Everyone else is searching for what you do. That's a different search, on a page you're not on.
your business name
what you do + your town
Twenty-five businesses. None have left.
Set your trade and the towns you travel to.
Sheffield, plus:
Each one is somebody who needs what you do and doesn't know your name.
Three phrasings per town, illustrative rather than exhaustive. No volumes, no positions, nothing estimated.
See where you stand for theseThese are done in-house, usually the next working day.
Where you appear for your main service, in Sheffield and the towns next to it.
Why it matters. Ranking in the city centre tells you nothing about Hillsborough. The gap between the two is usually where the missed work is.
Whether it can reach the map results at all, and what is stopping it.
Why it matters. The map results sit above everything else. If the listing cannot reach them, the website cannot make up the difference.
What is holding it back, in plain terms, with the fixes ranked.
Why it matters. Most of what holds a site back is structural rather than cosmetic. It is also usually the cheapest part to put right.
And what they are doing that you are not.
Why it matters. You are not competing with Google. You are competing with four or five specific firms, and what they are doing is visible to anyone who looks.
We are not going to invent a problem to sell you the fix.
Your market, not ours. Here is what Sheffield actually typed into Google last month, across the trades we build websites for.
| What Sheffield searches for | Searches a month | Difficulty | Ads cost per click |
|---|---|---|---|
| estate agents sheffield | 2,400 | 25 | £5.86 |
| plumber sheffield | 2,400 | 0 | £7.10 |
| roofer sheffield | 2,400 | 0 | £4.44 |
| solicitors sheffield | 1,900 | 25 | £7.70 |
| locksmith sheffield | 1,600 | 2 | £24.67 |
| accountant sheffield | 1,300 | 16 | £12.37 |
| electrician sheffield | 1,000 | 4 | £3.19 |
| joiner sheffield | 590 | 0 | £5.10 |
| builders sheffield | 390 | 0 | £3.11 |
Close to 14,000 searches a month across those nine trades, the largest of any town we work in. None of those people want an agency. They want a plumber who answers, a roofer who turns up, a solicitor who returns the call.
Sheffield is also the hardest, and we would rather say so. Estate agents and solicitors both sit at a difficulty of 25, the most contested figures in this whole set. If you are in one of those two, expect a longer job than a business the same size in Rotherham or Barnsley would face.
The opportunity is the rest of the table. Plumber and roofer are 2,400 searches a month each at a difficulty of zero, which is a genuinely unusual combination at this volume. Locksmith clicks cost £24.67 on Google Ads, so fifty of those is £1,234 a month that stops the day you stop paying.
Your trade is probably not on this list. Ask, and we will pull the real Sheffield number for it before you commit to anything. It is the same check that goes into every proposal, and sometimes it is the reason there isn't one.
Source: Google keyword data via DataForSEO, United Kingdom, August 2026. Difficulty runs 0 to 100. These are trades we have built websites for, so the list is illustrative rather than exhaustive.
Three businesses hold the map results for plumber sheffield. This is what they look like today.
The lowest way in is 243 reviews, not the 334 the biggest of the three has. That is the highest bar of any town we cover, and roughly 27 times the bar in Lincoln, which is 9. A plan built for Lincoln does not transfer here.
And this is what the 10 results underneath them are actually made of.
7 of the 10 are a directory, a national brand or a listing you do not control. The fourth result is the first Sheffield business showing its own website. That is the gap a local business can take.
Source: live Google results for plumber sheffield, United Kingdom, 4 August 2026. Map results move, so treat this as a snapshot rather than a live reading. Your trade is probably not plumbing; ask and we will pull the real Sheffield numbers for it.
Two jobs in progress, rather than two finished stories. Neither site has been live long enough for a before and after to mean anything yet, so there isn't one here. The files stay open, and we add to them as the evidence arrives.
Quickpickings is a Sheffield business, competing in the same city and the same map results you are. Danum trades in Doncaster, half an hour east. If you are a trade that gets called in an emergency, the locksmith file is the closer parallel of the two.
The rebuild replaced the old site at the end of the month.
robots.txt fixed, sitemap submitted, review markup connected to the live Google reviews, and the homepage retargeted at the term people actually search rather than the one the business calls itself.
Impressions for what they do, counted apart from searches for the name. Which of the town pages get indexed and which get ignored. Position for the head term in Sheffield itself. The Google listing. Enquiries arriving from search.
Two months of data is not enough to act on, so we are not going to pretend otherwise.
When there is enough to compare like with like.
An independent locksmith trading in Sheffield since 2018, with a reputation the website was not carrying any of.
We audited the old site, then rebuilt it rather than patched it.
Twenty-one town pages: fifteen towns on the main term, six of those with a separate emergency page.
Structured data across the site, with the review markup fed by the real Google reviews rather than typed in by hand.
Every URL on the old site redirected to where it now lives.
Danum Auto Solutions
An auto locksmith moving into vehicle security, while the old domain and the old service list both still said locksmith. Eight service pages where there were four, six town pages, and structured data on every one. The site is weeks old, so the first honest read is still months away.
Most SEO agencies can't touch the website they're being paid to fix.
For the map results, mostly yes. Google weights how close you are to the person searching, and there is no arguing with it. In a city the size of Sheffield that cuts both ways: a unit in the centre does not automatically reach somebody searching in Hillsborough.
For the ordinary results underneath, no. A page written properly about the work you do in an area can rank there whether or not you have premises in it. Most of the local SEO work lives in that second half, and it is the half most businesses never use.
If you want to be found in them, yes. One page cannot rank for eight areas, because it isn't about any of them in particular.
That doesn't mean eight thin pages with the place name swapped over. It means eight pages worth reading, which is why we do them one at a time rather than all at once.
The usual three are verification, category and inconsistent details across the web. Rule those out first, because they cost nothing to fix. Then there are reviews, and Sheffield is where that gets serious.
The three holding the map results for plumber sit on 243, 334 and 329. The lowest way in is 243, the highest bar of any town we cover and roughly twenty seven times the bar in Lincoln. Anyone quoting you a quick job here has not looked at it.
No. Your Google Business Profile can run as a service area business, which hides the street address and shows the places you travel to instead. For you that list is Sheffield plus Hillsborough, Crookes, Ecclesall and the rest of the city you cover.
It changes how you compete, not whether you do. Without a pin, Google leans on distance from the searcher, so the area pages take on more. In a city where the pack starts at 243 reviews, treat that as the long half of the work.
On the broad terms, often not, and we'll tell you so rather than take the money.
On the searches with a place name in them it usually is. National sites are rarely written about anywhere in particular, and that's the gap a local business can take.
From £495 a month. Six months to begin with, because that's where the work is front-loaded, then month to month.
Getting set up is charged once, at the start, and it's quoted in the proposal rather than folded into the first month. You should be able to see it. The full breakdown is on the SEO services page.
The Google listing can move within weeks. Website pages take three to six months to settle. Anyone quoting a fortnight is describing something else.
Sheffield is the exception on this list. Seven of the ten results on page one are directories or national brands and the first local business sits fourth, which sounds open until you look at the map pack starting at 243 reviews. Expect twelve months here, not six.
No. And neither can anyone else. What we can show you is where you were, where you are, and what we did in between.
Not for the work. It's about twenty miles and most of it happens on a screen either way, so we'd rather say that than pretend to a Sheffield address we don't have.
One of the two open files below is a Sheffield business. That's a fairer test of whether it matters than a postcode is.
No. Plenty of this happens on sites we didn't build.
It goes quicker when we built it. An SEO agency that only does search sends you a list and waits for somebody else to action it. We just make the change, because it's our website to change.
Then this is the wrong thing, and we'll say so. Google Ads is faster.
Getting found is the fourth thing we do, and it works because we already do the first three. How the four fit together
See what your customers see, then decide.
There's no rush from our end. Most of the businesses we look after took months to get round to it, and the ones who were hurried into it by somebody else usually regretted the somebody else.
If we're not the right people, we'll tell you who is.
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