Web design / Cincinnati, OH
A town full of brand managers
Procter & Gamble is widely credited with inventing modern brand management, and for decades people have learned the trade at its downtown headquarters before moving on to agencies, consultancies and companies of their own around town. Kroger is headquartered here as well. The result is a metro with an unusual number of marketers who can take a brand apart in a single meeting.
If you sell to those people (as a research firm, a packaging supplier, a photographer, a small agency) your own site gets judged harder than you’d like. A logo that changes between pages, a tagline that doesn’t match your LinkedIn, case-study pages with no real outcomes: all of it gets noticed, and quietly held against you. We’d fix the brand before the site. That means a brand identity simple enough to apply the same way everywhere, and then a site that uses it without fuss.
Three states, one metro
The metro crosses the Ohio River into Northern Kentucky and reaches west into southeast Indiana. Covington and Newport sit just across the bridges from downtown. Florence is a few miles farther south in Boone County, which is also where the region’s airport actually is, despite the Cincinnati in its name. Lawrenceburg, in Dearborn County, is the Indiana side of things.
For a contractor, a law office or a medical practice, that geography raises practical questions. Licenses differ by state, and so do some of the rules of the trade, and a homeowner in Kentucky wants to see that you work there before they’ll pick up the phone. We’d build service-area pages that keep each state’s details separate where they differ, and that name the Kentucky towns in real sentences. Licensing and service pages get more space in our contractors guide.
Neighborhood first
Inside the city, people talk in neighborhoods: Over-the-Rhine, Hyde Park, Oakley, Northside, Clifton up by the University of Cincinnati. A storefront should put its neighborhood right next to its name, because that’s the first thing a local uses to decide if you’re on their way home.
Up I-71 and I-75, Mason in Warren County and West Chester in Butler County have become big markets in their own right, full of families and office parks, and residents search by town name. Clermont County to the east has its own set, Milford and Batavia among them. A service business should name the suburbs it really covers on the pages that do the work. For most local businesses in the region, SEO is largely about getting those names onto the right pages and keeping them consistent with your Google listing.
Remote, on Eastern Time
There’s no Cincinnati office, and none in Covington either; we’re remote, keeping Eastern Time like both banks of the river. Your team learns the Framer editor before launch, so adding a case study or a job opening doesn’t require us. Firms that report into accountants and auditors may also like our accounting and finance guide, which deals with sites for cautious, detail-minded readers.
On Northern Kentucky
Should we build a separate site for Northern Kentucky?
Almost never. One site with a strong Kentucky page is easier to keep accurate, keeps all your search history in one place, and costs half as much to maintain over the years. Two thin sites mostly end up competing with each other.