SEO for Tradies

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is all about making your website more visible in search engine results, which helps bring in more organic traffic. For tradies, this means making sure people can easily find your business when they search for things like ‘plumber near me’, ‘electrician in [your suburb]’, or ‘affordable roof repairs’.

There are two main types of SEO: on-page SEO and off-page SEO.

• On-page SEO includes everything done directly on your website to help search engines find and understand your content. This can involve optimising your text, title tags, meta descriptions, image alt tags, and links – as well as more technical improvements like speeding up your site, making it mobile-friendly, fixing crawl issues, managing duplicate content, and setting up a clear, user-friendly structure.

• Off-page SEO involves activities that happen away from your website but still influence your rankings. This includes things like building quality backlinks, getting involved on social media, guest posting on relevant sites, and content marketing to boost your credibility and reach.

At Robico, we’ve done seo for tradies for years and understand what it takes to get your business in front of the right people online. Whether you’re a builder, plumber, sparky, or any other kind of tradie, we can help you develop a strong SEO strategy that brings in more local leads.

Both Google Ads and SEO have advantages and disadvantages. Google Ads can quickly drive traffic to your trades website, but it can be costly since you pay for each click. SEO builds credibility over time but may take a while to reach page 1.

Budget: With SEO, you pay for a team like ours to handle on-page and off-page tasks to improve your ranking. For Google Ads, you cover the ad costs and possibly the management of your campaigns, which can range from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars monthly.

Time Frame: You can see results from your Google Ads campaign in just a few hours. In contrast, SEO efforts might take months or even years to get your tradie website to page 1.

Expertise: SEO requires significant technical knowledge and strategy; simply adding content to your site isn’t sufficient. Google Ads, however, allows you to set up an ad without technical skills, although some planning is necessary for effectiveness.

Flexibility: Google Ads offers more control since you can pause your campaign when needed (e.g., no space in the schedule for new jobs, crew availability, etc.). SEO demands continuous effort to remain effective.

When You Stop: If you stop funding Google Ads, you will no longer appear at the top of Google. Conversely, if you stop SEO efforts, you will maintain your position until search engine algorithms change or competitors improve their rankings.

Ultimately, the choice depends on your business needs. If you need immediate results, I suggest going with Google Ads. If you can wait for new jobs, then SEO is the way to go. The best strategy combines both Google Ads and SEO, as the revenue from new projects acquired through Google Ads can help fund your ongoing marketing for your tradie business.

You can’t assume people know what you do so you need it to be on website. The best way to do this is to dedicate a page to each of the services you provide.  Just having a list of services isn’t enough to get noticed by Google. To give your website the best shot of getting attention is to make sure you do the following:

Keywords: Identify what your potential customers would be typing to find you and make sure its included in your page (e.g. 24 hour plumber near me, air con repair melbourne)

How You Can Solve Their Problem: Clearly explain your service and relate it to common issues customers face and how you can fix their issue. For example, mention how faded, peeling, or outdated paint can hurt a home’s appearance and reduce its protection against weather damage which can lead into your house painting services.

Service Area: Make it easy for potential customers to see if you work in their area—try adding a map or a list of the suburbs, cities, or regions you service.

Confidence Building: You need to tell potential customers your about experience and unique selling points that make you better than the competitors as well as building trust by including reviews and showcasing projects.

Call To Action: Now you have their attention, you need to tell them the next step to do.  Make it easy for them to get in reach out by phone, email, contact forms or booking systems.

Notifying Search Engines: once your page is live on your website, you need to let the search engines know its there as it could take a while for it to get found without prompting.

If this sounds like too much work to take on, we’re always available to have a free chat to discuss what we can do for your tradie business.

Yes we provide a full range of services all trades such as electricians, builders, plumbers, painters, just to name a few.  Not only do we provide digital marketing help with SEO and Google Ads but we can design and build easy to use tradies websites.  Don’t know how to put your words together to best describe what you do to convince customers to choose your services over your competitors as well as get the attention of the top search engines? No problem – we have a professional copywriter who will write content on your behalf using your thoughts and ideas.  We also provide a comprehensive range of branding services such as logo design, business cards, flyers, brochures, posters and more.  Let’s have a chat to discuss how Robico can help with tradie marketing.