Marketing for tradies who want the schedule full
Plumbers, sparkies, chippies, concreters. The trades differ, but the way customers find them barely changes: a search with a job and a suburb in it, a look at the Maps results, a quick check of reviews, then a call. What changes is the job. A burst pipe at 9pm, a switchboard upgrade next month and a driveway quoted for spring each start with a different search. So SEO for tradies works by job type first and trade second, and we shape one local system to both.
Why tradies work with us
Every trade we work with shares the same two problems. Quiet weeks with no calls, and busy weeks where the marketing they paid for sends junk leads.
The fix is one system, tuned per trade. A Google Business Profile built out for Maps searches, landing pages for the jobs you want and the areas you genuinely service, ads for the urgent searches, and reviews that make the choice easy.
Tuning starts with the work, not with a keyword tool. A short list of the jobs that pay, the jobs you'd rather refer on and the suburbs you'll actually drive to decides which searches the system chases first and which it ignores.
We already run it for plumbers, concreters and pest control businesses across South East Queensland. Some of the numbers on our results page come from those campaigns.
And there are no lock-in contracts. If the phone stops ringing, you can leave. That's the deal that keeps us honest.
The system, trade by trade
Google Business Profile
Set up and kept current with photos, services, hours and review replies, tuned to the searches your trade lives on. Google's Business Profile Help names relevance, distance and prominence as the local ranking factors, so the work goes into the parts you can influence: every service you really do listed, accurate details, and steady reviews. Many tradies also need a service-area setup with the home address hidden, which Google's guidelines ask of businesses that travel to customers.
Job-type and suburb pages
A page for each job that pays, such as hot water replacement or a switchboard upgrade, with real job photos and the answers customers want before they ring. Suburb pages come second and only where there's something local to say: the jobs you do there, the housing, access and travel. Trade searches almost always carry a location, and pages like these catch them without copying one page across fifty postcodes.
Google Ads
Campaigns shaped to your trade's urgency. Call-focused for emergency work, quote-focused for planned jobs. Google Ads Help explains that call assets can be scheduled to show only on the days and hours you answer the phone, and location targeting can be set by postcode or by a radius around your base, so spend follows the hours and suburbs you actually work.
Review growth
A repeatable routine for collecting Google reviews after each job, so your profile keeps a steady run of recent reviews. Every customer gets the ask, by text or a QR code on the invoice. Google's Maps content policy bans offering discounts or other incentives for reviews and bans asking only the happy customers, so the routine stays inside those rules.
Website and listings basics
A site that loads fast on a phone, puts a tap-to-call number at the top of every page and shows your licence details. Queensland Building and Construction Commission (QBCC) licensees must show their licensed name and licence number on websites and other advertising. Electrical and interstate licences carry separate advertising rules to check. We also check your name, address and phone number match across the directories customers use.
AI search visibility
Customers are starting to ask AI tools which tradie to call. The work here is the same groundwork done carefully: plain-text service pages, accurate profile details, and facts such as your service area and licence stated where a machine can read them. Whether an AI tool mentions a particular business is out of anyone's hands.
Call tracking
Every call and form tied to its source, so you know exactly which suburbs, services and channels feed your schedule. That means Google Ads call reporting, the calls and website clicks in your Business Profile performance data, and tracked numbers on the website, read together once a month.
Job-type routing: which search brings which job
Every trade has at least three kinds of work, and customers search for each one differently. That's why the marketing gets routed by job type before trade. The homeowner with no power and the homeowner with a burst pipe search more alike than the burst-pipe customer and the one planning a new bathroom.
Read the table from left to right. The job type sets how people search, the search tells you what they'll decide on, and the decision tells you which channel has to be ready when they look.
- Build around what you invoiceJob-plus-suburb and niche terms say far more about what the customer wants than "plumber" or "electrician" alone, so pages follow the services you actually bill for.
- Match the page to the urgencyAn emergency page puts the phone number above everything. A planned-job page answers questions and shows proof, because that customer is comparing two or three businesses.
- Leave out what you can't serveA tradie booked six weeks ahead gets little from emergency ads they can't answer, and a one-van emergency operator rarely needs a portfolio page for every job.
| Job type | How the search usually looks | What the customer decides on | Channel that catches it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Emergency | "emergency plumber near me", "no power [suburb]", "burst pipe" | Who answers now and can get there soon | Business Profile in Maps, call-focused ads scheduled to the hours you answer |
| Planned repair or replacement | "hot water system replacement [suburb]", "switchboard upgrade" | Reviews, licence details, a clear idea of the process | A service page for that job, the services list on the profile, recent reviews |
| Quoted project | "concrete driveway [suburb]", "deck builder [region]" | Photos of past work, how quoting works, timing | Project pages with real job photos, quote-focused ads in the busy season |
| Recurring or compliance | "smoke alarm compliance rental", "termite inspection [suburb]" | Whether you handle the paperwork and can rebook | Pages written for landlords and property managers, the review routine |
| Niche or high-value | "EV charger installation", "retaining wall [suburb]" | Specialist knowledge and examples | A dedicated page per niche service, sometimes a small ad group of its own |
How the work runs, step by step
An engagement usually starts with an audit and fixes the foundation before any new pages or ads. The order matters: a new suburb page can't do much while the Business Profile shows the wrong hours or the website hides the phone number.
- AuditCheck the Business Profile, the website on a phone, your directory listings, and which searches already show the site in Search Console. The audit also settles whether the current website can be fixed or needs replacing.
- Fix the foundationCorrect the profile's categories, services, hours and service area; fix tap-to-call, speed and indexing problems; add licence details; tidy listings that still show an old number or address.
- Build pages by job typeOne page per job that pays, with real photos and the questions customers ask before they call. Suburb pages follow only where there is genuinely local content to write.
- Add ads where speed mattersCall-focused campaigns for emergency work, with negative keywords that filter out DIY searches and job seekers. Planned work can often wait for the organic pages.
- Run the review routineAsk every customer after every job, reply to every review, and keep photos current.
- Measure and adjust monthlyRead calls, forms and their sources against the job list from the audit, then shift effort toward the job types that are booking.
| Part of the work | What it covers | What you supply |
|---|---|---|
| Business Profile | Categories, services, service area, hours, photos, review replies | Verification access, job photos as you go |
| Website pages | Job-type and suburb pages, tap-to-call, licence details, speed fixes | A quick check of service details, approval before pages go live |
| Listings | Name, address and phone made consistent across directories | Logins for directories you already use |
| Ads | Campaigns, schedules, location targeting, negative keywords | Your answering hours and the suburbs you'll travel to |
| Reviews | The request routine and review replies | Sending the ask after each job, or letting your job software send it |
| Reporting | Calls, forms and sources each month | A note when a lead turns into a booked job |
SEO or Google Ads: deciding by job mix
Where tradies should advertise depends on the job type and how fast the customer needs someone. Google Ads can put a business in front of an emergency search as soon as a campaign is live. Maps and organic visibility build more slowly, and Google's Business Profile Help says there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking, so the Maps side has to be earned.
Use the table to pick the starting weight, then adjust as call data comes in. Most trades end up running both, with ads covering urgent and seasonal gaps and SEO carrying planned work. There's a longer comparison in SEO vs Google Ads.
| Your situation | Lean on | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Mostly emergency work, phone answered all day | Call-focused Google Ads plus the Business Profile | Urgent searches turn into calls quickly, and call assets can be limited to your answering hours |
| Mostly planned or quoted work | Service pages, the Business Profile and reviews first | Customers compare before they ring, so answers and proof on the page do the selling |
| New business or new service area | Ads while the profile and pages build | Ads can run from the first week; organic visibility takes time to earn |
| Booked out for weeks | Trim or pause ads, keep the review routine going | Paying for calls you can't take wastes budget and leaves customers waiting |
| Seasonal trade such as pest control, roofing or air-con | Ads lifted in peak months, pages built in the quiet months | Pages need time to be found before the busy season starts |
A worked example: one electrician, three job types
Say a two-person electrical business in Nambour does three kinds of work: fault call-outs, switchboard upgrades for older homes, and EV charger installs. This is a hypothetical, not a client. The owner wants fewer after-hours call-outs and more switchboard and EV work, and won't travel more than about half an hour from base.
Routed by job type, the plan looks like this. Fault call-outs keep the Business Profile and a small call campaign scheduled to business hours only, because the owner has stopped taking night work. Switchboard upgrades get a page explaining when an old board is worth replacing, what the job involves and how quoting works, with photos of finished boards. EV charger installs get their own page answering what buyers ask first, such as whether the existing switchboard can take the extra load.
Suburb pages are written only for the handful of suburbs where the business has done enough work to say something specific: the age of the housing, the common faults, the travel time. Everything else stays on the job-type pages, which already name the service area.
Success here is measured by the job mix, not by traffic. If after a few months the tracked calls show more switchboard and EV enquiries and fewer late-night faults, the plan is working for this owner even if total calls stay flat. Any figures in a plan like this stay illustrative until the business's own call data comes in.
How results get measured honestly
Leads get counted from four places and read side by side, because each one sees a different part of the picture. A month where Maps calls rise and website forms fall can still be a good month if the forms were mostly the jobs you didn't want.
Google's own guide to hiring an SEO says no one can guarantee a first-place ranking on Google, and the same goes for Maps positions and AI mentions. So the report doesn't lead with rankings. It leads with booked jobs by type and source, checked against call tracking records, with rankings and impressions as supporting evidence.
- Business Profile performanceGoogle counts calls from the profile's call button, website clicks, direction requests and the search terms people used to find the profile.
- Search ConsoleShows the queries your website appeared for in Google Search, with clicks, impressions and average position, so you can see whether each job-type page is being found.
- Google Ads call reportingUses Google forwarding numbers to measure calls from call assets and call ads on the Search Network.
- Website call and form trackingTracked numbers and form records tie each enquiry to the page it came from, so a switchboard enquiry from the switchboard page is counted as one.
Local by nature
Trade searches are local by definition. Nobody hires a plumber from two hours away, and Google knows it, so proximity and local signals decide who shows up.
Google describes distance as how far each business is from the customer who's searching. That's why a profile tends to show less often the further a searcher is from your base, and why job-type pages and ads do the heavy lifting in the suburbs at the edge of your run.
"Near me" and suburb-name searches are where a lot of trade jobs begin, and those searches often show Maps results above the ordinary web results.
Word of mouth still matters too. A referred customer who searches your business name before calling lands on your profile and reviews first, and those either back up the referral or undercut it.
We map every campaign to the suburbs you actually drive to, whether that's one postcode or the whole Coast.
Questions we get asked
Does the same system really work across different trades?
Yes, the same system runs across different trades, because the channels stay the same: Google Business Profile, suburb landing pages, Google Ads and reviews. What changes is the keywords, the urgency and the seasonality, and that's the part we tune trade by trade. An emergency plumber and a custom carpenter get very different campaigns on the same bones, with call-focused ads for emergency work and quote-focused ads for planned jobs.
I've been burnt by marketing companies before. What's different?
What's different here is tracked calls, plain reporting and no lock-in contracts. Every call and form is tied to its source, so you can see each lead and the suburb, service and channel it came from. The work runs month to month, and you can walk away if the results stop. We have to keep earning the retainer.
I'm a one-person operation. Is this overkill?
No, it isn't overkill, because we size the system to your capacity, and most Australian businesses are non-employing or very small operators. Early on, the whole plan might be your Google profile, a routine for collecting reviews after each job and a couple of suburb pages. The system grows when your team does. There are no lock-in contracts, so if the phone stops ringing, you can leave.
Is SEO still worth it now that AI answers search questions?
Yes, it still is for tradies, because the same groundwork feeds both. Google says its AI Overviews and AI Mode have no extra requirements beyond normal Search practice, and it lists keeping Business Profile information up to date among the things that help. Local trade searches also still show Maps results with a number to tap. What nobody can promise is that an AI tool will name a particular business.
How much should I expect to pay for SEO as a tradie?
It depends on how much work your situation needs, so this page doesn't quote a figure. The cost drivers are the size of your service area, how many job types need their own page, how contested your trade is in those suburbs, the state of your current website and listings, and whether ads run alongside. A strategy review sets those out for your business before any price is discussed.
Can I do SEO for my trade business myself?
Yes, a fair amount of it, if you set aside regular time. You can verify and fill out your Business Profile, ask every customer for a review, add job photos and put your phone number and licence details at the top of your site. The harder parts are job-type pages that get found, reading Search Console data and running ads without wasted spend. Plenty of tradies start on their own and bring in help when time runs short.
Do I need a separate page for every suburb I service?
No, only for suburbs where you have something genuinely local to say. Google's spam policies list pages targeted at specific cities or regions that funnel visitors to one page as doorway abuse, so dozens of near-identical suburb pages can hurt more than help. Start with a page per job type, then add suburb pages where you know the housing, access or common jobs. The guide to service area pages goes further.
How long until the phone rings more?
It depends on your starting point and how contested your trade is locally, so an honest answer is never a fixed date. Fixing a wrong phone number, missing hours or a broken mobile site can help within weeks. Google's SEO Starter Guide says some changes take effect in hours and others take several months, so new pages and Maps visibility in busy suburbs take longer. More in how long local SEO takes.
Keep exploring
Want the phones ringing?
Tell us your suburb and your trade. We'll show you which searches and suburbs we'd target first.