Websites, SEO and social media for UK trade and service businesses
Websites, search and social media, handled by one person month to month, so UK trade and service businesses get a stronger online presence without having to run it themselves.
The usual story
Most trade websites were built once, years ago, and have been quietly costing money ever since. See how many of these you recognise.
The words, the design, the code, and the search work that follows — done by the person you rang, not handed between three agencies.
Nothing gets lost in the handovers, decisions get made in one phone call, and the person who built your site is the one who keeps it ranking.
You didn't start a building firm to write captions and chase Google. The point of a monthly arrangement is that the agreed work happens whether or not you remembered it that week — and that you see it, approve it, and otherwise get on with the job.
What I do
A site that looks like nobody else's, the work that gets it found, and the presence that makes people believe it once they check. Take all three or just the one you need — each is sold on its own.
Brand-led design, not a theme with your logo dropped in. I shape the copy around what your buyer needs to know, art-direct the imagery, then design and build it.
Hand-written code that loads quickly on 4G in a car park. Accessible to WCAG AA, and tested with a keyboard and a screen reader, not just a mouse.
Analytics, call tracking and form tracking wired up before it goes live, so from day one you can see whether it's bringing in work.
Keyword and intent research for your actual service area, then the service and location pages that answer those searches, written as they're needed.
Local SEO: Google Business Profile, citations and Google reviews. These are the signals that decide who shows up when someone nearby needs you today.
Technical health and Core Web Vitals watched every month, and rankings, calls and enquiries reported in plain English. No dashboards to decode.
Planned, written and laid out in your branding, for the platforms your customers actually use. Search brings them to you; this is what they find when they check you out.
AI tools do the first draft and the repetitive half of the job. I read every piece before you do, and you approve every piece before it publishes. Nothing goes out unread.
It only works with photographs of real jobs and a line or two about each one. If you can't get those, I'll tell you it isn't worth your money rather than take it anyway.
How it goes
01Half an hour on the phone about your trade, not about websites. Who buys from you, what they ask first, and who you keep losing work to.
02Before any design, the page order and the copy outline. It's built from what your buyer needs to know and what people are actually searching for.
03You see the real thing early, in a browser and on your phone, not a flat picture of a website. Changes happen while they're still cheap.
04Hand-written, fast and accessible. No page builder, no theme, and nothing on it you'll be paying a plugin subscription for.
05Analytics and tracking wired up before it goes live, redirects from the old site mapped, so you keep the rankings you already have.
06Then the long game: monthly SEO and care, with content added and results reported plainly. It's the part most agencies quietly stop doing.
How a kestrel works
It holds still over the field, reading the trails. That is the research: who is searching, for what, and what they need answered first.
When it commits, it commits properly. The site is designed, written and built in one run, by the person you spoke to.
It comes away with something. Enquiries from people who were already looking for exactly what you do.
Then it holds the ground. Monthly search work, so the site keeps earning instead of just existing.
The work
Solar, Porsche servicing, fire and security, commercial scaffolding, construction project management and joinery. They share almost nothing, and not one of these sites started from a template.
Renewables · UK-wide · Site + client portal
Solar, battery storage and heat pumps. The site had to sell a five-figure install to a homeowner who has never bought one before, so it leads with the outcome rather than the kit. Behind it sits a build tracker: engineers update a job from the van, and the customer watches their installation move from survey to switch-on without phoning anyone.
Porsche specialist · Quorn, Loughborough · Site rebuild
An independent Porsche workshop that had been trading since 2008 behind a website that made it look like a tyre shop. The rebuild opens by scrubbing through a real frame sequence as you scroll, so the camera moves through the car the way a technician would. Everything else stays quiet and lets the metalwork talk.
Fire & security · Leicester & the East Midlands · Site + lead capture
Fire alarms, CCTV, intruder alarms and access control, trusted by names like the National Space Centre and Leicester College. Buyers here are facilities managers checking accreditation before anything else, so BAFE, NSI and Safe Contractor sit in the first screen, over a night film of Fireserv's own building. Eight services, straight answers to the questions they actually ask, and every page leads to one thing: booking a free site survey.
Commercial scaffolding · London & the South East · Site build
Commercial access work, where the buyer is a main contractor weighing up risk before price. So the site puts engineering, RAMS and inspection records where they can be found in seconds, and opens on a full-bleed photograph of a crew working at height — the job, not a stock image of a building.
Construction project management · Residential & commercial · Site build
A project manager who runs builds from first drawing to final key. His clients aren't buying a service list, they're buying one person who owns the job, so that is the first thing the site says. Scrolling walks you across a live site, past the hoarding and under the crane, through five plain stages from brief to handover.
Carpentry & joinery · Fitted interiors · Site build
Fitted wardrobes, media walls and bespoke joinery — none of it bought flat-packed, which is exactly what the site says first: nothing off the shelf. It opens like a workshop film, timber named on screen beside a running REC counter, and the work is set out as a dimensioned 1:20 elevation before four plain steps take you from measure to fit.
A kestrel hunts in ultraviolet. Voles leave scent trails across a field that no human eye can see, and the bird reads them like a map. It doesn't hunt harder than anything else out there. It hunts where the trails already are.
Search works the same way. Your customers leave trails every day — the words someone types at half eleven when the aircon has packed in, the question they need answered before they'll trust anyone with a quote. Most websites are built blind to every one of them.
Find the trails first. Then build the pages that sit on them.
Ask me what yours look likeIndustries we help
A homeowner buying solar spends three weeks being reassured. A facilities manager buying fire alarms is checking you against a compliance duty. Someone with water coming through a ceiling is ringing whoever looks real in the next four minutes. The website has to answer whoever actually turned up.
Based in Leicestershire, working UK-wide. Most clients so far are in:
What it costs
No contract dressed up as a partnership, and no promises about rankings. The founding price is open to the first three businesses that take it, then it closes.
Growth Pilot · first 3 clients
£249a month
Initial three months, then £299 proposed, subject to agreement.
Growth Plus
£499a month
More ground covered each month, and a call about where it is going.
A website build is quoted per project, not charged monthly — a five-page trade site and one with a booking system behind it are not the same job. Major technical SEO work and extra content are quoted the same way. Every build is designed and written for your trade, fast on a phone, accessible to WCAG AA, and yours to keep on your own domain.
Why Kestrel
Tell me what you do and where you work. If I'm not the right fit I'll say so and point you somewhere better — that costs you one email.
