How to boost your SEO for trades businesses

SEO is now a multi-billion-pound industry, focused on improving website visibility. It’s a complex process and often one where those with the biggest budgets get the best rewards.

By joining Checkatrade, we offer some great solutions to help improve your rankings and gain new customers from search engines.

Below, we’ve outlined how this is done and some top trades SEO advice. We’ve also looked at the best local business SEO strategies.

What is SEO?

SEO stands for “search engine optimisation”. This term covers activities that help businesses (usually their website, social media pages, or directory listing) rank higher in search engines like Google.

If you want to appear on Google when someone searches for a product or service you offer, you need SEO.

The elements of SEO include:

• On page: Improving your site’s content and ensuring it’s relevant for keywords you’d like to rank for. A key part of this is keyword research
• Content: There’s no SEO without content. Google’s little bots read content to understand what the page is about and then rank it if it makes the cut. Also, content is the difference between a customer staying or leaving your website, socials or business listing
• Link building: Asking other sites to link to your website. This sends extra traffic and improves your site’s authority
• Technical SEO: Improving the way your site works. For example, you could make it more secure or load faster

By covering these areas and working to improve them, you can attempt to boost the rankings of your website.

You’ll need to create content that’s relevant for users and provide a better experience for visitors to your site.

The below graphic shows some of the key areas:

What is local business SEO?

In addition to the above three areas, you can use local SEO tactics to improve your rankings in a specific area.

This helps reduce the area you’re focused on to find more locally relevant customers.

For example, trying to rank for “builder” is highly competitive and will include many customers in regions you can’t serve. Instead, you would try to rank for a local place, i.e. “builder in Liverpool”.

This helps you reach a more targeted audience and will be easier to rank for.

You’ll still be competing with other Liverpool builders who also do local SEO, or have websites that rank well. But this is an area where Checkatrade can help.

What is a local SEO strategy?

Some of the best local SEO tactics include:

• Creating content that’s relevant to the local area
• Ensuring your locations and contact details are mentioned on your website and elsewhere (also known as local SEO citations)
• Getting local reviews
• Get your company added to high-quality directories, such as Checkatrade

Why is SEO important for tradespeople?

Creating a website and appearing in search results has never been easier, leading to many new businesses.

This increased competition also means it’s harder to stand out in a crowded market.

For this reason, SEO is important for tradespeople as it gives you the best chance to rank for the terms your prospective customers are searching for.

Looking for some tips for your trade business? Why not try one of our dedicated guides?

• What’s so important about SEO for roofers?
• How can electricians benefit from SEO?
• What’s so good about SEO for gardeners?
• Why construction companies can benefit from SEO
• How SEO helps plumbers show up in searches
• HVAC SEO ideas for your central heating business

After all, only one site can rank number one on Google for each term.

Aren’t all websites SEO-friendly?

It’s a myth that websites are automatically optimised for SEO. You must put time and energy into SEO to get the best results.

SEO is an ever-changing process, so there’s always new ways you could better optimise your site.

Trade SEO is a long-term process. It takes time to make the improvements, for them to be accessed by search engines and for results to change.

This process is well worth it in the long run. But if you need a quick solution, you could consider running paid adverts on search engines – known as pay-per-click marketing.

Our guide on how Google and PPC works is a great place to start.

How does Checkatrade boost SEO?

As we’ve established, SEO for tradespeople is hard. It takes a lot of time, and you’ll need a budget for SEO.

If you don’t have the resources to do your trades SEO or pay for an SEO agency, you could partner with another site.

This is called barnacle SEO. Much like how barnacles attach to bigger creatures and ships, you can place your brand on a larger site.

Instead of trying to rank with your site, your aim is that the larger site will rank for the terms instead. It’s a fantastic solution for small businesses that don’t have the time or budget to compete.

Benefit from Checkatrade’s SEO strategy and team

One way you can do this is by joining Checkatrade and creating a profile. We have a highly skilled SEO team internally and work with other agencies to create hundreds of articles every month.

As a result of this work, we currently rank for over 518,000 keywords*, reaching customers in all sorts of regions and niches.

So, when people search for guides, expert advice pieces and industry news, they’ll likely see a piece of Checkatrade content.

From those pieces, they can search our database of tradespeople, helping our members to get more business.

In addition to our content, we have category pages for different regions (e.g. ‘electricians in Newcastle’). These pages help our members with local SEO, as we target regional terms and put Checkatrade members in the results.

Lastly, all our member pages are optimised in line with SEO best practices, increasing the chance you’ll appear for the terms people are searching for.

SEO for trades FAQs

What are local SEO citations and the benefits of service reviews?

Local SEO citations are a key part of trades SEO and any good local SEO strategy.

They include all of the times when another website mentions your contact details and company name. These citations help show you’re a real business and give you added authority.

Service reviews are also known as review snippets, a type of rich snippet. They are reviews of your services that can appear directly in the search results.

These can be taken from your own site (with the right markup), your Checkatrade profile, or other sources. For more details, read our rich snippets guide.

Will you do SEO on my website?

Whilst we can help your business get known on search engines through our content and profile pages, we can’t do SEO on your website.

We do, however, have details on excellent web designers in the UK that you can browse.

Will you replace my SEO agency?

No, we wouldn’t recommend you stop other existing SEO work even if you add a Checkatrade profile.

It’s still important to optimise your own website where possible, especially if you already use an agency you’re happy with.

How can I learn more about SEO?

We highly recommend the learn SEO guide from Moz, who’ve been helping people learn about SEO for over 15 years. Best of all, it’s absolutely free.

How can you leverage top sites to appear on Google search results?

With barnacle SEO, if you can get listed on another site that already ranks well, you can appear when people are reading their content.

By appearing on Checkatrade, you’ll gain the benefit of our strong performing site. This will increase the chance your Checkatrade listing will appear in search engines.

Useful checklist to boost your SEO with Checkatrade

• To boost SEO, you need to improve your content, link-building, and technical SEO
• Local SEO is an excellent way to improve your rankings locally
• By joining Checkatrade, you get a well-optimised profile page and the chance to receive new customers from our content
• We won’t replace your SEO agency, but are a great low-cost way for you to get more customers from search engines

SEO for trades is vital for visibility, but covering all bases in your marketing strategy is important. Check out our guide to social media marketing for more tips for boosting your business.

* Data from SEMrush tool – last checked November 2024