Most tradespeople we meet have one page on their website that lists everything they do, and it ranks for nothing.
That is not a criticism of the site. It is a structural problem, and it is fixable. Google needs a specific page to point at for a specific search. If a customer in Naas searches “rewire quote Naas”, Google is looking for a page about rewires that mentions Naas. A single page titled “Services” covering nine trades across four counties gives it nothing to work with.
Here is the structure we use for every trades client, and roughly the order to build it in.
1. Start with what people actually search
Not what you call the work — what customers call it.
Electricians say “consumer unit upgrade”. Customers search “fuse board replacement”. Plumbers say “power flush”. Customers search “radiators not heating up”. Roofers say “flashing repair”. Customers search “leak where the roof meets the chimney”.
Use Google’s own autocomplete and the “People also ask” boxes. Type your trade plus your town and note what appears. Those suggestions are drawn from real search behaviour, and they are free.
2. One page per service
This is the single biggest change most trades sites need.
If you do rewires, EV charger installation, fault-finding and certification, that is four pages, not four paragraphs. Each one should cover:
- What the job involves, in plain terms
- Roughly what it costs, or the factors that determine the cost
- How long it takes
- What certification or insurance applies
- Photos of the work
- A quote form and a phone number
Four decent pages will out-perform one excellent one, every time.
3. Then a page per town
Location pages get a bad reputation because they are so often done badly — the same 300 words with the town name swapped out, twenty times over. Google has been discounting that since roughly 2012.
A location page earns its place when it contains something genuinely specific:
- Jobs you have actually completed in that town, with photos
- Local landmarks or estates you have worked on
- Response times from your base
- Anything particular about the housing stock — older terraces with specific wiring, estates built in a certain era
If you cannot write 400 genuinely specific words about a town, do not create a page for it. Cover it within a broader county page instead.
4. Get your details consistent everywhere
Your business name, address and phone number — the “NAP” — need to be identical everywhere they appear online. Not similar. Identical.
“Doyle Plumbing & Heating, Unit 4 Douglas Business Park, Cork” and “Doyle Plumbing and Heating Ltd, Douglas Business Pk, Co. Cork” read as two different businesses to a machine.
Priority places to fix in Ireland: Google Business Profile, your own website footer, Golden Pages, Yelp, Facebook, and any trade association directory you belong to — RGI, Safe Electric, CIF, and so on. Those trade body listings carry real weight because they are hard to fake.
5. Add the structured data
Schema markup is code that tells Google exactly what your business is, where it operates and what it offers. It does not change what a visitor sees, but it helps Google understand the page correctly and can produce richer search results.
For a local trade, the ones that matter are LocalBusiness, Service and FAQPage. Any competent developer can add these in an afternoon.
6. Build reviews continuously, not in bursts
Reviews affect both your ranking and the click-through rate once you are ranking. A steady trickle beats a burst — twenty reviews arriving in one week looks exactly like what it usually is.
Ask every satisfied customer, once, the day after the job. Make it one tap. Never offer anything in exchange, which is both against Google’s rules and, since the Consumer Rights Act 2022, a legal problem in Ireland.
The mistakes that keep trades on page two
Hiding the phone number. It should be in the header, in the footer, and tappable on mobile. Some sites put it in an image, where it cannot be tapped or read.
No pricing at all. You do not have to publish a full price list, but “from €X” or “typical range” filters out time-wasters and increases enquiry quality dramatically.
A slow site. Over half of mobile visitors abandon a page that takes more than three seconds. On rural mobile data, a heavy site can take considerably longer than that.
Stock photos of American tradesmen. Customers can tell. Photographs of your own work, even taken on a phone, build far more trust.
Chasing the whole country. Ranking well in three counties is worth more than ranking nowhere in twenty-six.
Realistic timelines
- Google Business Profile improvements: 4–8 weeks
- Service pages beginning to rank: 2–4 months
- Competitive town-level rankings: 4–9 months
- County-wide visibility: 9–18 months
Anyone promising faster than that is either targeting search terms nobody uses, or is about to disappoint you.
Where to start if you only do one thing
Complete your Google Business Profile properly and build a review habit. It is free, it takes an afternoon, and for most trades it produces more calls in the first three months than anything else on this list.
Everything else compounds on top of it.