Web design / Nottingham
Web design in Nottingham, north and south of the Trent
Many of the people a Nottingham business serves do not live in Nottingham, at least not on paper. West Bridgford, Beeston, Arnold, Carlton and Hucknall all sit outside the city boundary, and a website that only ever says “Nottingham” is talking past a large share of its own customers.
A small city inside a big one
The City of Nottingham is a tight boundary drawn around the centre and the older districts: Sherwood, Bulwell, Lenton, Radford, the Meadows, Clifton, Wollaton. The wider urban area spills into four other council areas. Rushcliffe has West Bridgford, Broxtowe has Beeston and Stapleford, Gedling has Arnold and Carlton, and Ashfield has Hucknall.
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People in those places tend to name them first. Someone in West Bridgford looking for an electrician may well type “electrician West Bridgford”, and someone in Beeston will often do the same. Google also weights local results by where the searcher is standing. A site that names only the city gives both of those signals very little to work with.
The fix is plain text. Say where you work, the way customers would say it, on the pages where it matters, and set your Google Business Profile service area to the same places.
Which side of the river you work
The Trent splits the urban area in two, and there are only a handful of road bridges across it near the city. At busy times of day they are where a tight schedule falls apart, which is why plenty of trades end up concentrating on one side: West Bridgford, Ruddington, Radcliffe-on-Trent and Cotgrave to the south, or Arnold, Hucknall and the Gedling villages to the north.
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If that is how you work, the website should say so. It filters out jobs you would rather not take and tells the right customers you are close. If you are happy to cover both sides, say that instead, with the towns named.
West of the city the county line runs close. Long Eaton and Ilkeston are in Derbyshire but a short drive from Beeston, and many Nottingham trades work there as a matter of course. If they are yours, list them.
Hockley, the Lace Market and the booking apps
Nottingham's independent streets, Hockley and the Lace Market most of all, are full of barbers, salons, tattoo studios, cafés and small restaurants. Many take bookings through a third-party app and treat Instagram as their website.
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That works until a customer searches your name and finds a booking-platform page, a directory listing with last year's opening hours and an Instagram grid with no prices. A simple site of your own is the one place where the hours, the prices, the address and the booking link are all correct at once, and it is what Google reads when it decides what your business is. Keep the app for bookings. Link to it from a site you own.
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A busy results page, and what earns a place on it
For the common trades a Nottingham search is crowded. Firms from across the county and from Derby compete for the same map results, directories and lead-generation sites take several of the plain listings, and the bigger local companies run ads above them all. Showing up is not a matter of one trick.
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What helps is a site that is easy for Google to understand and quick for a customer to act on: one page for each main service, the places you cover written as text, a Business Profile claimed and filled in, and reviews asked for as a habit. Speed matters too. Most of your visitors are on a phone, often on mobile data, and a page that takes too long to load loses them before they see your number.
Ads that know where the river is
Google Ads can work well here, as long as the targeting follows the way you actually work. If you stick to the south side, an ad shown in Bulwell is money spent on a job you will turn down. Target named places rather than a circle drawn around Old Market Square, and send each ad to a page about that exact service.
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The order still matters: fix the site, set up call and form tracking, and only then spend. Otherwise you cannot tell which clicks turned into work, and the budget becomes a guess.
Launch week, and the months after
Most of the risk in a rebuild sits in the first few weeks. The old addresses need redirecting so any search value they built up carries over, every form and phone link needs testing, and someone needs to watch for problems while Google catches up. Coltura does that for a month after launch as part of the build.
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After that, Growth Care is the optional monthly arrangement: hosting, security, your changes made when you send them, form checks, speed and indexing monitoring, and a plain-English report each month. If you would rather host the site yourself, you can. It is yours either way.
What it costs
From £1,400, one-off.
Growth Websites start at £1,400, one-off, for up to six pages. About 14 working days from agreed direction to launch. That covers the audit, the writing, the design, the build, the conversion and local search groundwork, tracking, speed and launch. You own it outright.
The free Growth Audit comes first either way, so you find out what is actually wrong before you spend anything.
In our clients’ words
What our clients say.
Questions
The ones that come up.
My customers are mostly in West Bridgford and Beeston. Should my website say Nottingham at all?
Yes, and it should name the places you actually work as well. Some people search for the city, others for their own town, and Google weights results towards where the searcher is. Use both, in plain text, on the pages where it matters, and set your Google Business Profile service area to match. What to avoid is a string of near-identical pages that only swap the place name.
Do I need a separate page for every Nottingham suburb?
Usually not. Near-identical suburb pages are exactly what search engines have learned to discount, and they do little for customers. A better approach is one strong page per service, a clear list of the places you cover, and real examples of work in those areas. If one area genuinely brings different work, such as the Victorian houses of the Park estate, that can earn a page of its own.
I run a salon in Hockley and take bookings through an app. Do I really need a website?
The app is fine for taking bookings, but it is not a website you own. When someone searches your name, a site of your own is the one place where your prices, hours, address and booking link are all correct together, and it is the source Google reads when deciding what your business is. Keep the app, link to it clearly, and stop relying on it to explain who you are.
How soon after launch will the new site show up in Nottingham searches?
Nobody can give you an honest date. Google decides when it recrawls a site and how it ranks it, and that varies from site to site. What can be controlled is a clean launch: old pages redirected so existing value carries over, the new pages easy for Google to find, and indexing watched through the first month. If something drops out, it gets spotted and fixed rather than discovered months later.
Also in Nottingham
Websites by trade:
Web design in Nottingham
Find out what your website is costing you.
A free Growth Audit, done by hand: a written, prioritised audit of your website, with the three fixes worth making first. It is yours to keep. We work across the East Midlands and the rest of the UK, remotely.
We take on a limited number of builds at once, so there is usually a short wait before a new one starts. Once yours starts, it is about 14 working days from agreed direction to launch.