SEO for tradies: how to get found when someone needs a job done

The short answer: the map pack does most of the work

For a trade business, SEO mostly means winning the map pack: the three listings Google shows under a map when someone searches "electrician near me". That block takes the bulk of the clicks on urgent local searches, and it is driven far more by your Google Business Profile than by your website.

Which is good news if you run a two-van operation. You do not need forty blog posts or a content team. You need a finished profile, a page for each service you actually want to sell, a website that loads on a phone, and a steady trickle of reviews.

Google publishes exactly what influences local ranking, and it comes down to three things: relevance (does your listing match what was searched), distance (how close you are to the person searching), and prominence (how well known and well reviewed you are). You cannot move your workshop closer to every suburb. You can move the other two.

This is also why most tradie SEO advice misses. It talks about backlinks and blogging while the profile sits half-filled, with no service list, no service areas, and one photo taken in 2019.

Finish the Google Business Profile properly, then stop tinkering

This is the highest-return hour in tradie marketing, and most of it is data entry. Work through the list once, do it properly, and you are ahead of a lot of your competition.

• Primary category. Pick the one that matches what you want to be called about. "Electrician" and "Electrical installation service" are different categories and they rank for different searches. Add secondary categories for the rest of what you do.
• Services. List them individually: switchboard upgrades, ceiling fan installation, safety switch testing. Each one is a phrase somebody types. An empty services list is a free ranking signal you are not using.
• Service areas. If you travel to customers, set your service areas and hide your street address. Google sets out the rules for this, and a home address on a listing helps nobody. We covered the detail in running a Google Business Profile without an address.
• Hours, including the honest ones. If you take emergency calls at 11pm, say so. If you do not answer on Sundays, do not claim you do. Ranking well for a call you never pick up is a bad outcome dressed as a good one.
• Photos of real jobs. Before and after, the van, the team, the finished switchboard. Not stock images of somebody else’s toolbox. Add a few every month rather than thirty at once.
• The phone number that actually rings. A mobile you carry beats a landline in an office nobody sits in.

Once it is complete, leave it alone apart from photos, posts and review replies. There is a full walkthrough in our guide to optimizing a Google Business Profile.

One page per service, and suburb pages only where you really work

Your website supports the profile and picks up the searches the map pack does not answer. The structure that works is boring and effective: one page for every service you want to be called about, written in the words your customers use.

Not one "Services" page listing fourteen things in a bullet list. A hot water page. A blocked drains page. A rewiring page. Each with the problem described, what you do about it, what it typically involves, and a phone number.

Suburb pages are where trades get into trouble. A genuinely useful suburb page has something specific on it: jobs you have done there, the local housing stock you deal with, response times, a photo from that area. Twenty pages generated from a template with the suburb name swapped out is the pattern Google warns about in its guidance on people-first content, and it has been a losing play for years.

Five suburb pages with real jobs on them will out-rank fifty pages where the only thing that changes is the suburb name. The template is easy to spot, and easy to ignore.

Start with the three or four suburbs that already send you the most work, and the two you want more of. If you cannot write a paragraph about a suburb that is true and specific, you do not need a page for it yet.

Reviews are the lever most trades leave sitting there

Reviews feed the prominence part of local ranking, and they do the convincing once someone is looking at three listings side by side. Most trade businesses collect them by accident, which means slowly.

The fix is a habit, not a campaign. Ask at the moment the customer is happiest, which is usually while you are packing up and the hot water is working again. A short text with a direct link, sent the same day, does better than an email three weeks later.

• Ask in person first, then send the link. "Would you mind leaving us a quick review? I will text you the link." Consent, then convenience.
• Never buy them or run incentives. It breaches Google’s policies, and Australian consumer law takes a dim view of it too. One suspended listing costs more than fifty reviews are worth.
• Reply to all of them, including the bad one. A calm, specific reply to a complaint is read by every future customer. Defensive paragraphs are read just as carefully, and land differently.
• Encourage detail. "He replaced the switchboard and cleaned up after himself" is worth more than "great job", because it contains the words other people search for.

If every review on your listing says "great service, highly recommend", you have collected compliments rather than reasons to call you. Lovely to read, not much use in a shortlist of three.

The website parts that matter, and the ones that do not

A trade website has one job: make it obvious what you do, where you do it, and how to reach you. Most of the money wasted on tradie websites goes into things that affect neither ranking nor enquiries.

What matters: a phone number visible without scrolling, on every page. Fast loading on a phone on mobile data, because that is where your customers are. Real photos of your work. Your service area written in text, not only pinned on an embedded map. A short form for the people who will not ring. And LocalBusiness structured data so search engines can read your details cleanly.

What does not matter: a video header, a custom animation, a blog you will never write, and "SEO packages" that bolt a thousand words of filler onto your homepage.

We looked at a business once where the rankings and the traffic were fine and the enquiries were not. The site looked good, but the offer was buried, it loaded slowly on mobile, and the phone number was an image in the footer. Fixing the website did more for the pipeline than any new campaign would have. Our breakdown of what a tradie website costs covers what is worth paying for, and what is not.

When SEO is the wrong first spend for a tradie

Do not start SEO if you need work this month. Local SEO usually takes three to six months to move, longer in a competitive city. If the calendar is empty in a fortnight, that timeline does not help you. Search ads put you in front of people searching today, and you can switch them off the week you fill up. Our guide to Google Ads for tradies covers the setup, and how to set a PPC budget covers the number.

A few other times to keep your money in your pocket:

• You are booked out six weeks ahead. More enquiries at the same price is not a win, it is a longer waiting list and more people you have to let down. Put your prices up first and see what happens.
• Your Google Business Profile is not finished. Paying an agency for link building while your services list sits empty is paying for the roof before the slab.
• Nobody answers the phone. Missed calls are the biggest leak in most trade businesses, and no amount of ranking fixes it. A call-back habit, or a simple answering service, will earn more than a year of SEO.
• You only want one type of job. If you want commercial contracts and not domestic callouts, "emergency plumber near me" traffic is the wrong traffic. Target the searches that match the work you actually want.

One more thing worth knowing: paid search can tell you in a fortnight what SEO takes six months to find out. If you are unsure whether "bathroom renovation" or "bathroom waterproofing" is where your money is, run both as ads, read the search terms report, then point your SEO at whichever one converted. It is far cheaper to learn that with a small ad budget than with half a year of content.

If the basics above are done and you want someone to take the rest off your plate, that is what our local SEO service is for. If they are not done, do those first. They cost nothing.

Frequently asked questions