North Northamptonshire is a cluster of mid-sized towns within a few miles of each other — Kettering, Corby, Wellingborough, Rushden, Burton Latimer, Desborough and Rothwell — and businesses routinely serve several of them while naming only one. That is a straightforward loss, because each town searches separately and the competition in each is thin.
Naming every town you genuinely cover is the highest-return change available to most businesses here.
Shoe and leather heritage
Kettering shares Northampton's footwear and leather history, and some of that manufacturing base remains alongside a wider engineering and light industrial economy. Businesses selling into it are dealing with technical buyers who assess capability and certification rather than searching by town.
Distribution is the modern economy
The A14 and the surrounding warehousing have made logistics a major local employer, with the service economy around it — vehicle maintenance, industrial cleaning, racking, staffing, security. As elsewhere in that sector, the buyer is an operations manager and the map pack contributes very little.
Local government reorganisation matters here
Northamptonshire was split into two unitary authorities, which weakened the county as a search term and made the town names comparatively stronger. Anyone still targeting Northamptonshire generally is aiming at something that means less than it used to.
Competition is light but not absent
Difficulty for Kettering terms is moderate rather than negligible, reflecting a reasonably active local business scene. The fundamentals still carry most of the distance, and naming the surrounding towns usually matters more than anything advanced.