A trade business lives or dies on being found at the moment somebody has a problem, and that moment is almost always on a phone, in the map results, with a call as the next action. That makes local SEO the whole game for plumbers, electricians, roofers and contractors. It also means the work is different from a shop, because most trades travel to the customer rather than the other way round, and Google treats those two things differently.
If you go to customers, say so properly
Google has a setting for businesses that travel to their customers rather than serving them at an address. Used correctly, the street address is hidden and a service area is shown instead.
This is the right choice for most trades working from home or a yard. It is also the honest one, and the alternative is worse than it looks.
Do not invent an address in a city you want work in. Virtual offices and mailbox addresses are the most common reason profiles get suspended, competitors report them because it is easy, and a suspension costs more than the work it was meant to win.
Set the service area as the places you will actually travel to. Google's own guidance is that the whole area should sit within about two hours' drive of where you are based, and it allows up to twenty areas. A service area covering half the country tells it nothing useful about where you should rank.
The primary category decides the calls you get
A general contractor and a roofer are different categories, and choosing the broader one to cover everything usually means ranking for nothing in particular.
Pick the primary for the work you most want, especially the work with the best margin. Use secondary categories for the rest.
If most of your income is emergency call outs, that is what the profile should be pointed at, because that is the search happening at the moment the money is decided.
Photographs of the work, not of vans
Trades have the best photographic material of any local business and use it the least.
Before and after pairs are the most persuasive thing you can put on a profile. They need no explanation and no design.
Photograph finished work, the team on site, and the vehicle with your name on it. A profile with a logo and nothing else reads like a listing rather than a business somebody is about to let into their house.
Keep adding them. It takes ten seconds at the end of a job and it is the cheapest marketing available to a trade.
Reviews, and the moment to ask
Ask when the work is finished and the customer is visibly relieved. That is the moment, and it will not come back later.
A card with a short link works. A message the same afternoon works better, and it takes fifteen seconds to send.
Ask them to say what the job was, because the words inside a review are read as a signal. A review mentioning an emergency boiler repair is worth more than one saying great service.
Never offer a discount for a review. It breaches Google's policy and the penalty can take the profile down.
The website part, briefly
Put the phone number where a thumb reaches it and make it tappable. On a trade site this is the single most valuable element on the page.
Say which areas you cover, in a list, in text. It is the question every visitor has and most trade sites answer it vaguely.
Have a page per main service rather than one page listing everything. Somebody searching for emergency drain clearing should land on a page about emergency drain clearing.
Say what happens when they call: how fast you can attend, whether there is a call out charge, what hours you actually work. Answering those plainly wins the call against a competitor who did not.
Questions people ask
- Should I hide my address if I work from home?
- Yes, and Google provides for exactly that. Set the business up as serving a service area, and the street address is hidden while the areas you cover are shown. It is the correct setting rather than a workaround, and it avoids putting your home address on the internet.
- Can I rank in several towns?
- In the map results, ranking drops off with distance and there is no safe way around that. What works is being genuinely strong in the area you are actually in, and building ordinary pages for the other towns you serve so you can appear in normal search results there.
- How many photos should I add?
- More than you think, and keep going. Ten is a reasonable start, and a few a month after that. It is the lowest effort, highest return thing a trade can do on a profile, and almost nobody does it consistently.
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