How to boost your SEO as a trade business

Most SEO advice is written for shops and software companies. A tradesman does not need most of it. You work in a handful of towns, you do a handful of jobs, and somebody either finds you when they need one of those jobs doing in one of those towns, or they do not.

So this is the short list, in the order I would do it, based on what actually moves the needle on our clients.

1. Finish the Google Business Profile. Properly.

This is first because it is free, it is fastest, and for local trade work it produces more than everything else on this list combined.

Ofcom's Online Nation report, December 2025, lists Google Maps as one of the three most used smartphone apps among UK adults, alongside WhatsApp and Facebook. That app is your Business Profile. It is not a directory listing you tick off, it is the shop front.

Finished means:

• Primary category set to what you actually are, and every secondary category that applies

• Every service listed individually, not "plumbing"

• Service areas set to the towns you genuinely cover, not the whole county

• Real photos of your own work, added regularly, not stock images

• Opening hours that are true, including whether you do emergencies

• Questions answered, including the ones you ask yourself

• Reviews arriving continuously

That last one is the whole game and most trades treat it as a one-off. A profile that got twenty reviews in 2023 and nothing since looks worse than one getting two a month.

2. Build pages for what people actually type

Not "Services". Not "About Us". One page per job, per town you actually work in.

Ofcom put Google Search at 82% of UK adults and 3 billion UK searches a month. A slice of those are somebody typing exactly what you do and where. If you have no page for it, you cannot be the answer.

The rules that matter:

• One job, one town, one page. "Boiler installation in Bridgend", not a county-wide page that mentions eleven places.

• Only towns you genuinely cover. Pages for places you would not drive to are the fastest way to look like spam.

• Real content on each. What the job involves, what it costs in that area, how long it takes, what you have actually done there. If you can swap the town name and the page still reads the same, it is not worth publishing.

• Prices if you can bear it. Pages with real numbers convert better and get quoted more by AI summaries.

This is the part that takes months to mature and then keeps paying. Start it before you think you need it.

3. Make your details identical everywhere

Name, address, phone number, opening hours. The same on your website, your Google profile, and every directory you have ever been listed on.

This is dull and it is the most commonly skipped step. Google cross-checks. So do the AI models. Disagreement makes you look unreliable to a machine that is deciding whether to name you.

Go and search your own business name and check every result. Most trades find at least one listing with an old mobile number on it.

4. Get the site quick and working on a phone

Nearly everyone finding you is on a phone, often outdoors, often in a hurry, sometimes with a leak. If your site takes six seconds and the phone number is not tappable, the rest of this is wasted.

Two things to check yourself right now: does it load fast on 4G away from your wifi, and can you ring the business in one tap from the top of the page.

5. Reviews, as a system not a favour

Ask after every job, the same way, every time. A link or a QR code, not "could you leave us a review sometime".

Reviews do three jobs at once: they push you up the local pack, they are what a customer actually reads before ringing, and they are the raw material an AI uses when it writes a sentence about whether you are any good.

6. Then measure which of it produced work

Not "the phone's been busy". Which channel produced which job and what it was worth.

Every client we take on gets this before we change anything, because the first month of real numbers almost always contradicts what the owner believed. Sometimes the answer is that the SEO is fine and the problem is that nobody answers the phone. Seven in ten people who get your voicemail leave no message.

What I would not bother with

• Buying backlinks. It is the single fastest way to get penalised and the packages sold to trades are almost all junk.

• Blogging about generic topics. "Top 5 signs your boiler needs replacing" written by AI, on a site with no local pages, does nothing.

• Chasing rankings for the whole county when you are one van.

• Anything sold with a guaranteed position. Nobody controls Google's results.

What this article does not claim

• The Ofcom figures are UK adults across all activity, not people specifically looking for a tradesperson. They tell you where attention is, not where your enquiries come from.

• The ordering here is what we do and what we see working on our clients. It is experience, not a controlled study, and a different trade in a different area might reasonably order it differently.

• I have not put timescales on results, because they vary enormously by trade, area and how much competition already does this properly.

Sources

1. Ofcom, Online Nation 2025, published 10 December 2025.

2. Moneypenny, Small Business Call Report, published 21 November 2016, page updated 27 January 2020, for the voicemail figure.