Local SEO for tradespeople: a site that earns enquiries
A trade business does not need much website. It needs the right six or eight pages, built honestly, pointed at the towns where the work actually is.
The shape of trade demand
Trade searches split in two. Emergencies (“emergency plumber Lewes”) are won by proximity, reviews and answering the phone; your Google Business Profile does most of that work. Planned work (“bathroom fitters Lewes”, “rewire cost Victorian house”) is researched on websites, compared, and booked weeks later. The site’s job is the second kind, and it is where service-area pages pay for themselves.
What to build, in order
- One strong page per service you want more of: what is included, how you price, how long jobs take, photographs of your own work.
- A handful of service-area pages for the towns where you already work, each carrying real local substance. Start with the towns your van visits weekly, not the edge of the map.
- A proof page or section: reviews, accreditations (Gas Safe, NICEIC, TrustMark), guarantees, insurance.
- A contact page that takes ten seconds to use on a phone.
Your site and your Business Profile do different jobs
The Business Profile wins the map pack for searches near your base; it cannot cover eleven other towns. Area pages on your site are how the towns without your address find you, and the profile links to the site for everything a profile cannot say. Reviews belong on both: collected on Google, quoted on the relevant service and area pages.
Photographs of real jobs beat everything stock
One photo of your scaffold on a flint cottage in the town the page is about does more than any paragraph. It is evidence, it is unique by definition, and it makes the local paragraph easy to write because it gives you something true to describe. Build pages where you have photographs and the defensibility question answers itself.
A first ninety days
Month one: service pages and the proof section. Month two: the first five area pages, written with real jobs in them. Month three: measure impressions and enquiries, fill the gaps the data shows, and only then decide whether the next tranche of towns is justified.
The same site, tuned to the trade
The structure in the section above holds for every trade, but the weighting does not. What people are searching for, and how urgently, decides what your pages need to say and how fast they need to load. An emergency search and a planned-work search behave nothing alike, and the gap between them is wider for some trades than others. A few words on each of the common ones, because the difference changes what you put first on the page.
Plumbers
Plumbing splits hard down the middle. A burst pipe or a leak is an emergency search, made on a phone, with no patience for a slow page or a buried number. A bathroom refit is researched for weeks. Build the emergency side around a phone number that is reachable in one tap and a plain statement of your call-out area, and let the area pages carry the considered work. The near me searches guide explains why proximity signals matter most for the urgent trades.
Electricians
Electrical work is trust work, and the page has to show it. A fuse-board upgrade or a fault-finding visit is judged on whether the reader believes you are qualified, so put your registration body and a real before-and-after photo above the fold rather than below it. The town paragraph matters less here than the proof does.
Heating and HVAC
Heating searches are seasonal and increasingly technical. A boiler service is routine, but a heat-pump enquiry comes from someone who has already read three articles and wants to know whether you have fitted one near them. Name the systems you actually install on the service page, and let each area page say which jobs you have done in that area rather than repeating the brochure.
Roofers
Roofing is the most photograph-led trade on this list. Nobody can inspect your work from the ground, so the page has to do it for them. One clear photo of a finished roof on a recognisable local street is worth more than three paragraphs of description, and it is the single thing most roofing pages leave out.
General contractors and builders
A builder’s problem is the opposite of a plumber’s. The work is so varied that the pages drift into listing everything and saying nothing. Pick the two or three jobs you actually want more of, build the service pages around those, and let the rest sit on a single capabilities page. A focused estate of pages reads as a specialist; a sprawling one reads as a directory listing.
Questions tradespeople ask
Do I need an area page for every town I cover?
No. Build pages only for the towns where you work regularly enough to say something true about them. A page for a town you have visited once is the kind of thin page that drags the rest down. The service-area pages guide sets out where the line sits.
What do I write on a page for a town I have not worked in yet?
Write about the work, not the place you cannot describe. Cover the service honestly, be clear that you cover the town, and add the local detail once you have a real job to point to. There is a whole guide on writing a page for a town you have not worked in yet.
My towns are nearly identical. What is left to say that is different?
More than it feels like. The work you did there, the access quirks, the kind of property, the journey time from your base. The location page content ideas guide lists the things worth writing when every town looks the same.
How do I know a page is too thin before it goes live?
A page leaning too hard on a shared template, with little said about the actual town, is the one to worry about. If you would struggle to tell it apart from the page for the next town over, so will Google. The features page shows how Local Pages Engine scores every page you build and flags the thin ones, so you can see which pages are leaning too hard on a shared template before they go live.
Where Townsmith fits
Townsmith generates the area pages from one blueprint as real WordPress pages, leaves a slot for the local paragraph on each, and refuses its top score until you fill it. The free plugin covers one service across five areas, which is precisely a sensible first tranche for a trade business.