Locators — forklift hire rankings across Dorset and the South

The client

Locators is a forklift hire and warehouse equipment supplier serving Dorset and the wider South — from everyday forklift rental and Toyota and Manitou machines to warehouse racking, mesh partitioning and access equipment. Being found for hire and equipment searches across multiple counties is central to keeping machines out on hire.

The challenge

Forklift hire is a competitive, county-by-county search market. Locators needed to rank not just in Dorset but across Berkshire, Wiltshire, Hampshire and into Southampton — and several important city and county terms, along with competitive head terms like ‘all terrain forklifts’, were sitting outside the positions that actually win enquiries.

What we did

We strengthened the county and city landing structure so each key area had a genuine, relevant page, sharpened local relevance and Google Business Profile signals, and built depth on the equipment and service pages. The aim was to compete properly for hire searches across the whole service area, not just the home county.

The results

Over six months (January to July 2026), Locators climbed across its priority forklift and warehouse terms. The county and city terms the campaign targeted:

The competitive head terms are a longer game, and this is where six months of work shows as progress rather than arrival — every one of these is still climbing:

‘Rent forklifts’ and ‘forklift trucks for hire’ also entered the top 100 from nowhere.

The picture is genuinely mixed, and worth saying so. Over the same window several terms outside the target set fell back — ‘electric forklift hire’, ‘Flexible Forklift Hire’ and ‘equipment hire in Dorset’ among them. A campaign that concentrates on county and city hire terms will tend to do that, and we would rather show it than publish a table of only the wins. The terms that moved are the ones the work was pointed at.

What this does and does not show. These are search positions and traffic figures, taken from Analytics and rank tracking over the same six-month window. They are not revenue figures. Rankings are the part we control and can evidence; what they are worth commercially depends on margins, conversion and capacity, which sit with the client.

What transferred

Locators is the closest of our three case studies to a classic service-area business: the equipment travels to the customer, and the catchment spans several counties. That makes the lessons the most portable.

• A real page per area that earns one. Berkshire, Wiltshire, Hampshire, Middlesex and Southampton each got a genuine page rather than a template with the county name swapped in. That distinction is the difference between ranking and being treated as doorway pages.
• City terms are winnable; head terms are a longer game. ‘Forklift hire in Southampton’ reached #2 in six months. The bare head term ‘forklift hire’ moved 47 places and is still only at #42 — real progress, but nowhere near done. Expecting both on the same timescale is the most common planning mistake in this kind of campaign.
• Proximity still applies to service-area businesses. Ranking across counties means earning it area by area, not setting a wider service radius — the same constraint every trade runs into.

If you hire out equipment or travel to customers across a region, this is the pattern that applies to you: fewer, better area pages, built where you can evidence genuine local work.