Most English regions have an obvious centre. The East Midlands does not — Nottingham, Leicester and Derby are of broadly similar size, forty minutes apart, and none dominates the others. Regional search terms here are correspondingly weak, and the effort belongs at city level.
Three cities, three characters
Nottingham has the largest professional services and retail centre of the three, with a substantial student population that shifts demand sharply through the academic year. Leicester is the most demographically diverse city in the region with a strong independent business base. Derby is smaller but has an unusually concentrated engineering and aerospace economy, which makes its business-to-business market disproportionately valuable.
Their counties — Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire and Derbyshire — each have a distinct secondary tier of towns worth separate consideration.
Lincolnshire is a different problem entirely
Lincolnshire is one of the largest and most sparsely populated counties in England, with Lincoln, Boston, Grantham, Skegness and Grimsby separated by substantial distances. A business claiming to cover Lincolnshire is claiming a great deal, and would usually do better naming three or four towns it genuinely serves.
Logistics is the regional economy
The region sits at the centre of the UK’s distribution network — Magna Park, the Daventry corridor, East Midlands Airport — and a substantial share of local businesses serve that sector. Those are business-to-business relationships won on capability, accreditation and tender processes rather than on local search, and the strategy should reflect that.
The Peak District and the rural edge
Derbyshire’s northern half sits in the Peak District, where tourism, holiday lets and hospitality dominate and where seasonal demand swings are severe. Businesses there have more in common with rural Cumbria or north Wales than with Derby twenty miles away.