Where does your work actually come from?
Pull up the last thirty jobs and put a postcode against each. If they are BD postcodes with the odd HX or LS, you are a Bradford business and the search work should say so. If half of them are in Sheffield, York or across the Pennines, the county-wide terms are the honest target and the Bradford ones are a bonus. Search strategy that starts anywhere other than the invoice book tends to build pages for places you would never take the van.
What does each results page look like?
Search your service with Bradford on the end, then with Yorkshire, then with West Yorkshire, and look at who appears. The Bradford page is usually local firms and the map pack. The Yorkshire page is bigger firms from Leeds, Sheffield and Hull with long histories, and there is often no map pack at all, because Google does not treat a county as a place you can drive to. Check the county wording too: in our own keyword checks, searches that say Yorkshire outnumber the ones that say West Yorkshire many times over.
Does Bradford mean the city or the district?
Both, and searchers do not agree which. Bradford the district runs from Keighley and Ilkley in the north down to Queensbury and Wyke in the south, but a customer in Bingley types Bingley, and one in Shipley types Shipley. A business that only ever writes Bradford is invisible to them. The fix is a page for each town you genuinely serve, written with something real on it: a job you did there, the streets you know, the time it takes you to get there. Jack Lunn’s Flower Meadows development at Wrose, which we filmed from the air, is the kind of local evidence that makes such a page believable.
How do you cover Yorkshire without a page for every town?
You do not need one. Twenty near-identical pages with the town name swapped are exactly what Google devalues, and a buyer who lands on one can tell in seconds. Cover the county with one strong page that names the areas you work in and shows the jobs you have done in them, then add a town page only where you have real work to put on it. Bond Brickwork lays brick on developments across Yorkshire, and those developments are on the site with evidence from the live jobs, which is what keeps the company at the top of Google for the commercial brickwork searches that matter. The proof came first and the pages followed it.
What about the Google map results?
The map pack is tied to where the searcher is and where your business is, and no amount of copy changes that. A Bradford business shows in Bradford map results and, with a service area set, in nearby towns. It will not show in York map results from a Bradford address, and anyone promising otherwise is describing something they cannot deliver. For county-wide work the map pack is a small part of the picture and the ordinary results are the fight.
What would Halizona recommend?
For nearly every Bradford business we speak to: Bradford first, then the towns of the district you already work in, then the county term once there is enough proof on the site to deserve it. We write the pages around real jobs, which usually means photographing or filming them, and we measure each page by the enquiries it produces, so you can see which towns actually pay.
