Trafford Fireplaces is a Carlisle-based retailer and installer of gas fires, electric fires, multi-fuel stoves and fireplaces. Under founder Peter’s ownership, they built a strong local reputation serving customers right across Cumbria and into SW Scotland.
The business had been quietly collecting testimonials from customers for years. Town by town, village by village. The question was what to do with them.
When Peter eventually sold the business last year, the website was doing exactly what a website is supposed to do: generating a huge number of leads, without anyone looking after it. The last proper article published on the site was 3 August 2023. A couple of pages have had a few images swapped and a line or two of text tweaked since then. That’s it.
Trafford Fireplaces served a large geographic area covering dozens of towns and villages across Cumbria and into SW Scotland. The challenge wasn’t awareness – locals knew the brand. The challenge was visibility. When someone in Brampton searched “gas fires Brampton”, or someone in Lockerbie searched “electric fires Lockerbie”, Trafford weren’t showing up for those specific local searches.
The usual approach – one testimonials page with all reviews lumped together – wasn’t working for hyper-local search intent. Google needed location-specific signals. Customers needed local proof. The website was delivering neither.
Peter had been doing something smart for years without quite knowing how valuable it was. He had been collecting testimonials from customers right across the region, and those reviews contained exactly the geographic signals that local SEO needs.
We built 52 separate pages, one for each town and village in the Trafford Fireplaces service area. Each page opened with a short, genuine introduction to that location, then presented the reviews from customers who actually lived there.
That’s it. No tricks. No shortcuts. Just well-structured, locally relevant, genuinely useful content built from real reviews that already existed.
The logic is straightforward. When someone in Brampton searches “gas fires Brampton”, they don’t want a result for a business in Carlisle that might, possibly, serve their area. They want to know this business has worked in their town before. That people there have used them and been happy. The Brampton page answered exactly that question. Multiply that across 52 locations and you have 52 highly relevant, geographically specific pages, each one satisfying a different local search intent. Google rewards relevance — and when the content is built around real reviews from real people in real places, it rewards trust too.
Top 3 rankings across all 52 locations. Not for a week. Not for a quarter. For years. With zero ongoing maintenance, no new content, and no agency on retainer.
Bear in mind the traffic figures cover spring into early summer – the quiet season for a business that sells heating products. Traffic climbs sharply from September as the colder months arrive. What you’re looking at is the floor, not the ceiling.
The best SEO isn’t clever. It’s useful. 52 pages that answered 52 specific local questions. Real reviews from real customers in real places. A clean structure that Google could understand and trust. That’s it. No magic. Just good work, done properly, built to last.
Ready to take your online presence to the next level? Contact us today to discuss your project and see how fecking creative can help your business succeed online.