Marketing tools

Search results move depending on where the person searching is standing. You can be top of the list from your own office and invisible three miles away, and nothing on your screen will tell you.

Local Radar checks 441 points across a grid covering ten miles in every direction, and hands you a map. Green where you show up, red where you don't. One scan a week, on one search term you choose.

What it measures is your Google Business Profile, so you need one of those before it can tell you anything. That's the free Maps listing, and claiming it is worth doing whether you join or not.

Somewhere in Essex, a business group or a local paper has written about one of your competitors and linked to their website. Not yours. That isn't a mystery you need an agency to solve. It's a list, and it's usually a short one.

Give us your website and up to three rivals you actually compete with. You get back the sites that link to them and not to you, local ones first, and we tell you where each link sits. A mention inside an article is somebody who writes about local businesses and might write about you. A logo in a footer is their web designer. One of those is worth an email on Monday morning.

We're reading someone else's index of the web, so a smaller site may have links we haven't found. And these are places worth asking, not places that have agreed to anything. One check a month, because backlinks move slowly and checking weekly would tell you nothing new.

Your website ranks differently depending on where the person searching is. That sounds like a technicality until you see it happen. We checked a Colchester software firm and found it third for one search from here and nowhere in the top twenty nationally. Same website, same afternoon.

Pick up to ten searches that matter to your business. We check each one from Colchester once a month and tell you the position, whether you moved since last time, and whether Google put a map of local businesses at the top. If you are not in the first hundred results we say so, because that is worth knowing too.

Most of those searches will not have your town in them. Building the first list for a real member, five of the six phrases ended in "near me" and not one said Colchester. That is how people search now. "Bike repair near me" gets 27,100 searches a month across Britain, and "bike repair colchester" gets 70.

One thing to read carefully: the search volumes are counted across the whole UK, not Colchester. We label every one of them, and they are better used as a rough guide to demand than as the size of your local market.

A rubric captures what you are trying to achieve, who you are talking to, what wins them over, what you would never claim, and what makes you wince. You build it once, for a blog post, landing page, LinkedIn post or sales email.

After that you have something concrete to hand a freelancer, a member of staff or an AI tool, instead of explaining your voice from scratch and being disappointed with what comes back. Ten a month.