SEO for tradesmen: what actually brings the work in

When someone searches "electrician near me", which happens roughly 74,000 times a month in the UK, most of them never scroll past the map box at the top. Three businesses sit in it. Getting into that box is a different job from ranking a website, and it's free.

What moves it: a complete Google Business Profile, the correct primary category, an honest service area, real photos of real jobs added regularly, opening hours that are actually true, and a steady trickle of reviews. Answering the questions people post helps too.

Here's the part that doesn't suit us to say. We can't do this bit for you, and mostly neither can anyone else, because it's tied to your business and your verification. If someone's charging you a monthly retainer purely to manage a Google Business Profile, they're charging you for about twenty minutes of work a month. Do it yourself and spend the money on something that compounds.

This is the single biggest thing a website does for a trade, and it's the thing most trade sites get wrong. Nobody searches "electrical services". They search the job. A fuse board upgrade. A rewire. An EICR before a tenancy. A leaking shower. A flat roof.

A single Services page listing fourteen things in bullet points can't rank for any of them, because it says almost nothing about each one. Fourteen pages, each properly written about one job, can rank for fourteen different searches.

The numbers make the case better than we can. "Fuse board upgrade" gets around 320 searches a month in the UK, and the pages currently ranking for it carry an average of under two links from other websites. "Rewire cost" is around 480 a month with under four. Those aren't defended positions. They're empty ones, and a genuinely useful page about that one job can take them.

Write each page the way you'd explain the job standing in someone's hallway. What's involved, roughly what it costs or what it depends on, how long it takes, what certificate they get at the end, and what happens if you find something worse once you're in.

Every trade wants to be found in the towns they cover, and this is where trade SEO most often goes wrong. The tactic being sold is fifty near-identical pages with the town name swapped in. Google has had that pattern flagged for well over a decade. It's called a doorway page, it's explicitly against their guidelines, and at best it does nothing.

What works instead is fewer pages with genuine substance. If you really do a lot of work in three or four areas, write a real page for each: the jobs you actually do there, photos from those jobs, named customers if they'll let you, the specific things about that area's housing stock that matter. Older terraces with rubber wiring. New builds with a particular developer's quirks.

If you can't write something genuinely different about a town, you don't need a page for it. Cover it in your service area on your Google Business Profile and move on. Three real area pages beat forty fake ones, and they can't get you penalised.

Reviews do two jobs at once. They influence where you appear in the map results, and they decide whether the person who finds you actually rings. Most trades treat them as a nice-to-have and collect them passively, which means they collect almost none.

The fix is unglamorous. Ask every customer, at the moment the job's finished and they're happy, before you've left. A saved text with a direct link works better than anything clever. A slow, steady stream is worth more than twenty in one week, which looks exactly like what it is.

Put them on the site too, but put the real ones with names and locations, not a carousel of anonymous five stars that could say anything.

Gas Safe, NICEIC, NAPIT, FENSA, CHAS, public liability, whichever apply to you. Commercial clients and letting agents genuinely won't book without seeing them, and homeowners use them as a fast shortcut for whether you're legitimate.

They belong high on the page where someone comparing three firms on a phone can see them in the first screen. Most trade sites bury them at the bottom, next to the copyright line, which is the one place nobody looks.

Paid directory listings sold on the promise of SEO value. The links are almost always marked in a way that passes no ranking benefit at all. Some directories are worth paying for because they send actual customers, and that's a fine reason to buy one, but don't buy it as SEO.

Buying links. It's against Google's guidelines, the risk sits with you rather than the person who sold them, and the cheap ones come from sites that exist purely to sell links and are worth nothing.

Blogging weekly about nothing. "Five signs you need an electrician" written by an AI and posted every Tuesday doesn't rank and doesn't convert. One properly written page about a job you actually want is worth more than a year of that.

Stuffing your town name into every sentence. "We are the leading Manchester electricians serving Manchester and the Manchester area." It reads badly to a person and it hasn't fooled a search engine since roughly 2005.

Google Business Profile work can shift things within weeks, sometimes days, because the map results move faster than the main ones.

Website rankings are slower. For the job-specific pages described above, on terms that aren't heavily contested, three to six months is a realistic expectation. Anyone promising page one in thirty days is either targeting something nobody searches for or isn't being straight with you.

The compounding is the point. A page about fuse board upgrades that you write once keeps bringing in enquiries for years, and the cost of it doesn't repeat. That's the opposite of paid ads, which stop the moment you stop paying.

You'll notice that a decent chunk of the above needs no website at all, and we'd rather say that plainly than pretend otherwise. If you've got no budget, do the Google Business Profile properly and collect reviews. That's genuinely the highest-value free thing available to you.

The website earns its place when you want the job-specific pages, because those are what you own and what compounds. A profile can't rank for "fuse board upgrade". A page can. The site also has to be fast and work properly on a phone, because most trade searches happen on one, often standing in the room with the problem. We wrote about why that matters in why website speed matters.

If you want the version of this aimed specifically at electrical work, with the actual search numbers for EICRs, EV chargers and emergency call-outs, we've written that up separately in SEO for electricians.

We build the site around the jobs rather than around a brochure. A page for each job you want more of, your certifications where people actually look, your real photos, and the whole thing quick enough on a phone that nobody bounces before it loads.

What that looks like per trade is set out on our sector pages: websites for tradesmen, electricians and engineering firms. There's a full list of who we build for, and it's short on purpose, because we only write one once we've genuinely built for that trade.

Our plans start at £20 a month with no setup fee, no minimum term and nothing to pay up front. That covers the design, build, hosting, your domain, business email, security, backups and ongoing changes. If you want to see it before you commit to anything, we'll redesign your current homepage and send you a link within three working days, before you've paid us a penny.

One caveat worth stating. Building the pages is the part we do. Getting the reviews and keeping the Google Business Profile current is the part you do, and no website replaces it. Any agency telling you the site alone will handle your local search is overselling.

The search volumes here come from Google's own advertising data and are rounded estimates rather than exact counts. They move around, and they're reported in fixed bands, so treat them as an indication of scale rather than a precise figure. The point isn't that "fuse board upgrade" gets exactly 320 searches. It's that the pages ranking for it have almost no links behind them, which is what makes it winnable.