Web design / Cleveland, OH
East Side, West Side
The Cuyahoga River splits Cleveland in two, and people on each side tend to stay put. Someone in Lakewood or Westlake can go years without a reason to drive to Mentor, and plenty of Shaker Heights residents treat the West Side as another city. Locals joke about it. They also shop that way, looking for a dentist, a contractor or a dinner spot on their own side.
Your site should make your side obvious in the first screen: the suburb, and if it helps, the landmark people use for directions. A plumbing company that covers both halves should write separate pages for them, because the suburbs differ, the housing differs and the drive times differ. Stuffing every suburb’s name into the footer achieves almost nothing. A paragraph about the towns you really serve, and the jobs you typically do there, achieves a lot.
Hospitals, and the businesses around them
Cleveland Clinic’s main campus and University Hospitals in University Circle shape the East Side economy, and each pulls a ring of smaller businesses along with it: private practices, physical therapists, billing firms, staffing agencies, apartments marketed to residents and nurses. Most of those sites are written for the wrong reader. They sound like a brochure for a board meeting, while the real visitor is a patient with a question at 10 p.m., or a hospital manager checking whether a vendor is legitimate.
For a practice, that means plain language, credentials near the top, insurance details that are current, and booking that works one-handed. Our medical and dental guide gets into specifics. Downtown law firms face a similar test, since the visitor is anxious and wants to know quickly whether you handle their kind of case; see our law firm guide.
Snowbelt contractors
East of the city, in Lake and Geauga counties and on into Ashtabula, lake-effect snow comes off Lake Erie in amounts the West Side seldom matches. Contractors out there effectively run two businesses: roofing, decks and paving in summer, then plowing and emergency repairs once winter sets in. The site should match whichever season it is. We’d set up the homepage so the owner can switch the lead service in a few minutes from a phone, and so the emergency number is impossible to miss for someone searching in a hurry.
Lorain and Medina counties, to the west and south, have their own mix of commuters, farms and factories, and their residents search by town: Elyria, Avon, Brunswick, Medina. If you work in them, name them.
Remote, with Eastern Time calls
There’s no Cleveland office, East Side or West, so nobody has to pick a side to meet us. The work happens over Eastern Time calls and shared review links, and by launch you’ll be editing the site yourself. If your site looks fine but nobody finds it, technical SEO might be a better first step than new web design, and we’ll say so.
Two questions about Cleveland sites
Should a West Side business try to rank on the East Side too?
Usually not. Rank where you’ll happily drive. Spreading thin across the whole county tends to produce weaker pages everywhere, and customers can tell from your address that you’re forty minutes away.
We’re near the Clinic. Can we mention it on our site?
As a location reference, yes; people use it for directions all the time. Just avoid wording that implies an affiliation you don’t have.