Websites for pubs that win the work.

Pub customers search in two very different moods. The first is immediate and local: someone is out, it is half past twelve on a Sunday, and they are typing "Sunday roast near me" or "dog-friendly pub" into a phone and choosing from whatever the map shows. They check whether the kitchen is serving, whether they need to book, and whether there is a garden. The second is planned: a birthday, a wake, a christening, a group of twelve after a walk, or a quiz team looking for a new Tuesday. Those people read the function room page, ask about a set menu and want an email reply. Regulars rarely visit the site at all, but they do check the events page for live music, quiz nights and which football is being shown. Walkers, cyclists and holidaymakers in rural areas lean heavily on search because they do not know the area, and they care about parking, muddy boots and whether food stops at half past two.

When demand peaks. Beer gardens make summer weekends; December is dominated by Christmas party bookings made from September. Major football tournaments and bank holidays produce sharp spikes, and wet January is quiet.

Most pub websites are a single page with a photograph of the building, a phone number and a menu PDF that went out of date two chefs ago. They cannot be found for the searches that actually fill tables - Sunday roast, dog-friendly, beer garden, food served all day - because none of those words appear anywhere in text. Kitchen hours are usually missing or wrong, which is the one thing a hungry family checks. Tenanted and leased pubs often inherit a template page from the pub company that the licensee cannot update, so events never get posted and the site quietly ages. And the function room, which is the highest-value enquiry a pub gets, is usually a sentence at the bottom of the About page with no capacity, no menu and no way to ask.