Small business website design for UK firms

The pages, in the order to build them

Most small sites need fewer pages than the first sitemap suggests. Start with these, and add a page only when it has a job.

• Home: what you do, who it is for, where you work, and how to enquire.
• A page for each service you want to sell. One service, one page.
• About: the people, the place, and how long you have done this, in details a stranger can check.
• Proof you are allowed to show. Jobs, clients who agreed to be named, accreditations that are current.
• Contact: phone, email, an address or a service area, and the hours you keep.

A blog is optional. Three posts from the week the site launched, and then silence, is a worse sign than no blog.

Write the way the customer asks

The heading on a service page should use the words a customer types, and the words they use on the phone. If you rewire houses and produce electrical installation condition reports, the page should say rewires and EICRs.

Innovative electrical solutions could be any firm in the trade. A customer cannot tell your firm from that line, and a search has nothing specific to match.

The same test works for a solicitor, a clinic, a workshop, or a shop. Read the sentence aloud.

If a competitor could paste it onto their site unchanged, rewrite it until it contains a fact that is yours: a place, a service, a limit, a person.

Being found, without a pile of town pages

Each page needs its own title and its own description. One topic per page.

The address on the site should match the address you use everywhere else. If customers visit you, or you serve a defined area, claim the Google Business Profile and keep it in step with the site.

For a local firm, that listing is the block Google shows with the map, so it deserves the same attention as the homepage.

Google Search Console is free. It shows the queries that already bring up the site.

Read it before you pay for another page. We will not invent a search volume for your trade and drop it into a proposal.

We also do not publish sets of town pages. A page for a town you do not really serve fails the same test as the generic heading above.

Those same pages do the AI-search work. Keep each page on one topic, written in the words a customer uses, and include a fact that belongs to the firm.

We do not add a block of keywords for an AI model to pick through.

What we leave off

• A slider that pushes the phone number below the first screen.
• Stock photographs of handshakes and skylines.
• A form that demands a budget, a company size, and a postal address before you have said what the job is.
• A phone number that exists only inside an image.
• Prices we were not given. If a price is public, you tell us, and we print it.
• If it is not, we leave it out.

If the site sets non-essential cookies, including a lot of marketing tags, UK rules expect consent before those tags run. We are not your solicitor.

Have the tag plan checked before it goes live. One analytics tool you will open is enough.

The rest of the work

This page is for UK small businesses. You do not need to be in London.

UDG is a boutique agency across four continents.

The same kind of site and search work is written for US law firms, US roofing contractors, and US plumbing contractors: lawyer SEO marketing, law firm marketing, roofing SEO, and plumbing SEO. HVAC companies, general contractors, and chiropractic clinics have their own pages: HVAC marketing, contractor marketing, and marketing for chiropractors. Electrical contractors, dental practices, and a small business that needs the map listing have their own pages: electrician marketing, dental marketing, and local SEO services. If you are a UK firm, start here.

We quote it per project.

A business based in Cheltenham should read web design Cheltenham. A business in Gloucester should read web design Gloucester. A business in Newport, South Wales, should read web design Newport. A Bristol firm that wants to be found in ordinary search should read SEO Bristol. Whole-site search for a US company, apart from the map, is small business SEO. A list the company already has, including a shop's order emails and texts, is email marketing.

A UK shop that sells online should read Shopify website design.

Consumer social is ongoing content for one business that sells to the public. UDG ghostwriting is for LinkedIn and X.