page do a second job.

Filming and building in the same head

There's a version of this argument that only works if the same person does both, and I should be honest that it's my case.

When I film a business and then build its site, I know at the shoot which clip becomes the header, which one has to survive being cropped to a phone, which one runs muted and still reads. The site gets designed around footage that exists rather than around grey rectangles somebody fills in later.

That's not a claim about anyone else's method. It's a description of why these two things ended up as one job for me, which happened by accident, from noticing that my video clients were the ones reading my site.

Two coasts, one site

From late September 2026 I'm working from Santa Teresa, in Costa Rica, as well as the Landes.

That's a genuine test of the argument above. The clients there will be new, the languages will be different, and the traffic will arrive from more countries at once. What I don't expect to change is the shape of it: the page people come back to will be the one that does the work.

I'll report back on whether that holds.

If you want to see how I build sites, and what the two options include, that's on this page.