Over the last decade there has been a marked increase in the number of farms and estates that have diversified by converting buildings into modern offices, storage and industrial units.

Generally these developments have been well received and supported by the Government and have become increasingly successful as companies realise that modern communications and high speed broadband links mean all types of business can locate inthe countryside.

The problem faced by all owners and managers of rural business space, is that when potential tenants research new locations on the internet (generally the starting point of a search for business premises), an independent website is unlikely to feature very highly on the search engine, unless the owner has spent much of the marketing budget on search engine optimisation.

Rural Solutions Consulting has recently held a number of Marketing Workshops for those people involved in running rural business centres. The common theme that has come out of these is that “the public don’t know we exist and we don’t have high numbers ofpassing traffic”.

To compensate for this, Rural Networks Limited has been formed to support a series of websites specifically designed to promote rural business space and www.officesinthecountryside.com is designed to act as a showcase for all rural business centres enabling potential tenants to search for office space in their locality.

www.storageinthecountryside.com and www.lightindustrialinthecountryside.com also support the commercial side of business.

The benefit to rural business centre managers is that the collective effort of a large website with many connections and links will attract a far greater number of hits than any stand-alone website. The internet is a complicated beast - if a site gets a greater number of hits (remember that this site will be covering the whole of the UK), the search engine will send it far higher up the results with a higher hit rate. The three sites will also benefit from having a dedicated marketing budget geared towards search engine optimisation (correct wording, key words etc), that an individual just wouldn’t be able to commit the money to over the long term.
The ethos of the websites is to get as many people to see rural office, storage and light industrial space in their chosen location, and each hit the website receives will collectively help all advertisers on the site.

If you have offices, storage or light industrial space in the countryside and would like to know more, please do contact us.

Matthew Hale, Director, Rural Networks Ltd
Tel: 0845 026 7915
matthew.hale@ruralnetworks.co.uk