Kerbsmith is me and Ibrahim, working out of Croydon, building and looking after websites for plumbers, electricians, heating engineers, roofers, locksmiths and landscapers. Mostly South London: Croydon, Sutton, Bromley, Merton, Lambeth. That is where I can knock on a door rather than send an email.
Plenty of web people will tell you that hiring locally is essential. It mostly isn't: the work happens over WhatsApp and it would happen over WhatsApp if I were in Leeds. Three things it does change:
Photos and prices are the thing that stalls every build; trades hate typing them out. If you are inside about half an hour of Croydon I will come and take them off you at a kitchen table, which is usually the difference between a site going live in a fortnight and it sitting in drafts for two months.
When you say you'll do Purley and Coulsdon but not south of the M25, or that half your work is Victorian terraces off London Road, I know what that means without you drawing me a map. It makes the service-area setup and the copy on your site faster and less wrong.
This is the real one. We are not a brand with a stock photo; there are two of us, in one borough, and trades in South London talk to each other. That is a much stronger guarantee of us behaving than any badge we could buy.
Every agency that has ever cold-called you implied they could put you at the top of Google. Here is the sentence they were hoping you would not read, from Google's own help page on how local results are ranked:
“There's no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google.”
Google says local ranking rests on three signals, and its own words for them are below. Here is what I can and cannot do about each one.
Because Google's spam policy names the alternative directly, under two headings:
I hold client sites to a swap test: if you can swap the town name and the page still reads fine, it is not a real page and it does not ship. It would be incoherent to enforce that rule on a plumber's site and then publish six near-identical Sutton, Bromley, Purley, Coulsdon and Thornton Heath pages on my own. There will be a second local page here when there is a real named client in that town to put on it.
There's no portal and no ticket number. This is a real price change, from the first message to live on the site.
Anything on the site: prices, photos, a new service area.
A preview link comes back before anything goes live, so you see it before your customers do.
A quick reply signs it off. That is the whole approval process.
Same day on Growth and AI Front Desk. Within two working days on Sorted.
jd-heating.co.uk updated
The same number handles changes, questions and “can you just…” requests. There is nowhere else to send them, and nobody they get passed on to.
No. I build for trades anywhere in the UK, and the demo sites cover businesses from Reading to Cardiff. But I am based in Croydon, most of my door-knocking is South London, and if you are inside about a half-hour drive I will come and see you rather than doing it all over WhatsApp. That is the only thing being local actually changes.
Nobody can promise that, and Google says so itself: “There’s no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google.” Local results are ranked on relevance, distance and prominence. Distance is decided by where the person searching is standing, which neither of us controls. What I can do is the relevance half properly: the Google Business Profile, a page for each service you sell, your details identical everywhere. The rest is your reviews and your reputation, and I would rather say so than pretend otherwise.
I can, but I will not build twelve of them from a spreadsheet, because that is the pattern Google names as doorway abuse and it can take the whole site down with it. The rule I use on client sites is a swap test: if I can swap the town name and the page still reads fine, it is not a real page. Two to four proper area pages, each about somewhere you genuinely turn up, beat twelve templated ones every time.
No. Most of the work happens over WhatsApp and that suits most trades better than a meeting. But I am a real person in a real borough rather than a form on a website, and if you would rather hand over your photos and prices at a kitchen table in Croydon than type them, that is easy to arrange.
Sorted is £79 a month, Growth £139, AI Front Desk £219, with 15% off if you pay yearly. No setup fee, no minimum term, cancel with one WhatsApp message. Every price is on the pricing page rather than behind a phone call.
More detail on the money side: Kerbsmith plans and prices. Want to see the work? Six demo trade sites.
Tell me your trade and your town. You'll get back what I'd build and exactly what it costs, usually the same day.
And if you don't reply, I don't chase.
Get in touch
Fastest on WhatsApp, usually same day.