Which Businesses Does VisitSouthport.com Actually Promote?

VisitSouthport.com is a publicly-funded tourism promotion platform for Southport. It holds a Domain Rating of 59 according to Ahrefs, built over years of council investment and institutional linking. Its stated purpose is to promote the town and its businesses to visitors.

The platform includes a directory of business listings, an events calendar, and a series of seasonal editorial blog posts covering Christmas, Halloween, Easter and school holidays. These editorial pages are where the platform makes active choices about which businesses to name, describe, and link to.

We manually reviewed the full HTML source of every seasonal editorial page on VisitSouthport.com. We counted every mention of every business. We extracted every external outbound link. We checked the dofollow/nofollow status of each link by inspecting the rendered HTML.

We also reviewed the main category pages (Food & Drink, Restaurants, Accommodation, Things to Do, What's On). These directory-style pages contain zero editorial external links. No business on any listing page receives an outbound link to their own website. The editorial promotion happens exclusively on the seasonal blog pages.

This review was conducted on 7 April 2026. The pages are publicly accessible. Every finding is independently verifiable by anyone with a web browser and View Source.

The following table shows every business mentioned across the four seasonal editorial pages. Mention counts include editorial prose, event listings, image alt text, and structured data present on each page.

An outbound dofollow link from a Domain Rating 59 website is a tangible commercial asset. It passes authority to the receiving domain, improves its search rankings, and drives referral traffic. When that link comes from a publicly-funded platform, who receives it is a governance question.

Two of the four seasonal pages contain external editorial links. Two contain none at all.

These are established independent Southport restaurants, pubs, and cafes. They serve the same visitors. Many of them pay the same compulsory BID levy. Not one appears in any editorial content on VisitSouthport.com's seasonal pages.

VisitSouthport's editorial content follows a recognisable structure. Each seasonal page opens with an introduction, then describes specific activities and events, naming the businesses involved. The businesses that are named receive both visibility and dofollow links. The businesses that are not named receive neither.

Among attractions, the coverage is reasonably broad. The Atkinson, WWT Martin Mere, Silcock's, the Lawnmower Museum, Ocean Plaza, and the Bijou Cinema all appear. This is expected. They run structured seasonal programmes and are natural editorial choices.

Among commercial hospitality businesses, the coverage is not broad at all. One group appears on every page. Every other independent hospitality business in Southport appears on none of them.

The Commercial Director of that hospitality group sits on the Southport BID board. That board oversees the promotional infrastructure of the town, including the platforms that decide which businesses receive editorial coverage.

The competing independent businesses pay exactly the same BID levy. They receive zero editorial mentions, zero outbound links, and zero seasonal promotion on the publicly-funded platform that is supposed to serve all of them.

This is the structural pattern described in SIBA's analysis of how BIDs breed cronyism by design, operating in practice on a specific, publicly-funded platform with independently verifiable data.

This is not speculation about editorial influence. The BID and Visit Southport have confirmed their joint working on seasonal content in a published interview. In September 2025, Rachel Fitzgerald, CEO of Southport BID, sat down with Mark Catherall, Sefton Council's Tourism Service Manager and the person who runs Visit Southport day-to-day. The interview was published by Liverpool City Region Destination Partnership.

Fitzgerald stated directly:

The seasonal pages reviewed in this analysis are therefore a joint editorial product between two organisations whose governance structures overlap directly. The three shared positions are documented on public records.

This analysis was conducted through manual review of publicly accessible web pages. No automated crawling tools were used for the editorial content analysis. Every mention count was obtained by searching the full HTML source of each page. Every outbound link was extracted and its dofollow/nofollow status verified by inspecting the rendered HTML attributes.

Domain Rating data is sourced from Ahrefs, an independent third-party SEO analytics platform.

The Rachel Fitzgerald quote is sourced from a published interview conducted by Liverpool City Region Destination Partnership in September 2025, titled “Southport Leaders in Conversation: Rachel Fitzgerald and Mark Catherall on the Town's Incredible Future.” The interview is publicly accessible at liverpoolcityregiondp.com. BID board membership data is sourced from southportbid.com/our-team/.

The review was conducted on 7 April 2026. All pages referenced are publicly accessible and every finding is independently verifiable by any party with a web browser. SIBA welcomes corrections from VisitSouthport, Sefton Council, or any party referenced in this analysis and will publish responses in full.