Nate Westre - Marketing Main Street

Nate Westre - Marketing Main Street Web design, video, social media marketing, SEO, Google Business Profile optimization, and other marketing services for small businesses.

10/03/2026

Harvest season shifts everything in Iowa. Combine hours, school schedules, shorter days, and suddenly your business is running on different hours than it was in July.

Here's the problem. If your Google Business Profile still shows summer hours, customers who already decided to come see you are pulling up to a locked door. That's not a marketing problem. They found you. You just weren't there when Google said you would be.

It takes about three minutes to fix. Open your Google Business Profile, hit the hours section, update it. Do it again in January when things shift back.

Not sure your profile is set up right? We put together some free tools at marketingmainstreet.co/free-tools.html that can help you take a look.

Your business info is probably wrong online right now, and October is the worst time to find outHere is what we see ever...
10/01/2026

Your business info is probably wrong online right now, and October is the worst time to find out

Here is what we see every fall: search traffic picks up, people are looking for local businesses before the holidays, and somewhere out there a Stuart or Panora shop has the wrong hours, an old phone number, or a Google Business Profile that has not been touched since spring.

Harvest season is busy. We get that. But October is exactly when someone in Guthrie Center or Winterset pulls out their phone, searches for what you sell, and either finds you or finds your competitor.

Local SEO is not complicated, but it does require someone to actually do it. We help small businesses get their info right, show up in local searches, and stay visible when the season matters most.

If you want to know where you stand before the holiday push, we offer a free tools page to get you started: marketingmainstreet.co/free-tools.html

Or reach out directly at marketingmainstreet.co/contact.html

10/01/2026

Two Ames tattoo artists opened their own shop in 2010, then bought two Main Street buildings seven days before the COVID lockdown. They gutted them, moved in six months later, and they're still there with five artists and three piercers. The owner's reason it worked: take care of people the right way and they'll come back. A small-town business is judged on the fourth visit, not the first. Source: Iowa State Daily.

Whatever October looks like for your business, you're deciding it right nowSeptember feels like it still has a little su...
09/30/2026

Whatever October looks like for your business, you're deciding it right now

September feels like it still has a little summer left in it. But customers in Iowa are already thinking ahead: harvest schedules, fall events, Friday night football, holiday planning. They are searching for things before you have updated a single photo or written a single post about them.

Google needs a few weeks to catch up on changes to your Business Profile. Seasonal photos, updated hours, fall promotions, that event you want packed on a Saturday in October, those need to go up now if you want them showing up when someone goes looking.

We learned this running Ruby's Pub. The weeks you prepped ahead of time were the weeks that felt like momentum. The weeks you didn't were the weeks you were just reacting.

If you want a full room in October, you better get started now.

The person who answers is the person who built your siteWhen your website needs a change, the person who answers is the ...
09/29/2026

The person who answers is the person who built your site

When your website needs a change, the person who answers is the person who built it.

Most agencies walk you through your site in a conference room. Marketing Main Street is a one-person shop in Stuart, Iowa, and that's on purpose.

Nate builds the site. Nate answers the phone. There's no ticket queue, and you don't need a support contract to update your hours.

The businesses we work with aren't logos in a portfolio. Stuart Bowl is a storefront Nate drives past most days. When something on a site is off, we usually hear about it in person. Building for a town you actually live in changes how you build.

We're not the fit for a six-week discovery process or a 40-page brand audit. We are the fit for a Stuart-area business that wants a clean site that loads fast on a phone and is built to be found.

Want to talk through a project? Call or text Nate at 515-422-6208.

09/29/2026

When I bought Ruby's I had a line in the budget for everything. The loan, the b**r, the frozen pizzas, the cable bill. The thing that blew it up was toilet paper. Sam's Club runs every week. Every business has an expense like that, the one you never thought to write down. For most owners I meet now, it's the website nobody's touched in years or the email quietly landing in spam. Nobody budgets for those. They cost you anyway.

Your fall website checklist fits in one coffeeBefore harvest season gets fully underway and the calendar fills up, here ...
09/27/2026

Your fall website checklist fits in one coffee

Before harvest season gets fully underway and the calendar fills up, here are four things worth doing on your business presence today. They take about twenty minutes total.

Update your hours if they change at all this time of year. Confirm your phone number actually taps and dials on a mobile screen. Reply to your last three reviews, even if they're older. Post one photo of what you're doing this season, whether that's a fall product, a job site, or your team.

That's the whole list. Four items. One cup of coffee.

We see small businesses lose customers to basic stuff like a wrong phone number or hours that say "summer schedule" in October. The fixes are free. They just need a few minutes of attention.

If you want a second set of eyes on how your business shows up online, message us here.

09/27/2026

Every fall thousands of tarantulas walk across the prairie outside La Junta, Colorado. Most towns would keep that quiet. La Junta built a two-day festival around it. A parade, movies, spider experts, and locals explaining the spiders to nervous visitors. They didn't build an attraction. They named one that was already crawling past. What does your town already have that nobody else can copy? Source: Daily Yonder, September 9.

A real website audit doesn't tell you your site is bad. It tells you which three things to fix first.Anyone can hand you...
09/26/2026

A real website audit doesn't tell you your site is bad. It tells you which three things to fix first.

Anyone can hand you a 100-line report and make you feel like your whole online presence is a disaster. We've seen it. Long lists of technical errors, color-contrast flags, meta-description warnings, none of it ranked, none of it translated into plain language. You walk away feeling worse than when you started and still not knowing what to actually do Monday morning.

What matters is priority. What is costing you customers right now, versus what can wait six months? That's the question a useful audit answers.

We built our free website checker around exactly that. Not a shame spiral. A short list of what to fix first, framed for a business owner who is also the bookkeeper and the closer and the person answering the phone.

If you haven't run it yet, it takes about two minutes. marketingmainstreet.co

Two sentences. That's the whole strategyReplying to a Google review takes two sentences, and most businesses still skip ...
09/26/2026

Two sentences. That's the whole strategy

Replying to a Google review takes two sentences, and most businesses still skip it.

Thank them by name. Mention the specific thing they praised. That's it. You just showed the next hundred people who read that review that a real human runs your business, not a logo.

Bad review? Same idea. Two calm sentences, then take it offline. Google does not want you to argue in the comments, and neither do your future customers.

If you have reviews sitting there with no reply, start today. It costs nothing and takes about 90 seconds. Find your profile at https://business.google.com/ and work through whatever's in the queue.

Visibility starts with showing up, and this is one of the easiest places to do it.

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320 N Gaines Street
Stuart, IA
50250

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