SEO for Tradesmen: Getting Found for Local Jobs
Most tradesmen we speak to got their work the same way for years: word of mouth, a mate’s recommendation, the sign on the van. That still works. The problem is that the moment a boiler packs in or a fuse board starts tripping, the person with the problem doesn’t ask a neighbour — they pull out their phone and search. If you’re not there when they look, the job goes to whoever is.
The good news is that being there is far less complicated for a trade than it is for most businesses. You don’t need blog posts about industry trends or a marketing budget. You need Google to understand three things: which trade you do, which towns you’ll travel to, and whether anyone can vouch for you. Here’s how to sort each one.
Your address problem, and how to solve it properly
This trips up more tradesmen than anything else. You work out of your house. You do not want your home address plastered across the internet with a map pin on it. So a lot of people either skip the Google Business Profile entirely or put in a fake address, and both choices cost them work.
There’s a proper answer built into Google Business Profile: the service area business setting. You tell Google you visit customers rather than receiving them, list the towns or postcode districts you cover, and your address is hidden from the public listing. Google still knows where you are — which is what feeds the “near me” results — but nobody sees your front door.
Get this right and you can appear in the map results for the towns you actually serve. Get it wrong and you’re either invisible or, worse, showing an address that doesn’t match anything else about you. If you haven’t set your profile up yet, work through our step-by-step Google Business Profile guide first — nothing else on this page will do much until that’s done.
Be honest about the towns you cover
The temptation is to list every town within an hour’s drive on the theory that more towns means more searches. It backfires twice. Google weighs distance heavily in local results, so claiming a town forty miles away doesn’t put you in that town’s map pack — a local firm will always beat you there. And if someone there does ring, you either turn down the job or spend two hours in traffic for it.
Pick the towns you’d genuinely drive to on a Tuesday morning. Name them plainly on your website: “Electrician covering Ashford, Tenterden, Hythe and the surrounding villages.” That sentence does more for you than a page listing sixty place names, which reads as spam to a customer and to Google alike.
One page per service, not one page called “Services”
This is the single biggest website change most tradesmen can make, and it costs nothing but an afternoon.
If you’re a plumber, you probably do boiler repairs, bathroom installations, emergency leaks, radiator work and maybe power flushing. Put all five on one page titled “Services” and that page is trying to rank for five different things at once, so it ranks properly for none of them. Give each one its own page — a real page, with a heading that says what it is and a few hundred words about how you do it — and each has a chance of matching what someone typed.
It also converts better. Someone searching “emergency plumber Ashford” at eleven at night wants to land on a page about emergency call-outs, not scroll through your bathroom gallery hunting for a phone number.
| What you’re tempted to do | What actually works |
|---|---|
| One “Services” page listing everything | A page per main service, each with its own title |
| ”We offer a range of quality solutions" | "Boiler repairs and servicing in Ashford” |
| Listing 40 towns in the footer | Naming the 5–8 towns you really cover |
| Gallery of stock photos | Ten photos of jobs you actually did |
| Contact form only | Phone number visible on every page, tappable on mobile |
Photos of your own work, not stock images
Trades are one of the few businesses where photography genuinely sells the job. A customer choosing between three quotes is trying to guess which one won’t leave a mess. Twenty photos of real work — before and after, tidy pipework, a finished bathroom — answer that better than any paragraph you could write.
Take them on your phone as you go, and put them on both your website and your Google Business Profile, where fresh photos also tell Google the business is still active.
Why Checkatrade isn’t a substitute for your own site
Directory memberships have their place. They send work, especially early on, and a good rating on one is worth having. But a listing on someone else’s platform is a rented pitch, not a shop.
You don’t control it — the platform decides who appears above you, and can change the rules or the price whenever it likes. You’re shown alongside your competitors, by design, because that’s the product. And the reviews you work hard for build up the directory’s reputation, not yours.
A directory listing and a website aren’t rivals; the listing sends people somewhere, and your own site is where they should land. Use both, but own one of them.
Speed matters more for trades than for most
Think about when people search for you. Standing in a kitchen with water coming through the ceiling. In a cold house on the first frost of the year. Locked out. These are not patient, browsing moments — they’re phone-in-hand, three-seconds-and-I’ll-try-the-next-one moments.
A site that takes six seconds to load on 4G loses those jobs before it ever gets a chance. Big unoptimised photos are usually the culprit, and they’re an easy fix. Our guide to a mobile-friendly website covers the practical checks.
Reviews are your prominence
Google ranks local businesses partly on relevance and distance, which you’ve now handled, and partly on prominence — how well known and well regarded you are. For a trade, that’s reviews, and it’s the bit most competitors neglect.
Ask at the moment the customer is happiest, which is when you’ve just finished and they’re pleased. Make it two taps with a review link on your phone or a card in the van. Reply to every one. A handful a month, every month, will put you past the firm that got fifteen in 2023 and none since. There’s a full method in how to get more Google reviews, and the broader picture is in our plain-English local SEO guide.
What this costs
If you pay someone for ongoing local SEO in the UK, you’re typically looking at somewhere in the region of £300–£1,500 a month depending on scope and how competitive your patch is, with London and the bigger cities at the higher end. Those are rough figures and they vary a lot by region.
Honestly, for a one- or two-van operation in a market town, most of what’s on this page is a few evenings of your own time and costs nothing.
Here’s where we declare our interest: the website part is what we do. We build a professional site from your Google Business Profile — your services, your photos, your hours and reviews — free, on a free .co.uk domain, live within 48 hours of the domain being registered, with hosting at £24 a month including VAT as the only cost. If your profile is sorted and the website is the missing piece, claim your free website.