Whether you already have a website to advertise your trade or you’re thinking of getting one, SEO is a term that you’ll hear floating around in almost every conversation.
That’s because it’s an important element of marketing your website, regardless of whether you’re a tradesman or not. Every business, if it wants to be successful, has to put some thought into their SEO efforts and online presence.
For that reason, it’s also super important to understand what it is and how you can make it work to your advantage. You might already know what SEO stands for, but not how it works, which is why we’re going to give you the complete guide to SEO for tradesmen. Packed with both obvious and less-obvious tidbits, you’ll hopefully come away from this with a whole new perspective on your website.
What Is SEO And Why Is It Important?
Let’s start off by unrolling that little acronym. SEO stands for search engine optimisation, which should already be giving you some clues as to what it’s about.
Because we rely so heavily on smartphones and search engines on the internet, SEO is a powerful tool for a tradesman to use, giving you an advantage over your competitors if their website isn’t optimised very well. To put it simply: the higher a site ranks in local search results, the more likely people are to see and click it.
But what do we mean by optimise? We’ll cover the different aspects of it in more detail later, but it’s basically about getting your house in order. You want potential customers to find you easily, and you want to be as high up in their local search results as possible. That means you need to put into practice a few things that search engines like in order to scoop up the traffic and the enquiries for the terms that best suit you. Maybe that’s ‘local electrician’ or maybe it’s ‘best plumber near me’, but the businesses and tradespeople appearing the highest for those terms have essentially got their SEO game on point.
With search engine optimisation for your trade website, you’re essentially working to make sure the algorithm understands what you’re offering and how it best relates to people searching. Relevant keywords, content and other elements help the Bing and Google search engine bots to understand you, so that they aren’t just serving random results to users.
How Can SEO Benefit A Tradesman
Given all the above, you should probably be starting to see how SEO can benefit you as a tradesperson. It’s not just for big brands and shops, you can use SEO to make sure your business is being found by more and more potential customers. Here are just a few ways you can benefit from SEO for your website:
- Best your competitors – By appearing higher in the rankings, people are more likely to click on your site, meaning you win more business than your competitors.
- Get more traffic, get more customers – The more people that are exposed to your website in the search results, the more likely they are to call you, meaning your customer base expands significantly.
- Building more income – Because of the previous point, you can start expecting to generate more income, which is really what all this is about, right?
- Get a better reputation – You might not realise it, but the simple act of appearing in someone’s search results when they look for you helps to generate better trust, because people will start to recognise you as a trusted brand.
What Are The Two Main Types Of SEO?
Let’s start getting into the nitty gritty of it, shall we? You can cut the search engine optimisation pie into a lot of different slices, but let’s start with the major split: on-page SEO and off-page SEO. And yes, it’s as simple as it sounds:
- On-page SEO is everything on your own website that you can use to improve your rankings. From the amount of time it takes for your pages to load to how your content is structured, it all counts. That means there are both technical aspects to this as well as visual ones too.
- Off-page SEO is everything you can do elsewhere on the internet, on other platforms, to help boost those rankings. This is things like making sure your trade business appears in directories and getting genuine links to your website from other trusted sources.
Which Works Better: On-page or Off-page SEO?
You’re asking the right questions, but unfortunately, there is no “one or the other” angle to take here. In order to succeed with local SEO, you need to be getting both right. The two worlds go hand in hand and can help inform each other in the long run. That means getting both slices of that pie.
So now let’s dive down another layer and get a little bit more technical.
On-page & Technical SEO Features For Tradesmen Websites
- Keywords – Short and long, keywords should be naturally distributed across your site, letting search engines and users know what you’re about
- URLs – A well-structured URL hierarchy lets search engines know what different pages are about and make your website easy to understand.
- Title tags and meta descriptions – Similarly, title tags and meta descriptions help search engine bots to categorise your site, knowing when to serve your site in the results.
- Industry-related content – Valuable, insightful and engaging. All your content should be this, giving not only another sign of what industry you’re in but also that you can be trusted. This is why you’ll often hear the phrase “content is king”.
- Internal and external links – Internal links help to associate different services and make your site easier to navigate, while external links offer some value to your audience and can build mutually-beneficial relationships.
- Responsive design – The simple fact of whether your site can be easily viewed and navigated on different screen sizes is something search engines prioritise.
- Fast page loading – The longer it takes for your pages to load, the lower your score will be for users, especially since people don’t hang around long these days before clicking away.
Off-page Features For Tradesmen Websites
- Link building – The number one way to show your website is respected is to have links back to your website from other places on the internet. Not only is it a gateway for customers to reach you, but links from trusted sources help to boost how search engines see you.
- Influencers – Influencers mentioning writing about you, posting about you on social media and linking to you is yet another way to show you have a trustworthy brand.
- Content marketing – It’s that word again. This time, content for other platforms, whether it’s YouTube or a Q&A on someone else’s website, will give you added value and opportunities for backlinks.
Are There Any Disadvantages To SEO?
We’ve spoken a lot about how SEO can improve things, but are there any disadvantages to the practice of optimising your website? The answer is no, not if you’re doing it well.
Some people find they get more attention and competition once they up their SEO game, but it’s only a natural part of growing your business and it can be planned into your seo strategy.
There are, however, some crucial SEO mistakes that people make that put people off…here are our seven deadly sins for trades SEO.
The Biggest SEO Mistakes For A Tradesmen
- Not following the latest SEO best practices – SEO is something that keeps on evolving – the shift to Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is one change sending shockwaves through the industry right now – so if you optimise once and never come back to it, you’re going to suffer in the rankings as things fluctuate. You need to constantly be looking forward to the next big change.
- Cheating the system – there are some local SEO tactics that we’ve not covered here because search engines can penalise your website if you’re found to be gaming the system – keyword stuffing is one such example, where you simply fill your site to the brim with keywords without any relevant structure for the user.
- Not understanding your audience – Without learning about your customers and what they’re after, you can’t effectively optimise your site. When you know your audience better, you can make a better plan.
- Not using Google analytics to track conversions – You can put all your efforts into driving traffic to your site via local SEO tactics, but if people don’t get leads from that traffic then it’s all for nothing. Checking your Google analytics with search engines can help you understand where you need to improve things.
- Using other people’s content – Content may be king, but that doesn’t mean you can take it from someone else’s site. Whether it’s imagery or words, you can land yourself in some hot legal water as well as penalisation from search engines. Always write your own, unique and genuine content for the best results.
- Not localising your SEO – Because you’re a tradesman, you can likely only reach certain local areas around you, so if you don’t localise your optimisation, you’re not going to appear to enough people in the right region.
- Not making your site mobile-friendly – From responsive web design so that your site looks good on the screen of a smartphone to offering click-to-call buttons so that people can get in contact straight away, sites that are not mobile-friendly really are missing a trick.
Important SEO Tools For Tradesmen Websites
In addition to the directories that we’ve covered recently, which are themselves a kind of tool, there are some really important tools for helping SEO on websites for trades. Here are four of the absolute musts if you’re just getting started:
- Google Analytics – to check the data from your website, including traffic and conversions
- Google Ads Keyword Planner – to plan out the keywords related to your trade
- Google Search Console – to see how Google views your website
- Google Trends – To find out what’s trending, adding to your keyword and content efforts
If all this seems like a lot, that’s because it is. SEO isn’t one simple and easy trick you can use to get more business. It’s ongoing and evolving, with industry nuances that mean you have to always be ahead of algorithm updates and changes. If that sounds like a lot of effort that you’d rather not add to the day-to-day running of your trade, then don’t worry – at Leblek, we handle SEO for tradesmen with ease.
Just as your bread and butter might be keeping the power on or keeping the water flowing in the right place, we’ve made it our business to know all about getting SEO right for people like you. Whether you want to chat about our SEO service as part of a new website design or getting a plan together to improve the rankings of your current site, contact us today and we’ll be glad to help.
