SEO for Tradies

The problem, honestly

You’re flat out on the tools. Marketing is the thing you think about at 9pm and do nothing about, because who has time. Meanwhile some competitor with a worse reputation and a better Google listing is picking up the jobs that should be yours, because Google doesn’t rank reputation. It ranks whoever set their online presence up properly.

Most tradies don’t need much to win here. Outside the cities the competition is thin, and half the trade businesses in any Gippsland town have a Google listing with wrong hours, no photos and three reviews. Being the one who does it properly is a low bar with a big payoff.

What I actually do

The short version: I fix your Google Business Profile so Google knows exactly what you do and where, sort out your website (or build you one if what you’ve got is beyond saving), get your reviews growing on autopilot, and put content on your site that matches what locals search. Then I build you the same systems I run on my own business, so the whole thing keeps ticking over without you touching it. Whether you’re a sparkie, plumber, chippie, builder or mechanic, the searches differ but the playbook doesn’t.

Then, and this is the bit other agencies won’t offer, I teach you how it all works as we go, in plain English. My SEO program runs six months and ends with a handover, because my goal is that you don’t need me forever. No lock-in contracts. If you’d rather keep me around after that, there’s a small monthly option, but that’s your call, not a trap.

What local SEO actually involves for a tradie

“Local SEO” sounds like agency jargon, so here’s the actual work, in the order I’d do it for you.

Most of it starts with your Google Business Profile. That’s the listing with the map, the hours and the reviews that comes up when someone searches “plumber sale” or “electrician lakes entrance”. Google fills it with whatever it was given years ago, which for a lot of trade businesses means a category picked at random, a landline that rings out and no photos. Set up properly, it has the right primary category (Electrician, not Contractor or Home Improvement), and because you drive to jobs rather than serve customers at a shopfront, it shows your service area, the towns from Sale through Bairnsdale out to Lakes Entrance, instead of your home address. Then it gets photos of real jobs. The switchboard you rewired in Orbost beats a stock photo of a bloke in a hard hat, both for Google and for the customer deciding who to ring. A short update or photo posted every few weeks keeps the listing looking like a business that answers its phone.

Reviews carry more weight than most tradies realise, and the words matter as much as the stars. When a customer writes “rewired our place in Mallacoota in a day, tidy work”, that one review tells Google your trade and your town in a customer’s own voice. The way to get reviews like that without nagging anyone is to ask once, at the right moment: the job’s done, the customer’s happy, and you text them a direct link they can tap. Google gives every profile one. Most happy customers will do it on the spot, and the ones who won’t were never going to.

Your website’s job is to back the listing up. Google wants a page that says plainly what you do and where you do it. A plumber covering Sale does better with a page about hot water system replacements in Sale than with a homepage that says “quality workmanship at competitive prices”, because nobody has ever typed that into Google.

Citations are the boring part. They’re the places your business name, address and phone number appear around the web: Yellow Pages, Hipages, Localsearch, the community directory your shire runs. Google cross-checks them against your listing, and if half of them still show the number from two phones ago, it trusts your details a little less. Fixing them is dull, once-off work that quietly helps everything else.

As for “content that matches what locals search”, that means writing pages for the questions customers already ask you. If you’re a sparkie and every second winter callout starts with a safety switch that keeps tripping, a plain page answering that question, with your name and Bairnsdale on it, is what the next person finds when they search it at 9pm. That’s the whole trick, and it’s the same one I used to get this page in front of you.

Fair question: have you done this for tradies before?

Here’s how I’ll answer that. Instead of fabricating numbers to lure you in, or showing you screenshots of websites that don’t exist, I’m using my own business’s SEO as the reference. I’m my own perfect client.

I started Your Mate Agency a bit over a year ago, and the same thing happened to me that happens to every tradie who gets busy: once the client work stacked up, the time I had to work on being found online disappeared. The exact thing I do for a living, and I couldn’t find the hours to do it for myself. Sound familiar?

So I built systems that run most of it for me. My Google listing stays active, my reviews grow, my site publishes content that matches what people search, and I get on with the actual work. You found this page because those systems put it in front of you. That’s the product, demonstrating itself.

Do this yourself before you pay anyone

I meant it earlier about not needing me yet. Here’s an afternoon of free work that puts you ahead of half the trade businesses in Gippsland.

1. Claim and verify your Google Business Profile. Search your business name, click “Own this business?” and follow the prompts. Verification is usually a postcard or a quick video of your ute and tools.
2. Fix your hours and phone number. If the listing shows a landline you disconnected in 2019, that’s costing you calls today.
3. Add at least ten photos of real jobs. The deck in Lakes Entrance, the bathroom in Sale, the reroof in Orbost. Phone photos are fine. Stock photos are worse than nothing.
4. Check your primary category. Plumber, Electrician, Carpenter, Builder. If it says General Contractor, change it.
5. Get your review link and text it to your last five happy customers. It’s under “Ask for reviews” in your profile. One line does it: “if you were happy with the job, a Google review would be a big help.”
6. Reply to the reviews you already have. Two sentences each. It shows Google, and the next customer reading them, that someone’s home.

If you get through that list and want the rest done properly and explained as you go, that’s what the six-month program is for.

What it costs

My SEO prices are published, no sales call required. The one-off audit if you want to do it yourself, the six-month program if you want it done and explained, all of it with real numbers on the page.

Questions tradies ask me