Local SEO for Trades

The map pack is the whole game

For most trade searches the three map results sit above everything else and take the majority of the clicks. Ranking fourth organically while being absent from the map is close to being invisible.

The map pack runs on different signals to organic listings: proximity to the searcher, prominence, and relevance of the profile itself. That is good news for a small business, because proximity is not something a national competitor can buy their way past.

Your Google Business Profile is the product

More decisive than the website for trade searches, and most profiles are half-finished.

Primary category is the single biggest lever

Choose "Plumber" and you appear for plumbing searches. Choose "Contractor" and you compete with everyone. Getting the primary category exactly right, then adding genuine secondary categories, changes which searches you show up for more than any other single setting.

Service area, set honestly

Covering a 90-minute radius is not the same as ranking across it. Profiles claiming half of England rank well nowhere, because the signal is diluted. Set the area you genuinely serve and can reach quickly.

Photos, dated and real

Job photos with recent dates. Not stock images of a smiling person in overalls — customers can tell, and so can the profile's engagement data.

Reviews are the compounding asset

Trades live or die on reviews, and the businesses winning are the ones that ask every single customer, every time. Not a campaign — a habit, built into the job-completion process.

Respond to all of them, including the poor ones. Prospects read the responses more carefully than the reviews; a measured reply to an unfair review does more good than ten five-star ratings.

Ask for the specific job in the review where you can. "Fitted a new combi boiler in Croydon" contains the service and the place, which is exactly the language your listing needs to be associated with.

Service and area pages that are not duplicates

The obvious move is one page per service per town. Done badly — the same 400 words with the place name swapped — that is a textbook near-duplicate problem and it can suppress the whole site.

Done properly, each page carries something genuinely local: the estates or areas you actually work in, response times from your base, jobs completed there, local factors that affect the work. If you cannot write something true and specific about an area, that page should not exist.

The honest sequence is one strong page per service first, then area pages only where you have real depth to add.

What we do

• Google Business Profile audit, categories and service area
• Map pack ranking tracking by postcode, not a single average position
• Citation consistency across UK trade directories — Checkatrade, Yell and the rest
• Review generation process built into how you close jobs
• Service pages, then area pages only where they earn their place
• LocalBusiness schema with correct service area and hours
• Call tracking, so you can tell which enquiries came from search

Emergency versus planned work

These behave completely differently and deserve separate pages. Emergency searches convert in minutes, on mobile, and care about whether you answer the phone right now — so those pages need the number prominent, hours clear, and almost no reading.

Planned work — a bathroom, a rewire, a new boiler — involves comparison over days. Those pages need photos, process, guarantees and pricing guidance. Serving both intents from one page serves neither well.

Pricing on the page

The most common objection we hear from trades, and the evidence points the other way. Publishing indicative pricing — a range, a call-out fee, a "from" figure with what affects it — filters out the enquiries that were never going to convert and increases the proportion that do.

The fear is being undercut. In practice the customers who choose purely on price were not going to be profitable, and the ones who value reliability read a published range as confidence. It also matches what people search: "how much does a new boiler cost" is a far bigger query than any service term.

What actually gets measured

Most trades cannot say where their last twenty jobs came from, which makes every marketing decision a guess. Before spending anything, get three things in place.

• A tracked phone number for the website and profile, so search-driven calls are distinguishable from repeat customers and word of mouth.
• Ask every caller how they found you and write it down. Low-tech, and more reliable than most analytics for this sector.
• Map enquiries to job value, because twenty emergency call-outs and two bathroom fits are not the same business.

Without that, you will be judging results on ranking screenshots, which is how agencies keep clients who are not making them money.

Seasonality

Trade demand swings hard and predictably — heating searches spike with the first cold week, drainage after heavy rain, roofing after storms. The work to rank for those terms has to be done months ahead; a boiler page published in November has missed the season.

We plan around the calendar rather than the retainer: build heating content in summer, drainage before autumn, and use quiet periods for the technical and review work that pays off year-round.