A website and SEO for a Bury St Edmunds family building firm

Northgate is a family run building company based on Northgate Avenue in Bury St Edmunds. Full new builds and house extensions are what it does most, taking the architect's drawings and running the whole project from groundworks to the last day of snagging, with renovations, kitchens, bathrooms, lofts and garden rooms alongside.

It works up to 40 miles out, is a member of the Federation of Master Builders, carries £10m of public liability insurance and guarantees its work for 12 months, or 2 years on new builds. One team stays on every job, and that is what the site leads with.

Someone in Newmarket planning an extension searches for builders in Newmarket, and someone in Diss searches for Diss. A builder with one homepage that mentions Bury St Edmunds gives neither of them a reason to call, however good the work is.

Building is also the biggest spend most homeowners make with a tradesperson, so they read before they ring. The site had to explain how a job actually runs, the planning position and who turns up on site, in a way that sounds like a builder rather than a brochure.

Each kind of work has its own page, from new builds and house extensions to loft conversions, garage conversions, garden rooms, holiday lets and groundworks, and each one explains how the job is sequenced on site, the planning and building regulations position and what to think about before committing. A planning page covers the Article 4 conservation areas in Bury St Edmunds, where an extension that would be permitted elsewhere can need full planning permission.

A page for every town Northgate covers.
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‍These are service by location pages: the keyword research showed people search for builders by town, so Bury St Edmunds, Newmarket, Mildenhall, Thetford, Ely, Soham, Haverhill, Stowmarket, Sudbury, Brandon, Diss, Attleborough, Watton, Wymondham and Dereham each have a page, written about the housing and the work in that town. A homeowner in Ely searching for builders in Ely lands on the Ely page, not a homepage about somewhere else.

The design is plain and confident: off white and pale grey backgrounds, charcoal for type and buttons, and photography of the work on site, brick going up and scaffolding round real houses. Case studies show finished projects for named clients, a properties for sale page carries homes Northgate has built and sells directly, and a WhatsApp button sits on every page for people who would rather message than fill in a form.