Local SEO · 6 min read
Kirklees has 440,000 residents. How many can find your business?
Kirklees had an estimated population of 442,033 in mid-2023 — a market bigger than most English cities, spread across Huddersfield, Dewsbury, Batley and dozens of villages. The offline competition for that market is fierce; the online competition, for most sectors, is thin. That gap is the opportunity.
By Raja Wahab, Co-founder, Fixby Studios · Updated
A big market that behaves like several small ones
Kirklees isn't one town. It's Huddersfield, Dewsbury, Batley, Mirfield, Holmfirth and a long list of villages, each with its own search behaviour. A business that treats it as one market writes one page about 'West Yorkshire' and competes for none of them properly.
Where the gap actually is
- Whole sectors — trades, wholesalers, garages, nurseries — where almost no local competitor has more than a homepage.
- Village-level searches with real intent and almost no competition.
- Sectors where everyone is on Instagram and nobody is in search results.
- Businesses with great reviews and no website to convert the people those reviews attract.
Do it properly, not at scale
The temptation is to spin up thirty near-identical location pages. Google's doorway-page rules exist precisely for that, and thin duplicated pages tend to drag down the rest of a small site. Build a page for an area only when you have something genuinely local to say — real jobs, real photos, real prices, real questions from customers there.
Start with the map, then the site
For most Kirklees businesses the order is: fix the Google Business Profile, get reviews flowing, then build the pages that convert the traffic those two send you. Doing it the other way round is why a lot of pretty websites produce nothing.
Sources
Raja Wahab is co-founder of Fixby Studios, a Huddersfield studio building websites, SEO, social media and business software for small, owner-managed businesses across West Yorkshire.
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