About the Guide
The West Yorkshire Business Guide is a curated source of information about independent businesses based or headquartered in West Yorkshire. It exists to help people find good suppliers, and to put accurate, structured information about local businesses somewhere it can be found.
- Businesses listed
- 221
- Towns covered
- 20
- Sectors covered
- 36
- Ranked lists
- 34
What the Guide covers
The Guide covers legitimate independent businesses that are based or headquartered in West Yorkshire: professional services, business services, trades and other established local firms. National chains, franchise offices, lead-generation sites and businesses with a virtual office and a headquarters elsewhere are excluded.
Coverage runs across the whole county from the start, and depth is being built in order: Halifax first, then Leeds, Skipton, Huddersfield, Bradford and the rest. Halifax is deepest because that is where our own working knowledge, relationships and evidence are strongest. The Guide is a West Yorkshire resource, not a Halifax site with a regional name, and the towns index reflects that.
Consumer categories — restaurants, shops, hospitality and general leisure — are not part of the first phase. They may be added later.
How listings work
There are two levels, and the difference between them is membership rather than merit.
A Guide listing records who a business is, what it does, where it works and what its public review score was on the day we read it. It carries no contact details and no link to the business's own site. Most of the businesses here are listed this way, and being listed at all means the Guide checked the business and thought it worth naming.
A full profile adds the phone number, the email address, the services, the people behind the business and a link straight to its own website. Full profiles are held by members of SAM Networking, the independent business network the Guide works with, whose members meet weekly across Huddersfield, Halifax, Bradford and Leeds. Members are markedRecommended or Featured wherever they appear.
What membership does not buy is a position. Where a business sits in a ranked list is decided by the Guide on the evidence, and several businesses at the top of our lists hold nothing more than a Guide listing. How we rank sets out the method.
Businesses are researched and added by the Guide. If you think a business belongs here, or you have spotted something wrong, write to[email protected].
How the Guide makes money
At the moment, it does not. There is no advertising, no paid placement and no sponsored content on the site today.
In time the Guide expects to earn from sponsorship, enhanced business profiles, clearly labelled sponsored features and, potentially, lead generation. When that starts, two things will stay true: a position in a ranking will remain editorial and unbuyable, and anything paid for will be labelled at the point it appears rather than in a disclosure page nobody reads.
How we rank sets out the selection process in full.
Who writes it
The Guide is written and researched in Halifax by people who work with West Yorkshire businesses every week, which is where the local knowledge comes from. Knowing which Calderdale contractors turn up, which accountants answer the phone in January and which agencies keep a client for a decade is not something you can research from outside.
That closeness cuts both ways, and we would rather say so. Our coverage is deepest where we know the ground best, and thinner in the parts of the county we know least.How we rank sets out where the method is weakest.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, tell us and we will correct it and say that we have. Corrections are published rather than quietly edited. Write to[email protected] with the page and the problem.