Here Are 5 SEO Tips for Those in the Trades Looking to Build a Search Presence

For those in the trades, SEO probably seems like a foreign language. That’s okay—we wouldn’t know the first thing about replacing a roof, wiring a home, or fixing a broken pipe. 

Still, SEO is as relevant as ever for trades and home services businesses. Just consider these statistics from CallRail:

• 98% find information about local businesses online
• More than 55% of consumers run a search before booking with a home services business

And what’s more, somewhere between 60–70% of consumers prefer to book home services appointments online.

But if you’re in the trades and looking to kickstart your SEO, where do you start? The search landscape is constantly changing, and it can often feel like a moving target. However, our digital marketing experts at Armada Digital have a few pieces of advice that trades businesses can put into practice now—and that will always be relevant.

Let’s take a look.

1. Maintain a User-Friendly Website

First things first: to get traffic, you need a website. More importantly, for that traffic to mean anything, your website needs to be user-friendly and intuitive to navigate.

A website for a trades business doesn’t need to be anything overly fancy. But it does need to load quickly and be responsive enough to work well on all devices—particularly mobile devices, where the majority of searches now take place.

2. Set Up Google Analytics and Search Console

Whether you’re planning to run your SEO yourself for the long term or if you anticipate working with an agency down the line, historical data is a powerful tool. 

Google Analytics and Google Search Console are your best tools for tracking your website’s performance in search, and that performance will help determine the most effective strategies to use moving forward.

Here are Google’s instructions for Search Console and Analytics.

3. Optimize Your Local Presence & Get More Reviews

Search marketing is everything when it comes to your digital presence as a trades business—but local search is everything when it comes to SEO for service-based businesses. Results from Google’s “map pack” show up high on search results pages and are much more likely to drive conversions.

How do you get there? By maintaining a strong local presence and establishing your reputation as a top service provider in the area. That requires a number of things, but getting more reviews is one of the single best things you can do as a business based in a particular geographical area. 

While you can’t incentivize customers to leave reviews—it’s against Google’s TOS—there’s nothing that says you can’t ask for them. After completing a project with a happy customer, email them a link to your Google Business Profile to provide a direct route for them to leave a review—and respond once they’ve left you a review.

Document and Photograph Your Work

This is more of a general marketing tip than an SEO tip—but as it turns out, a lot of SEO best practices do just overlap with good practices as a business.

One area we see that can often be an afterthought for trades businesses is documenting their work. In particular, service businesses should take high-quality photos of what they do.

Consider it this way: if you’re buying a physical product, you want to know what it looks like, right? Online stores will have multiple high-quality photos of their offerings so customers know exactly what they’re getting.

Getting photos of trades projects is just as important. Whether it’s a beautiful new roof, an eye-catching sign, a section of cleverly and tidily hidden wiring—it’s worth getting photos of it.

Google Search is getting increasingly visual, and those photos paint a clearer picture of what your business does on your website, in your Google Business Profile, and across social media.

Write Quality Content

If you’ve heard “content is king” once, you’ve heard it a million times. But it still is true—with an important addendum: quality.

While SEO—for trades and everyone else—was once about the volume of content you could produce and the number of times you could stick keywords into that content, search has evolved greatly in that time.

From improvements to the algorithm to AI summaries, Google has continued to focus on the quality of content. That’s content that demonstrates expertise, authority, and genuine value, as well as authenticity.

Adding content to your website is an important way to communicate your business’s authority in your field. While it can be difficult to know what to write about, consider these options:

• Service pages describing your offerings in detail
• Location pages overviewing your offerings across all service areas
• Blog posts answering common questions you get from customers
• Project features showing off the work your team did and how you pulled it off

Answering common questions is an especially important type of content to pursue. While it doesn’t work exactly the same way, AI summaries operate somewhat similarly to Google’s “People Also Ask” search feature. 

By answering questions related to the different keywords you’re aiming to rank for, your business can begin to show up in these zero-click searches and build authority and name recognition while driving traffic.

Need a Hand? Armada Digital Can Help

Each of the above tasks will help improve your business’s performance in search results, either directly or indirectly. In a lot of ways, they’re also just good practices to follow in digital marketing overall.

But they also take time, they take specialized skills, and of course these five things are far from an exhaustive list of how to maximize the SEO performance that those in various trades can achieve.

If you’re in the trades and need a hand—or several—with launching your digital presence, Armada Digital is here to help! Our Platform to SEO program is designed for service-based businesses looking to establish their digital presence from scratch, while our ongoing SEO services will develop and execute on a strategy tailored to your needs and your audience.

Whether you need SEO for an existing website or you’re looking for a team to help in all areas of digital marketing, we specialize in helping those in the trades reach the right audiences and sell their services. Book an exploratory today to get started!