SEO for Trade Businesses

What SEO is worth to a trade business — and what it isn't

SEO is slow, compounding and free apart from your time. That combination makes it very different from paid ads, which are fast, expensive and stop the moment you stop paying. Neither is better; they do different jobs. Ads buy you enquiries this week. SEO builds a source of enquiries that keeps arriving in eighteen months without a monthly invoice.

Two honest limits before you spend a weekend on it:

• Your listing usually matters more than your site. For urgent local searches — emergency plumber near me — a big part of the results page is the map. That's your Google Business Profile doing the work, not your website, and it's free and quicker to fix. Do that first: Google Business Profile for tradies covers it properly, and this guide assumes it's already done.
• It takes months, not weeks. Nothing you do this Saturday shows up next Saturday. That's an argument for starting, not for skipping it, but it's also why anyone guaranteeing rankings by a date should be treated carefully.

It's also worth saying plainly: nobody outside the search engines knows exactly how results are ordered, the rules change, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. What doesn't change is the underlying goal — a searcher wanting a clear, trustworthy, relevant answer. Build for that and you're insulated from most of the churn.

Start from the searches you actually want

Before you write anything, work out what you want to be found for. There are only three ingredients, and you already know two of them: the services you want more of, the areas you'll actually drive to, and the words your customers use — which are often not the words you'd use.

That last one catches nearly everyone. You call it a switchboard upgrade; they search for fuse box replacement. You call it hydronic heating; they search for what they saw at a friend's house. Your pages have to be in their language, with your terminology alongside it.

• Write down what people actually say on the phone. A fortnight of noting the words in the first sentence of each enquiry beats any keyword tool.
• Look at your Google Business Profile insights for the searches that surfaced your listing.
• Connect Google Search Console to your site. It's free and it shows what people searched before they landed on you — including the things you rank for by accident and could own properly.
• Use the search box itself. Type your service and your city and read the autocomplete suggestions and the "people also ask" questions. That's a free list of what your customers want to know.
• Be honest about intent. Someone searching how to fix a running toilet wants to do it themselves. Someone searching toilet repair Brisbane wants to hire you. The second is worth ten of the first.

One page per service, one page per area you really serve

This is the structural part, and it's where most trade websites fall down. A single page listing everything you do — plumbing, gasfitting, drainage, hot water, roofing, blocked drains, renovations — gives a search engine nothing specific to match against any of them. A page per service gives it something to match, and gives the customer something that reads like it was written about their problem.

• A page for each service you want more of. Not everything you're capable of — the handful you actually want the phone to ring about.
• A page for each area you genuinely serve, if you cover several distinct regions. Real content on each: the suburbs inside it, the jobs you've done there, response times, anything specific to that area's housing stock or requirements.
• Don't build sixty near-identical suburb pages. Templated pages with the suburb swapped in are the oldest trick in local SEO, they read badly to a human, and they're exactly the pattern search engines have spent years learning to discount. Ten genuine area pages beat sixty generated ones.
• One topic per page. If two pages cover the same service, they compete with each other and neither wins. Merge them into the better one.

Three things decide whether a service page ranks, and all three are about answering the question properly: a heading that names the service and the area, so the reader and the search engine both know what the page is in one line; what the job actually involves, in plain English, because the customer usually doesn't know what's about to happen and explaining it is most of the trust; and something honest about how the pricing works. You don't have to publish a price list — explaining what drives the cost and how you quote answers the real question.

The rest of what belongs on the page — photos of your own work, reviews, licence numbers, a tappable phone number — is the furniture every page on the site needs rather than anything specific to ranking. A website for your trade business covers that, and the routes to getting a site built without spending three months on it.

Content that earns its place

The advice to "blog regularly" is where most trade websites go to die. Nobody running a business off the tools is publishing weekly, and thin posts written to fill a schedule do nothing for anyone. Six genuinely useful pages that stay up for years will out-earn sixty rushed ones.

The reliable source of subjects is your own phone. Every question you answer more than once a month is a page:

• "How much does it usually cost to…" — the most-searched question in every trade, and most competitors dodge it. You don't have to publish prices; explaining what makes a job cheap or expensive is more useful and builds far more trust.
• "Do I need a permit / certificate / compliance sign-off for this?" — high intent, and answering it well positions you as the person who knows.
• "Should I repair it or replace it?" — genuinely helpful, and it leads naturally to a quote either way.
• "How long will it take and what happens on the day?" — access, water off, mess, whether they need to be home.
• Job write-ups. The problem, the photos, what you did, how long it took. They're quick to produce, they're unique to you, and they double as proof on the service page.

Two rules keep this from becoming a chore. Write for the customer standing in the hallway, not for a search engine — if it reads like it was written to hit a phrase, it will read that way to them too. And go back and update the good pages rather than always adding new ones; an existing page that's earning is worth more attention than another new one that isn't.

The basics you control, and the link question

You don't need to become a technical SEO. There's a short list of things that make a site work for readers, and they're the same things that make it legible to a search engine.

• It has to work on a phone. Most of your visitors are on one, often outdoors, often in a hurry. Look at every page on your own phone before you look at anything else.
• It has to load quickly. Huge unresized photos straight off a camera are the usual culprit. Google's PageSpeed Insights is free and will tell you what's slow.
• Every page needs its own title and description. They're what shows in the results list, so write them for a person deciding whether to click.
• Descriptive headings and real text. Not a page whose entire content is inside an image or a video.
• Link your own pages together. A service page should link to the related service and to the relevant area page. It helps people, and it makes the structure of your site obvious.
• Name your image files sensibly and write a short alt description of what's in them. It takes seconds and it's the accessible thing to do regardless.
• HTTPS, and one address. Your site should load securely and resolve to a single version rather than several. Whoever hosts it can sort this in an afternoon — see domains and getting online.

Links from other sites are the part everyone asks about. The ones worth having are the ones you'd want anyway: your trade association, your suppliers' installer directories, the manufacturer whose product you're accredited to fit, the local sports club you sponsor, the builder you sub for, your chamber of commerce, and the mainstream local directories. Consistent name, address and phone number across all of them, matching your Google Business Profile exactly.

How to tell whether it's working

Rankings are the wrong scoreboard. They move around, they're different for every person searching depending on where they are, and a first-place ranking for something nobody hires you for is worth nothing. Judge it on enquiries, and then on jobs.

1. Set up Search Console and check it monthly. It's free. Look at which pages are getting shown, what people searched, and which of those searches you're nearly ranking for — those are your best next pages.
2. Ask every caller how they found you. Then write it down somewhere you'll look again. Analytics can't see the person who searched, read your page, and rang you off the top of the results.
3. Track enquiries by service and area, not just totals. The point of building the pages was to get more of a specific kind of work. Whether that happened is the actual measure.
4. Give it two quarters before you judge it. A new page usually does nothing for weeks and then starts to move. Judging it after a month tells you nothing except that a month has passed.

If you're going to pay someone, hire on the same basis. An agency that reports on rankings and "impressions" is reporting on effort. An agency that can tell you how many enquiries and how many jobs came from the work is reporting on results — and that comparison only works if you know what an enquiry is worth to you.

Frequently asked questions