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SEO for tradesmen
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Most SEO advice is written for shops that sell things online. A trade business does not. It needs the right jobs, in the right places, arriving as calls and quote requests you can actually count.
The gap between a trade business and an online shop is bigger than it looks. A shop wants traffic, because a fraction of any traffic buys. You want six calls from the right postcodes and none from three counties away. That difference changes what you should work on, and it changes the order.
Start with the map, not the website
For most trade searches, the results that get clicked are the three businesses in the map pack, not the blue links underneath. That block is fed by your Google Business Profile, and it is the single highest return thing you can fix, because it is largely a completeness exercise rather than a competition against bigger sites.
Fill in every field, not the ones that are quick. Pick the primary category that matches the job you most want, add the secondary ones that genuinely apply, and set it up as a service area business covering the places you will actually travel to rather than publishing a yard address you do not want visitors at. Put real photos on it, of your work and your vans, and keep adding them.
If you do one thing from this page, do the profile. It is free, it takes an afternoon, and it sits above every website result on the searches that matter most to you.
One page per job, not one page for everything
The most common structural mistake on trade websites is a single services page listing nine things. Somebody searching for car park resurfacing and somebody searching for a dropped kerb are not the same customer, they are not worth the same money, and they will not both be satisfied by a paragraph each.
Smart Surfacing Solutions, whose site we redesigned, runs a page for each job it wants: road surfacing, driveways, car parks, school playgrounds, road repairs, general groundwork and dropped kerbs. That is not a content strategy so much as an honest reflection of how the work is bought. Each page can then say what the job involves, what it costs to think about, and what it looks like finished.
Reviews are the ranking factor you can actually control
You cannot make Google like your website more this week. You can ask the customer whose driveway you finished on Friday to leave a review, and that genuinely moves the map pack as well as the decision. The trades that do this well have a habit, not a campaign: the review is asked for at the moment the customer is happiest, which is the day the job is done and the site is left tidy.
Put the reviews on the site as well as leaving them on the profile. Named, specific reviews about a real job read as true in a way that a star average never does.
If you cannot measure the enquiry, you cannot tell which half worked
This is where most trade SEO quietly fails. The reporting arrives full of sessions, bounce rates and impressions, none of which pays a wage. What you need to know is how many quote requests came in, which searches produced them, and what a job from that search is worth to you.
That means the form submission and the phone tap have to be recorded as conversions and attributed back to the search, with the consent handling that has to sit around it. Without that you are choosing next month's spend from a number that does not describe your business. It is the first thing we set up on a contractor site, before any of the search work.
Speed, because the phone is the office
Most of this traffic is a phone, often on a bad signal, often outside. A page that takes six seconds to paint has lost the call before it arrives, and no amount of ranking fixes that. Test your own site on mobile data rather than the office wifi, and be honest about what you find.
What not to buy
- Monthly directory bundles. A handful of the major listings are worth having for consistency of your name, address and phone number. A subscription to fifty that would never send you a customer is not.
- Guaranteed rankings. Nobody controls the results, and the guarantee is always quietly attached to a term nobody searches.
- A page for every town within eighty miles. Google has discounted near duplicate area pages for years, and they make the site worse to read.
- A rebuild you do not need. If the site ranks and converts, the money is better spent on the profile, the reviews and the measurement.
The order we would work in
Google Business Profile first, because it is free and it is above everything else. Then measurement, so the next decision is made on evidence. Then the service pages for the jobs you most want, one at a time, best paying first. Then reviews as a standing habit rather than a push. The website rebuild, if it is needed at all, comes after you know which pages earn.
If you want the build side of this rather than the search side, we have written that up separately in web design for trades.
