Why SEO for trades is a different job
Most local SEO advice assumes a shop. You have premises, customers come to you, and Google ranks you near your pin. Trades work the other way round: you travel to the customer, you may run the business from home, and the area you serve is far larger than the area you sit in.
That single difference changes almost everything — how you set up your Google Business Profile, how many pages you should build, and which searches you can realistically win.
Set up as a service-area business, properly
If customers do not come to your address, Google expects you to hide it. This is not optional tidying; a home address left visible on a profile that should be a service-area business is one of the more common causes of a suspension.
- Hide the address and list service areas instead. Google lets you name a set of towns, postcodes or regions.
- Do not list twenty towns hoping for twenty rankings. Service areas tell Google where you work; they do not make you rank in each one. A tight, honest list looks more credible than a county-wide sweep.
- Use a real, reachable phone number. If it is a landline, be aware you cannot receive verification texts — ask for the call or video option instead.
- Pick the most specific primary category you can. ‘Electrician’ beats ‘Contractor’. The primary category does more ranking work than any other field on the profile.
Get this right before anything else. For a trade, the profile is the single strongest local signal you have — more than the website — and it feeds AI answers too, because Gemini and AI Overviews read it directly.
The radius problem nobody tells you about
Here is the uncomfortable truth about service-area work: proximity still applies. Google weighs how close the searcher is to your registered location, and a service-area setting does not switch that off. You will rank strongly near home and progressively weaker the further out you go, even in towns you genuinely cover.
You can see this yourself. Search your trade and town from home, then ask a friend fifteen miles away to run exactly the same search. The results usually differ more than people expect. That is not a fault on your site; it is how local ranking works.
What follows from it is a strategy, not a workaround: win convincingly in your own patch first, then extend outward one town at a time, and use pages rather than profile settings to compete in the towns further out.
How many pages, and what goes on them
The instinct is to build a page for every town within an hour’s drive. Resist it. Twenty near-identical pages with the town name swapped is the most reliable way to end up with doorway pages that help nobody and can be discounted wholesale.
| Build a page when | Skip it when | |
|---|---|---|
| Evidence | You have done real jobs there and can describe them | You have never worked there |
| Difference | You can write 300 words that could only be about that town | The only change would be the town name |
| Demand | People actually search your trade plus that town | You are guessing |
| Maintenance | You can keep it accurate as the business changes | It will be stale within a year |
Three genuinely specific town pages beat twenty templated ones, both for ranking and for the AI answers that increasingly summarise this stuff. Specifics are what get quoted: the estates you work, response times, what you charge for a callout, which jobs you turn down.
Reviews do more for a trade than anything else
For trades in particular, reviews are the whole ballgame. They are a ranking input, they are what a customer reads before calling, and when an AI assistant recommends a plumber it is largely synthesising what other people wrote about local plumbers.
- Ask every satisfied customer, at the moment the job is finished and they are pleased.
- Make it one tap — a short link saved in your phone, sent by text before you leave.
- Reply to all of them, including the bad ones, briefly and without arguing.
- Steady beats spiky. Five a month for a year is worth more than sixty in one week, which looks bought and can trigger a filter.
Nothing on your website compensates for having four reviews when the firm above you has ninety.
What this looks like when it works
Locators, a forklift hire business working across the South, is a service-area operation of exactly this kind — equipment goes to the customer, not the other way round. Focusing on the towns they genuinely served, rather than blanket coverage, took them from position 11 to position 2 for forklift hire in Southampton.
That is the pattern for trades generally: fewer places, done properly, beats a map of the county done thinly.