Most tradies rent their leads. You pay a directory per enquiry, compete on price with four others who got the same lead, and own nothing at the end of it. SEO builds something you keep.
I run search programs for trade businesses directly, so a senior specialist does the work rather than an account manager relaying it. Every recommendation is judged on booked jobs, not rankings.
Agencies churn out a page for every suburb and service combination, add a blog nobody reads, and report on positions. It's cheap to produce, it's the same thing your competitors bought, and Google has been discounting it for years.
Job values swing from a $200 call-out to a $30,000 renovation, and a lot of demand is urgent, so being visible at the moment of need matters more than being visible generally. Local trust and reviews carry most of the persuasion.
Work out which jobs are actually profitable for you, then win visibility for those searches in the areas you want to work, in Google and in the AI tools people now ask for recommendations.
Whether it's an emergency or a planned job, the process is predictable. Coverage is built at each point, in Google and in the AI tools now answering these questions.
Someone works out what's wrong, whether it's urgent and roughly what it should cost. Increasingly they describe the problem to an AI assistant.
“why is my hot water not working”, “how much to rewire a house”
They shortlist a few businesses. Reviews, licensing, response time, past work and whether an AI tool names you decide who gets called.
“best [trade] near me”, “[trade] [suburb] reviews”
One business gets the call. How easy you are to contact, how clearly you explain what you do and how credible you look are what convert it.
“emergency [trade] [suburb]”, “[trade] near me open now”
Scope follows your business, your market and your service mix. These are the components a program draws on.
Working out which jobs and areas are most profitable, then building coverage around those first instead of chasing every search.
A focused set of genuinely useful pages for the services and areas you want work in, not a thin page for every suburb in the state.
The highest-leverage piece for most trades: a complete, actively managed profile plus consistent details across every listing.
Most trade searches happen on a phone, often urgently. Speed, click-to-call and a site that works one-handed all matter.
Structured data and consistent, corroborated facts so AI tools name your business when someone describes their problem.
Systematising review generation, which is the single strongest local ranking and conversion lever you have.
A business doesn't run on traffic. It runs on the work that gets won and what that work is worth.
LeadSight, my own attribution software, ties enquiries and closed work back to the channel that produced them, so your monthly report shows what SEO returned in dollars rather than which keywords moved.
How LeadSight works →I keep my client list small, and trade SEO works best where job values justify the investment.
Where you're profitable but sick of paying per enquiry and competing on price against three others.
Where you do something most competitors don't, and specificity is an advantage in search and AI answers.
Where you have capacity to fill and need a predictable pipeline rather than word of mouth alone.
It's easier and it's rented. You pay per enquiry forever, the same lead goes to your competitors, and the moment you stop paying you have nothing. SEO takes longer to build and then keeps producing without a cost per lead. Most of my trade clients keep both running for a while, then wind the directory spend back.
No. Thin suburb pages built at scale are one of the most common wastes of money in trade SEO. A smaller number of genuinely useful location pages, built where you actually work and want more work, performs far better and won't get discounted by Google.
Fewer than you get from directory leads, where price comparison is the entire model. Targeting the searches attached to the jobs you actually want, and being clear on your pages about how you work, filters a lot of it out before the phone rings.
In local search they're one of the strongest levers you have, for rankings and for conversion. Most trade businesses have a fraction of the reviews they could have simply because nobody asks. Systematising that is usually one of the first things I set up.
No. I keep my client list deliberately small and won't take on a directly competing trade business in the same catchment.
Local and Google Business Profile work often moves within weeks. Broader visibility takes two to three months to start compounding. I'll tell you what's realistic for your area before you commit.
Send your domain through and I’ll review your site, your competition and your AI visibility before we speak. No obligation, and a straight answer on whether it’s worth the spend.