Revamping your trade business online

For a trade, almost all of it comes down to the map pack and the phone. A complete Google Business Profile with the right primary category, the service areas you genuinely cover, real photographs of finished work, and a steady drip of reviews will out-perform a prettier website that has none of that. After that it is service pages for the jobs you want more of, rather than one page listing everything you do.

You will get calls from a profile alone, and plenty of trades do. But the profile is where you are compared, and a customer choosing between three plumbers will click through to see whether you look like a real business. The website is also what lets you rank for the specific jobs and areas the profile cannot cover on its own. The two work together, which is why we do both.

With a real page for each area, not a list of town names in the footer. That page needs something genuinely specific to say: jobs you have done there, the postcodes you cover, how quickly you can get there. Google has been discounting thin location pages for years, and stuffing thirty towns onto one page is the fastest way to look like everyone else.

Ask at the moment the customer is happiest, which is usually when the job is finished and working, not three days later by email. A card you can hand over on the doorstep converts far better than a link in an invoice, which is why our sister company Tap To Review makes them. Review recency matters as well as count, so a slow steady flow beats a burst.

Yes, and it behaves differently to everything else. Emergency searches convert in seconds, on distance, rating and whether someone answers. They deserve their own pages and, if you run ads, their own campaigns, because the person searching at eleven at night is not comparing quotes, they are calling the first business that looks like it will turn up.

Profile and listing fixes often show inside the first few weeks, because you are removing something that was holding you back. Ranking consistently for competitive terms across several towns is a matter of months. If someone promises you page one in a fortnight for a trade in a busy area, they are describing an ad, not SEO.