SEO for Tradesmen

Mastering local SEO

Doing SEO for the trades is a simple process as the tradesman will typically want to rank for “service + location” keyword combinations. However, just because something is simple, does not mean it’s easy.

Local SEO is the primary type of SEO that these businesses need to master. And as there is very limited real estate in a local SERP (less than 5 listings) it’s incredibly competitive to rank for those coveted keywords.

Add into the mix the fact that the vast amount of searches being carried out are on a mobile device, we start to build a picture of the types of optimisations we need to make first to get the site ranking well in local searches.

When it comes to ranking your site whether you are a locksmith, plumber, electrician, roofer or joiner there are some common SEO actions that you need to take in order to rank in position 1.

Firstly, let’s talk about ranking your Google My Business profile (GMB) also known as the Google Maps listing or the map pack. Traditional SEO tactics are important but the most important thing to get right is your Name, Address and Phone number information or NAP.

Google uses NAP information to understand your business as an entity on the web, therefore it’s important that their is uniformity of your information across multiple business directories and review sites so that Google trusts you as a business and is confident in ranking you.

Making the most of structured data

We like to tie all of this together on your site withe Schema.org markup, in particular the SameAs markup. By using SameAs markup on your site we can write meta data that tells Google that your site is the “same as” your companies house profile, your social profiles and your reviews. This way they can collect more information about your business and feel more confident in ranking you in a higher position.

When it comes to ranking locally, one of the things most sites are lacking is enough site power in the form of inbound links to rank well. At Type A we already have relationships with most local newspapers, chambers of commerce and even some universities that we can pitch content to in order to get a link back to your site.

Optimising for speed

As most of your traffic is coming through a mobile phone it’s incredibly important to have your site well optimised for mobile. That means we need it to be lightening fast (think under 1 second load times) and we need to to adhere to the Core Web Vitals, a set of speed an UX metrics that Google is baking into the algorithm.

For the non-geeks, Core Web Vitals are metrics that tell is how your site loads, how your site displays and how it behaves when you interact with it.

Experts in tracking and reporting

Lastly, as you are a lead generation business, we need to setup the correct analytics so we can track conversions through phone calls so we can understand the true value of SEO to your business. We do this through software called Call Tracking Metrics which hooks directly into your Google Analytics so you get a full view of what is happening on your site and where all of your leads are coming from.