Local SEO for tradespeople: what actually works

What Google is doing when someone searches

Someone types 'emergency electrician near me' into a phone. What comes back is two different things stacked on top of each other. At the top, a small map with three businesses pinned on it. Underneath, the ordinary blue links. Different systems produce those two blocks, and for a one-van business the map is the one worth winning.

Google has said in public what it weighs for the map: relevance, distance and prominence. Relevance is whether your listing matches what was typed. Distance is how far you are from wherever the searcher is standing. Prominence is how well known the business appears to be — reviews, mentions, links, the ordinary evidence that you exist and have done this before.

Distance is the part people find hardest to accept, because it moves with the customer. Someone in Otley and someone in Ilkley type the same eight words and get a different three, and neither set is wrong. You cannot rank first across a whole county from one van. What you can do is dominate the few miles around home and extend outwards on the strength of everything else.

The blue links below the map behave more like the rest of the web, and that is where your own pages earn their keep. The map gets you onto the shortlist. Someone ringing round for three quotes will click through and read before they call. The site decides whether you stay on the list.

The Business Profile is most of the job

If you do one thing this week, do this one. A Google Business Profile is free, it takes an afternoon to fill in properly, and it is the only way into the map. Verification is often a video call now — you walk round the van, show the tools, show a headed invoice — and it can take a week or two to come through. Start it before you need it.

The field doing the most work is the primary category. There is a fixed list and you choose one. 'Electrician' and 'Electrical installation service' are not the same box and they surface for different searches. Pick the one that describes the work you want more of, not the one that covers everything you are capable of. Secondary categories exist for the rest.

Then set a service area rather than a shopfront. Most tradespeople work from home and would rather not publish the address, which is fine — you can hide it and list the towns you travel to instead. What you cannot do is invent an address in a town you fancy ranking in. Google removes those, and sometimes takes the whole listing with it.

• Primary category chosen for the work you want, not the work you can do.
• Services listed one by one — 'consumer unit replacement', 'EICR for landlords', 'EV charger installation' — each with a sentence under it.
• Service area set to the towns you genuinely drive to on a normal week.
• Hours that are true, including whether you actually answer the phone at eleven at night.
• Photographs of your own finished work, added now and then rather than forty in one afternoon.
• Links that point at the matching page on your site — the boiler page, not the home page.

Note. The primary category is the field that matters most on the whole profile. Change it and you change which searches you turn up in at all. Everything else is smaller than that.

One page per job you want more of

Your home page cannot rank for everything and should not try. Someone searching 'boiler not firing up' and someone searching 'bathroom fit-out' are at completely different points in their week. Give them different pages.

Name each page the way a customer names the job, not the way the trade does. Nobody searches for 'domestic electrical services'. They search for 'fuse box keeps tripping' or 'EICR for a rental'. The heading wants to sit close to the words being typed, because that is the match being made.

Then put something on the page. Two paragraphs and a phone number will not hold anyone. Write what the job involves, roughly how long it takes, what it tends to cost as a range, what you need access to, and what usually goes wrong. That reads like someone who has done it two hundred times, which is the point — and it happens to be the sort of page that ranks.

Resist making forty of them. Six or eight pages you can write properly will beat a page for every line on your price list, most of which would end up three sentences long and near enough identical.

Town pages: worth doing, easy to do badly

The idea is sound. If you cover eight towns, a page each gives Google something specific to match against 'plumber in Thatcham', and gives the customer the reassurance that you actually come out that far.

The bad version is one page written once and copied, town name swapped. Everyone has seen them. 'Looking for a reliable plumber in Thatcham? Our team of experienced plumbers in Thatcham...' Google has been discounting that pattern for well over a decade, and it is embarrassing to be caught with, which matters more than the ranking does.

A town page earns its place when it says something true that could only be said about that town. A job you did there and what it turned out to be. How long the drive is and whether that changes the call-out fee. The parking on the terraced streets by the station. Hard water, if the water is hard. A run of houses from the same decade with the same thing wrong in the loft. Two specific paragraphs beat six vague ones.

Note. Four town pages with something real on them will out-perform thirty copies of the same page. Every time.

Reviews do more than you think

Reviews feed prominence, which is one of the three things the map weighs. They also do the persuading once someone is looking at you. Those are different jobs and they respond to different things — the ranking cares how many and how recent, the customer cares what they say.

The hard part is asking. Nobody wants to and everyone means to. The version that works is asking in person at the door, while you are packing up and the heating is back on, then sending the link by text before you pull away. Google gives you a short review link inside the profile. Save it as a keyboard shortcut on your phone so it is three taps rather than a hunt.

Reply to all of them, briefly. A one-line thank you is enough. A poor review answered calmly — what happened, what you did about it — reads better to the next customer than a run of five stars with nothing underneath. Arguing reads worse than the original complaint.

• Ask at the door, while the job is fresh and they are pleased with you.
• Send the link the same day. The next morning is already late.
• Ask them to mention the job and the town. 'Sorted our leak in Newbury' is worth more than 'great service'.
• Never buy reviews and never write them yourself. It is visible, and they get removed.
• Do not offer money off in exchange for one. Against Google's rules, and it shows in the wording.

Get your name, address and phone straight

NAP is the acronym you will hear: name, address, phone. The rule is that all three should be written identically everywhere they appear, because Google is trying to work out whether the plumber on Yell, the plumber on Facebook and the plumber on the website are one business or three. Small differences make that harder than it needs to be.

Identical means identical. 'J. Marsh Plumbing Ltd' and 'J Marsh Plumbing' are different strings of characters. An old mobile on a directory you forgot you joined, the address from before you moved, a trading name from before you incorporated — those are the usual culprits, and they are usually free to fix once you find them. Put your own phone number in quotes into Google and see what comes back.

As for which listings to bother with: the free ones with real traffic, and anything that proves you are qualified. Trade body registers are the genuinely useful ones — Gas Safe, NICEIC, TrustMark, whichever governs your work — because a careful customer will check there anyway. Paid lead sites like Checkatrade or Rated People are a decision about buying leads, not an SEO decision. Judge them on whether the leads turn into work.

• Bing Places and Apple Business Connect. Free, ten minutes each, and Apple is what every iPhone map lookup uses.
• Your trade body's public register, with the details written exactly as they are on the site.
• Facebook, if you will actually use it. A page last posted to in 2023 is worse than no page.
• The chamber of commerce, the junior football team whose shirts you paid for, the village hall you rewired. Real links from real local sites.
• Bulk 'citation building' packages: skip them. They fill directories nobody has ever visited.

What is a waste of your time

Local SEO has a poor name in the trades, and the reason is that there is more money in selling the complicated version than the plain one. Some of what gets sold does nothing. A little of it does harm.

The things that do work are dull and mostly free. A profile filled in properly. Pages that say something specific about the job and the town. Reviews you remembered to ask for. Details that match wherever they appear. Two or three evenings to set up, then a few minutes here and there to keep it honest.

Common questions

How long before this makes the phone ring?

The profile can start putting you in the map within a couple of weeks of verification, sooner if you are in a quiet patch. Pages and reviews build more slowly — think months. Anyone promising results in a fortnight is selling you the fortnight, not the results.

Do I have to put my home address on the internet?

No. Set the profile up as a service-area business and hide the address. Google still needs it for verification but it will not be shown publicly. What you must not do is list an address you do not work from.

Is it worth paying someone to do this for me?

It can be, if they tell you what they will do and you can go and check it afterwards. Most of the work here is two or three evenings once, then asking for reviews. Be careful with a monthly fee that has nothing named against it.

There are thirty plumbers in my town. Can I still rank?

Locally, yes. You are not competing with all thirty everywhere at once — you compete near wherever each customer happens to be standing. Owning the two or three miles around you, with steady reviews, is realistic and it is plenty of work for one van.

Should I make a page for every town in my county?

No. Make one for each town you would genuinely drive to tomorrow, and write something true about each. A long list of towns you have never worked in reads as filler to customers, and Google treats it the same way.