The local SEO checklist for trades

You don't need to understand how Google works to do well on it. You need to do a small number of unglamorous things properly and consistently. Here's the list — in order of payback.

1. Claim and complete your Google Business Profile

Free, and the single highest-impact half-day in local marketing. Don't leave anything blank: hours, services, description, service areas, photos. Google rewards completeness — and so do nervous homeowners comparing three roofers at 9pm.

2. Get your categories exactly right

Your primary category ("Roofing contractor", not "Contractor") is one of the strongest signals you control. Add every secondary category that honestly applies.

3. Add photos every week

Real jobs, not stock. Before-and-afters, in-progress shots, the finished article. Google's own numbers say businesses with photos get more calls and direction requests — and a profile whose last photo is from 2023 tells customers you might not be trading.

4. Build a review habit

The firms winning the map pack aren't lucky — they ask. Text every happy customer the direct review link the day you finish. Reply to every review, good and bad; the reply is read by a hundred future customers, not just the reviewer.

5. Make your name, address and number consistent

Your business details should match everywhere they appear — profile, website, directories. Sloppy inconsistencies (old number here, trading name there) quietly erode Google's confidence in you.

6. Give every service its own page

One "Services" page listing nine trades ranks for none of them. "Roof repairs", "flat roofing", "gutter cleaning" — each earns its own page, written around what a customer would actually search.

7. Build pages for the towns you cover

If you work across four towns, you need pages for four towns — honest ones, describing real service in real places, not copy-pasted with the town name swapped. This is how you appear for "[trade] in [town]" beyond your home base.

8. Fix your page titles

The title is the blue link in Google. "Home | Bloggs Ltd" wins nothing; "Roof Repairs in Taunton | Bloggs Roofing" wins clicks. Every page: what you do, where you do it, who you are.

9. Be fast on a phone

Most of your customers find you on a mobile, often on site or in a kitchen mid-crisis. If your site takes six seconds and jumps around while loading, they're back on Google before your hero image appears. Test it on your own phone, on 4G, honestly.

10. Install the free scoreboard

Google Search Console is free and shows exactly what you rank for, what people click on, and what's climbing. Ten minutes to set up; it turns SEO from guesswork into a scoreboard.

The honest caveat

Every one of these is doable yourself — that's why we published the list. The catch is that half of them aren't tasks, they're habits: weekly photos, review asks, page-by-page improvements. If you'd rather stay on the tools while someone runs the system for you, that's exactly what our SEO service and profile management are for. Start with the free audit and see which items you've already got covered.