Are you running a Hartlepool business and wondering why your website isn’t pulling in customers like it should?
You are not alone. According to Statista, the UK has over 5.5 million small businesses, and the vast majority of them have websites that hardly get visited. With more local competition than ever before, it is essential your business stands out online. We have created this blog post to help Hartlepool businesses understand what actually drives traffic to your website.
Get your local SEO sorted first
Before we get into anything fancy, you must invest time into your local SEO. This is the most important stage before everything else! Local SEO is the magic behind your business appearing in Google when someone searches “joiner Hartlepool” or “hairdresser near me”.
If you have not already set up your Google Business Profile, you should sort it today. Add real photos of your business, your opening hours, your services, and start asking happy customers to leave reviews. In my opinion, this is the single most powerful free thing you can do. We have worked with local businesses who went from invisible on Google Maps to ranking in the top three for their service in under three months — purely from getting this right.
Make sure your business name, address and phone number match exactly everywhere — your website, Google, Facebook, Yell, and any directory listings. Even tiny differences confuse Google and damage your rankings.
Invest in proper content
Most websites we audit have the same problem — they are full of “Welcome to our business” type pages with absolutely no useful content. Google is not interested in that. Google wants to send people to websites that actually answer their questions.
Think about it this way. When was the last time you Googled “best plumber” and clicked the first salesy website? You didn’t. You probably searched something like “why is my boiler making a banging noise” or “how much does a loft conversion cost in Hartlepool”. The websites that answer those exact questions are the ones that get the traffic.
This is where blog content comes in. A regularly updated blog signals to Google that your website is alive and active. It also gives you the chance to target hundreds of long-tail keywords your competitors are ignoring. We have a client, ARC Training Academy, who publishes regular useful content for their industry. Their traffic has grown month on month for over two years, all from creating content that genuinely helps their audience.
Make sure your website is fast and mobile friendly
This one is huge, and honestly, it is one of the most ignored issues we see when we audit Hartlepool business websites.
80% of your potential customers are searching for you on their phone. If your website loads slowly on mobile, or worse, looks like a mess on a small screen — they are gone before they have even seen what you do. Google also uses page speed as a ranking factor, so a slow site will struggle to rank even if everything else is perfect.
Take five minutes today and run your website through Google PageSpeed Insights. It is completely free and will tell you exactly what is slowing your site down. We have taken Hartlepool client sites from eight or nine second loading times down to under two seconds — and the difference in traffic and enquiries is genuinely massive.
Don’t underestimate the power of location pages
If you want to rank in Hartlepool, you need pages on your website that actually mention Hartlepool. Sounds obvious, but the amount of sites we see that just have a generic “Services” page is unreal.
Create dedicated pages for the services you offer in the specific areas you serve. So instead of a single “Plumbing Services” page, you should have a “Plumbing Services in Hartlepool” page, and possibly one for Seaton Carew, Hart Village, Greatham, Wynyard and beyond. These pages should mention local landmarks, talk about the type of properties you work with in the area, and feel genuinely local — not just the same content with the town name swapped out.
A Hartlepool tradesman client of ours went from page four of Google for “joiner Hartlepool” to ranking on page one in just over three months by doing exactly this. Same business, same services, just findable now.
Track everything and adjust
You cannot improve what you do not measure. Make sure you have Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console set up properly on your website. Both are completely free and will tell you which pages are getting traffic, what people are searching to find you, and where you need to improve.
Quality SEO, with outstanding results
At InfaCloud, we have been helping businesses across the North East with their SEO since 2011. We have over 500 active clients and we are proud to be recognised by Dragons’ Den’s Theo Paphitis. Whether you are based in Hartlepool, Peterlee, Seaham, Durham or anywhere else across the region, we can help your website actually pull in customers.
We also don’t just sort your website and forget about you. We are ALWAYS on hand to help with future requirements. Whether you need a hand with content, want help fixing your rankings, or just fancy a chat about your marketing — we are only a message away.
Why not fill in our contact form and see what we can do for your Hartlepool business today!
