Aviation
Most marketing people have to be taught your business before they can sell it, and that teaching happens on your time. A lot of it does not stick. I already know why a Part 135 operator and a corporate flight department are not the same customer, and why a part number belongs on the page rather than being tidied off it.
Where this comes from
I run the marketing for The Allen Groupe, a business aviation services company with roughly two hundred people working at more than twenty airports across the US, Canada and Europe. I built their site and I run their search program. I am also part of Dash Aero, which provides patented APU cleaning for Airbus narrowbodies, and part of Swype, which makes aviation approved cleaning products conforming to Boeing BSS7432 and AMS 1526C.
Worth being exact, because in this industry the words carry weight. I work on the business side of private aviation, which is where FBOs, charter and aircraft management live. MRO, avionics and parts sit on both sides of that line and I know them from the same angle. I am not a pilot and I am not going to imply that I am.
What you get is somebody who does not need your customer explained, who knows the difference between a scheduled input and an AOG call, and who will not write copy that makes an owner or a director of maintenance wince.
The web work itself is the same standard as everything else here. This site publishes its own performance numbers on Under the Hood, measured rather than claimed, which is the habit this industry teaches you.
Who this is for
Based, transient and contract fuel customers find you in completely different ways. Most FBO sites are built as though all three arrive the same way.
Scheduled, unscheduled and AOG are three different kinds of urgency, and only one of them is browsing.
Buyers arrive with a specific box, a specific airframe and a mandate deadline already in mind. General copy loses them in one screen.
The part number is the query. A catalog that hides its numbers behind a search box cannot be found by the people looking for them.
A market where the comparison is happening across three browser tabs and a broker spreadsheet at the same time.
Long cycles, few buyers, and a decision made mostly on trust and references. The site either supports that or quietly undermines it.
The one corner of aviation that is genuinely local and genuinely high volume, which makes it the one where ordinary local search still applies.
Selling to operators who are conservative by profession and will check every claim you make before they believe any of them.
What is actually different
A term with forty searches a month that reaches a director of maintenance is worth more than one with forty thousand that reaches nobody who can buy. Agencies optimize the big number because it reports well. Here the big number is usually the wrong one.
ICAO codes, tail numbers, part numbers, airframe types. Somebody looking for you at Palm Beach types KPBI. Somebody with a problem types the part number. Most marketers strip that out as jargon and replace it with plain English nobody is typing.
Nobody signs a management agreement from a contact form. They shortlist, then they check. So the site has to survive scrutiny: who actually does the work, where you genuinely cover, what your safety and insurance posture is, and whether the operation looks real.
Ask an assistant who handles a given service at a given field and you get a short assembled list, not ten blue links. In a market with a handful of credible vendors, being absent from that list is most of the market.
The hard one
This is the problem I have spent the most time on, because I have it myself.
A company operating at twenty airports does not get twenty Google Business Profiles. Most aviation locations sit inside somebody else's facility, or are covered by a mobile crew, or are a hangar with no walk-in, or carry an address that is not yours to claim. The local pack is built for a storefront and you do not have one.
So the coverage has to be won organically, on pages that earn a position rather than pages that list a city name and hope. Ten thin airport pages will lose to three real ones every time. That is local search work without the part of local search everybody else leans on, and it is slower, and it is the only thing that actually works when the map pack is closed to you.
In practice
A hand built site that loads fast and can be added to for years without breaking. Search work aimed at the few hundred people who can actually sign something, rather than at traffic that looks good on a chart. AI search work, which matters more in a market this small than in almost any other sector I work in.
If what you need is a tool rather than a page, a portal, a tracker, something your crews and your clients both use, that is app development and it is the same conversation.
And if the honest answer is that search is not your growth lever, that your buyers all come through brokers and relationships and a better website will not change that, I will tell you so. That answer is free and it has saved people money before.
Further reading
Start here
Send over the site you have now, or the one you wish you had. I will tell you honestly whether I am the right person for it.
info@palmprojects.com
