SEO for tradies, explained without the jargon
SEO for tradies gets sold badly. Most of what gets charged for is reporting, and most of what moves the needle is three things nobody bothers to do properly.
Three things decide it.
Strip out the noise and local ranking comes down to whether Google believes you do the job, whether you are near the person searching, and whether other people vouch for you. Everything else is downstream of those.
- Your profile says the right thing. Categories and services matched to the work you want, not the work you started with.
- You are close enough. A real service area, set to where you will actually send a van.
- People vouch for you. Reviews arriving steadily, not in one burst two years ago.
The invoice line items that do nothing.
Plenty of agencies bill for work that has no measurable effect on a trade business. Knowing the list is most of what protects you.
- Directory submissions to sites nobody visits.
- Monthly reports showing traffic rather than calls.
- Hundreds of near-identical suburb pages, which Google now treats as spam.
- Blog posts about topics your customers never search before hiring.
Count calls, not traffic.
A tradie does not get paid in sessions. The only numbers worth reading are how many people rang, how many asked for directions, and how many of those turned into jobs. If a report leads with visitors, it is measuring the wrong end of the funnel.
Different trades, different searches.
The broad advice is the same everywhere, but what people type is not. Emergency trades get found in seconds and compared on nothing. Project trades get researched for weeks. Compliance work gets searched by a business, not a homeowner. We have written the detail up per trade below.
Straight answers.
How much should SEO for tradies cost?
Enough to cover real work, not so much that one extra job a month fails to cover it. Judge it against jobs won, not against an hourly rate.
How long until it works?
Profile fixes can move quickly. Ranking in contested suburbs builds over months, and anyone naming a date is guessing.
Do I need a website if I have a profile?
The profile gets you found. The website is where someone decides you are worth ringing. They do different jobs and the profile leans on the site to rank.
Can I do it myself?
Most of it, yes, if you have the hours. The hard part is not knowing what to do, it is doing it every week for a year while running a business.
Local SEO by trade
Want to know where you actually rank?
Tell me your trade and the suburbs you cover, and I'll show you where you sit and what's holding it back.