SEO for Trades & Construction
Trade work is won in the map pack and lost to whoever answers the phone first. Most trade SEO is not about volume of content. It is about being the nearest credible option when someone searches at eight in the morning with water coming through the ceiling.
A £1,000 deposit, then 11 monthly payments, or £5,500 for the year. That buys up to five target keywords, a named consultant, and a monthly roadmap you can read in ten minutes.
See all three packagesHow your customers search in this sector
Trade searches are short, urgent and local: "roofer near me", "emergency plumber Doncaster". Ranking a long service page nationally wins you nothing. Ranking in the local pack wins you the job.
Google Business Profile first
For most trades the profile outperforms the website. Categories, service areas, photos and a steady flow of reviews bring in more work than a blog ever will, and they move within weeks.
One page per service, not per town
Twenty thin town pages get you filtered out. One strong page per service, backed by real local proof, is what holds its position.
What trade customers actually search
Trade searches are short, urgent and tight to a place. "Roofer near me", "emergency plumber Doncaster", "boiler repair Rotherham". Nobody researches a leaking roof for a fortnight. They pick from the first three results and ring the one that answers.
That shapes everything in two ways. First, the map pack matters more than the organic results under it. On a phone the three local listings fill most of the first screen, and being fourth means sitting behind a "More places" link most people never press. Second, emergency intent converts immediately or not at all. A missed call at 8am on a Monday is not a lead to follow up. It is a job that went to someone else.
In practice that means two things: answer the phone, and be in the three-pack when it could ring.
A page per trade, a page per town
The single biggest structural mistake trades make online is one Services page listing everything they do, everywhere they work. It is a page about nothing in particular, and the only people who will ever find it already know the company name.
If you fit bathrooms, repair boilers and install underfloor heating across Sheffield, Rotherham and Barnsley, that is a page per service and a page per town you seriously want work from. Nine pages sounds like a lot until you see it as nine chances to rank instead of one.
The catch: they have to be genuinely different. Different proof, different photographs, different FAQs, different emphasis. The previous version of this website generated 288 near-identical trade pages in a single day (one template with the trade and town swapped), and between them they produced twelve clicks. Google’s helpful-content systems target that pattern specifically, and the damage lands on the whole domain, not just the thin pages.
Photographs of your own work beat everything
This is the cheapest advantage open to a trade and almost nobody takes it. Ten photographs of jobs you actually finished (the boiler you fitted, the roof you stripped, the van outside a house on a street someone recognises) beat any amount of copy about quality and reliability.
They do three jobs at once: they feed your Google Business Profile, which favours recent photos; they give visitors evidence instead of adjectives; and they let you write pages about specific jobs rather than generic service descriptions. A stock photo of someone else’s plumber is worse than no photo, and customers can tell.
Take them on a phone. You do not need a photographer, and it costs nothing but ten minutes at the end of a job.
Reviews, and why recency matters more than count
Trades live or die on reviews, and the mistake is treating them as a total to build up rather than a flow to keep going. Ten reviews from 2021 read as a business that stopped trading. Two a month for a year read as a business that is busy.
What works: a direct review link sent by text within a day of finishing the job, while the customer still remembers being pleased. Google gives you a short link in your profile dashboard. Reply to every one, briefly, and to the bad ones especially, because that reply is not for the reviewer. It is for the next fifty people who read it before deciding whether to ring.
What not to do: buy them, filter them so only happy customers get asked, or collect twenty in one week. All three are visible, and the third looks exactly like what it is.
Certifications and trade bodies are underused links
Gas Safe, NICEIC, FENSA, TrustMark, Checkatrade, the Guild of Master Craftsmen. Most trades are already on several of these and never think of them as part of their search presence.
They do two jobs. They are genuine, relevant links from established sites, which is exactly the kind of link that is hard to fake and easy for you to get. And they are corroboration: your name, address and phone number appearing identically across independent directories is what makes Google and an AI assistant both confident you are a real business at a real address, which is what moves the map pack.
The one requirement is consistency. If one listing says "Unit 3" and your website says "Unit Three", fix it. That kind of tidying is dull, and it is often what takes a business from fourth to third.
What a trades campaign costs and what it should return
Our Local package is £497 a month plus VAT after a £1,000 deposit, covering up to five target keywords and five URLs, which suits a trade competing in one or two towns. If you genuinely need four towns and six services, five keywords will not stretch, and we say so before you commit rather than in month three.
The arithmetic is usually simple for a trade. With a £2,000 average job, roughly one extra job a quarter covers a Local campaign. Work out your own number first. It turns an abstract monthly cost into a plain yes or no, and we would rather you did that sum before the call than during it.
If the budget is not there yet, start with the Google Business Profile checklist. It is free, it is ungated, and it is the highest-return hour available to any trade in the country.
Every trade this page covers, and why it is one page
The previous version of this website had a separate page for each of these: affordable SEO for roofers, top plasterer SEO, local SEO for floor layers, and about 190 more generated in a single day. Between them they produced twelve clicks. They were one template with the trade swapped, and Google treated them exactly as such.
This page replaces the lot, and covers the same trades properly rather than 190 times badly.
- 01
Building and structural
Builders, groundworkers, bricklayers, extensions, loft conversion specialists and construction companies working domestic or commercial.
- 02
Roofing and exterior
Roofers, roof cleaning, rendering, cladding and guttering, including the emergency call-out work that comes with all of it.
- 03
Plastering and finishing
Plasterers and plastering companies, drylining, tilers, and painters and decorators.
- 04
Electrical, plumbing and heating
Electricians, plumbers, gas engineers, boiler installers and heating engineers, including the emergency searches that dominate the sector every January.
- 05
Joinery and glazing
Joiners, carpenters, furniture makers, glaziers, and window and door fitters.
- 06
Outdoor and grounds
Paving and driveway installers, landscapers, fencing contractors, tree surgeons and floor layers.
- 07
Security and access
Locksmiths, alarm installers and CCTV installers.
- 08
Site and general trades
Scaffolders, and the handyman trade, which behaves far more like an emergency service than a planned one.
Four steps, then round again
SEO never finishes. The work runs on a loop, and you see the report every time round, good month or bad.
- Step 1Keyword research
We start with the terms that show buying intent, not the ones with the biggest numbers. Alongside those, lower-competition terms that rank sooner and bring early results.
- Step 2Competitor analysis
Then we look at who outranks you and why. Once we know what they are doing, we know what it takes to beat it.
- Step 3Implementation
The team does the work: on-page fixes, new content, links and local signals. Every item is listed in your monthly report, not buried in a dashboard.
- Step 4Reporting & revision
Each month you see what was done and what it moved. When something is not working, we change it rather than wait for it to come good.
Three packages. Prices included.
Pick the one that matches where your customers are. Pay for the year, or a deposit and eleven monthly payments. Either way, the number on this page is the number on the invoice.
- Up to 5 keywords per campaign
- Up to 5 URLs included
- GMB post every 14 days
- 1+ new landing page or article
- Targeted locations, blog posts, on-page SEO report
- Initial audit & corrections, citations audit
- Monthly roadmap & action report
- Up to 10 keywords per campaign
- Up to 10 URLs included
- GMB post every 7 days
- 2+ new landing pages or articles
- Targeted locations, blog posts, on-page SEO report
- Initial audit & corrections, citations audit
- Monthly roadmap & action report
- Up to 20 keywords per campaign
- Up to 10 URLs included
- GMB post every 4 days
- 5+ new landing pages or articles
- Targeted locations, blog posts, on-page SEO report
- Initial audit & corrections, citations audit
- Monthly roadmap & action report
Every package includes keyword analysis, heading tags and meta description optimisation, image alt tag analysis, duplicate content checks, sitemap creation, mobile responsiveness reporting, citations, load time testing and search engine reports. All prices are subject to change. Budgeting for the website too? Here iswhat a website should actually cost.
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Clients who bought this, and what they got
Named businesses, real figures, and the work that produced them.
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Ready when you are
Tell us what you are trying to rank for and we will look at the site and the search results before we reply. You get a straight answer, including if SEO is not the right spend for you yet.