How a Yorkshire start-up grew its organic visibility through local SEO, digital PR and strategic Google Shopping optimisation
When a new luxury bed and mattress manufacturer launched in Yorkshire, they needed more than a website… visibility! Competing with established national retailers while trying to win trust as a local, premium brand is not easy, especially in a category dominated by big-box stores and aggressive advertisers.
They came to us as a start-up, clear on their mission:
build a brand rooted in Yorkshire’s historic textile heritage, and get found by customers who value high-end, handcrafted furniture.
We partnered with them for their first six months to build the foundations of their organic growth engine.
The Challenge
This brand had zero organic footprints when entering the marketplace.
No rankings, no local signals, no backlinks, and no presence in Google Shopping grids.
Yet, their whole business depended upon being found by searchers using queries such as:
“handmade beds yorkshire”
“yorkshire mattress company”
“luxury bed manufacturer”
“handcrafted mattresses UK”
“bespoke beds in Leeds”
The market is competitive and Google tends to favour long-established manufacturers. To break through early, we needed to combine brand building, technical SEO, digital PR, and strategic local positioning.
The Strategy
1. Local SEO centered on Yorkshire’s heritage
We leaned into what made them different; authentic Yorkshire craft, local manufacturing, and high-end construction.
We created a local strategy focused on ranking for intention-rich queries:
- “handmade beds yorkshire”
- “yorkshire beds”
- “bespoke beds yorkshire”
- “handmade mattress yorkshire”
- “yorkshire mattress manufacturer”
This included:
- Location-based optimized landing pages
- Local relevance signals
- Structured data of products, business details, and manufacturing.
- Coverage and citations across high-authority local directories
- Material tailored to fit Yorkshire’s textile and manufacturing identity
This instantly separated them from national competitors.
2. Google Merchant Centre optimisation & Product Grid SEO
To appear in Google’s product grids (the organic version of Shopping results), we rebuilt:
- Product titles
- Product descriptions
- Schema
- Merchant Centre feeds
- Image optimization
- GTIN/MPN data cleanup
This helped them show in the organic Shopping results without spending a dime on ads.
3. Digital PR for authority and trust
Being the new brand, Google had no reason to trust them.
So we devised a digital PR programme that:
- Highlighted their Yorkshire manufacturing roots
- Secured placements in relevant home, lifestyle, and local publications
- Build high-authority backlinks
- Reinforced keyword relevance using anchor text and topical coverage.
This moved them from “unseen start-up” to “emerging regional brand.”
4. Technical SEO fundamentals
We rebuilt key on-site structures:
- URL architecture
- Internal linking
- Product Collections
- Metadata
- Page speed, Core Web Vitals
- Sitemaps and crawl paths
This ensured Google was able to index, crawl, and scale the site accordingly.
The Results
Even though we only worked with them for six months, the impact continued long after because the foundations were done properly.
Across the last 10 months (including the months after our engagement ended), the site achieved:
- 103,000+ impressions
- 939 organic clicks
- Average position rising to the low 40s
- Continuous improvement in local intent keywords
The top performing queries show the strategy worked exactly as planned. They now rank and receive impressions for:
- “yorkshire beds”
- “yorkshire bed company”
- “yorkshire handmade beds”
- “bespoke beds yorkshire”
- “handmade beds yorkshire”
- “yorkshire mattress manufacturer”
- “mattresses made in yorkshire”
- “handmade mattress”
- “Luxury Mattresses Yorkshire”
- “custom upholstered headboard”
These are high-intent, premium local search terms which are the exact audience they wanted to reach.
CTR appears low, but this is expected when a site begins to rank for a wider pool of new keywords. As the site grows, impressions rise sharply and include many newly-acquired positions, naturally lowering the overall CTR metric. (Seen clearly in the data.)
Conclusion
For a start-up competing in a premium market, SEO isn’t about chasing volume. It’s about owning your niche and building authority from day one.
Through:
- local SEO
- digital PR
- Technical Optimization
- Google Merchant Centre enhancements
Rooted in Yorkshire identity and a strategy. …this brand built a solid foundation for long-term growth. They now appear consistently for terms relating to Yorkshire beds, handmade mattresses, bespoke furniture, and local manufacturing — exactly the keywords that convert.
This project illustrates this approach especially well at Vertex: senior-led SEO, executed properly from the start, so brands can scale without relying on ads
