Local SEO for trades: how to be the one they call when the boiler dies

You run one van, maybe three. The work is good and most of it still turns up because somebody's neighbour passed on your number. This article is about the jobs you never hear about: the boiler that packs up at half six on a Tuesday, the consumer unit that trips and will not reset, the water coming through a bedroom ceiling on a Sunday. That homeowner has a phone in their hand and has rung somebody inside two minutes, and you were nowhere in the decision.

Winning that work is two separate jobs: appearing in the map pack, and being callable the second you do. Most trades I speak to have paid for the first and done nothing about the second, which is how a firm sits third in the pack and still loses half the calls. Everything below is ordered by return per hour spent, because your evenings are worth more than a checklist that pretends every line is equal. Finish the first two sections and you have taken most of what is available.

Ninety seconds, one thumb, one bar of signal

Picture the person searching. Not a browser, a woman in a cold house with a toddler, or a landlord who has just had a phone call he did not want. They tap the top three map results in turn, and the first listing with a number they can press gets rung. If it rings out, they press the next one.

Two things get rewarded there: being in the top three, and having a phone that gets answered. The first takes months. The second takes a Saturday morning.

1. Google Business Profile, and the field that is usually wrong

For "electrician maidstone" or "emergency plumber near me", the map pack sits above the ordinary blue links and takes most of the taps. That block is fed by your Business Profile, not your website. It is free, and most of your first month's return is sitting in it.

The primary category earns more than everything else combined

You get one primary category and up to nine additional ones. The primary decides which searches you are eligible for at all, and it is the field I find wrong most often. The classic is a heating engineer filed under Plumber: he fits and repairs boilers all week, but Google has him down as the man for a dripping tap, so "boiler repair" and "new boiler" go to the firm two miles up the road. That is a £90 callout instead of a £3,200 install, week after week.

Checking takes ten minutes. Search your best money term in a private window and read the category printed under each of the top three map results. If all three say Heating Contractor and yours says Plumber, change it once and leave it alone. The rest of the fields are covered in the Business Profile guide.

Services, with prices where you can bear it

The services list is free shelf space and most profiles have it half empty. Each entry takes a name and up to 300 characters of description, and Google reads that text against what people type. Put the priced work in: boiler service £95, EICR on a three-bed £180, gutter clear £70. Prices thin out the tyre-kickers before your phone rings.

Service area, not a pretend shopfront

If a customer cannot turn up at your premises and be served, take the address off the listing and set a service area instead. A fake shopfront at your home address is one of the fastest routes to a suspension, and reinstatement takes weeks you cannot spare. And a service area does not make you rank across it, you rank in a radius around your pin, strong in your own town, competitive five to eight miles out, thin past twelve.

Bank holiday hours beat a month of posts

People use the "open now" filter more than you would think, and wrong hours lose you calls silently. Set the normal week properly, then add special hours for Christmas, New Year, the May bank holidays, Easter and the August weekend. Those are exactly the days heating fails and exactly the days your competitors' listings say closed.

Photographs of your van, not a stock photo of a van

Three or four a month beats forty uploaded in one afternoon. Real work only: the van outside a job, the consumer unit before and after, the flashing at the point it stopped leaking. If the van and the website look like two different companies, that is a branding problem pretending to be a marketing one.

2. Reviews: ask on the day, not next week

Prominence is the third of Google's three local ranking factors and it is mostly reviews. It is also the only one you control outright. The mistake is treating them as a total to accumulate, when rate and recency count for far more than the running number.

Ask on the doorstep while she is still relieved the leak has stopped, then send the link by text before you pull off the kerb. Save the short link from your profile as a text template so it takes six seconds. A face to face ask followed by a text is the version worth aiming at, because an email sent a week later is competing with a full inbox and a job the customer has already forgotten.

Forty reviews with four from this month beats a hundred and twenty whose newest is from 2021, for ranking and for the person reading them. Two to four a month is realistic for one van, roughly one job in ten. Do not try to catch up in a week, twenty reviews in seven days after two silent years is the exact shape the filters look for.

3. One real page per service, one per town

The paragraph reading "we cover Maidstone, Ashford, Canterbury, Faversham, Sittingbourne and Whitstable" does nothing whatsoever. There is no content on that page about any of those places, so there is nothing to rank and nothing for a homeowner in Faversham to believe. One page cannot be the best result for six towns.

Do services first, higher intent, less competition per page. Emergency boiler repair, boiler installation, landlord gas safety certificates, fuse board upgrades, flat roof repairs. One page each, written as though the reader has that exact problem in front of them now. Then add two or three towns, and only the ones you actually want more work from.

The test is simple: if you could write it from a template, do not publish it. Ten thin near-identical pages are worse than none, because they teach Google that your site is padding. Link the pairs in the body copy, a line on the boiler repair page saying most of your emergency work is around Headcorn, with that phrase linking through. A footer stuffed with thirty place names is worth nothing.

4. The emergency path: tap-to-call, WhatsApp, and who answers at seven in the evening

This is the half nobody sells you, and the half that pays fastest. A large share of emergency trade enquiries lands outside eight-to-five: evenings, early mornings, Sunday afternoons. Those enquiries do not wait until Monday. They go to whoever picks up.

• The number in the header of every page as a proper tel: link, thumb-reachable, never baked into an image.
• No form anywhere in the emergency path. A contact form at half six in the morning is where the enquiry dies.
• WhatsApp Business with a wa.me link. Half the value is the photo, an E133 on a Worcester, or the wet patch under the cylinder, which lets you triage without driving anywhere.
• Hours in words beside the number. "Emergency callout until 10pm, seven days" converts better than a 24/7 badge nobody believes.
• A voicemail that gives a time. "I'm on a job until four. Leave your postcode and what's happened and I'll ring you straight back."

If you cannot answer, buy the answers. A UK call-answering service runs roughly £1 to £2 a call, or £50 to £120 a month for a small package, and texts you the name, postcode and problem inside a minute. One recovered boiler swap pays for a year of it.

The unprofitable version: if you do not want the phone going at nine at night, do not build the emergency path at all. Publish your hours plainly and compete on planned work, servicing, installs, rewires, landlord certificates. That is better business anyway, because it can be diarised and priced without somebody standing in a cold kitchen watching you do it.

5. Accreditations do two jobs at once

Gas Safe, NICEIC, TrustMark and the rest are trust signals to a homeowner and citations to Google at the same time, each one a listing on a real, relevant domain carrying your name, address and phone number. Most trades hold three or four and bury them in the footer as a row of grey logos.

Put the registration number in the text, not just the badge. Your six-digit Gas Safe number belongs in the header, the footer and on every gas service page, because a homeowner can check it on the register in half a minute and the careful ones do. A national lead-generation site cannot show one at all.

Checkatrade earns its warning. If you have 312 reviews there and nine on Google, your reputation is parked on a platform that shows the same customer three of your competitors on the way past. Keep it if it pays on cost per won job over a three-month test, and ask for the Google review anyway, every time.

6. Citations: about six, then stop

The £99 "submit your business to 200 directories" package is dead money and has been for years. What counts is a short list, filled in identically. Pick one version of your name, address and phone number, keep it in a note on your phone, and paste it character for character.

• Google Business Profile, everything else is a rounding error next to it.
• Bing Places, two minutes, imports straight from Google.
• Apple Business Connect, free, and it feeds Apple Maps and Siri.
• Your Facebook page, with the address, hours and phone number filled in.
• Yell at the free tier, past its best, still crawled.
• Your trade body listing: Gas Safe Register, NICEIC find-a-contractor, NAPIT, OFTEC, FMB.

That is the lot. Everything past it is somebody's affiliate income dressed up as a ranking factor.

What to ignore entirely

Weekly blogging. Twenty three-hundred-word posts about "five signs your boiler needs replacing" do nothing, because a hundred national content mills published that first with more budget behind them. One honest piece built from your last twelve invoices, what a full rewire actually cost this year, by property size, and what pushes a price up, will out-earn all twenty. If you hate writing, do not force it.

Buying links. The £300-a-month packages, the guest posts on sites nobody reads, the "DA50 placement" emails. Local rankings run on proximity, relevance and prominence, and a bought link is none of the three. You would be risking a manual penalty to nudge a factor that barely applies to you.

National directories that resell your enquiry. You pay to bid against four other firms for a job already being quoted at your price, and the homeowner gets five calls in an hour and trusts none of them. Some trades win steady work from them for years, so judge on cost per won job over three months and cancel on the number, not the feeling. The full local SEO checklist covers which are worth a test.

A firm with thirty years of goodwill is not starting from zero online. It is starting from a reputation nobody can find.

What moves in weeks, and what takes months

A common pattern in this trade: hundreds of Checkatrade reviews, a handful on Google, and thirty years of work nobody can search for. The reviews are on the wrong platform for the search that matters, and the website has no page for the thing being searched. Expect the shape of the fix to be slow at the front. The first six weeks of category corrections, review habits and new pages usually look like nothing at all, and a reasonable person would call it wasted money.

So be honest about the runway. If you cannot fund six quiet weeks, start with a channel that pays out faster. And if you are in a city where the top three all hold two hundred reviews and a decade of history, organic local SEO is probably not your way in this year, put the money into Google Ads and a habit of ringing back within five minutes. I would rather say that in the first conversation than bill you for six months of nothing.

If you want a second opinion, send me your Business Profile link and your postcode. I will tell you which category you are sitting on, roughly what it is costing you, and the two things worth doing first. Start there.