Most SEO for tradies goes wrong in the same handful of places, and none of them are about clever tricks. They’re everyday gaps on the website and Google listing that quietly send jobs to the bloke down the road. Here are the five we see most on trade sites around the Gold Coast, starting with the ones that cost the most enquiries.
Each one comes with a fix you can do yourself on a quiet afternoon, or hand to whoever looks after your site.
One page trying to rank for every service
This is the big one. A plumber’s site has a single Services page that lists blocked drains, hot water, gas fitting, leak detection and bathroom renos in one long scroll. A sparky’s site lumps switchboard upgrades, ceiling fans, solar and safety inspections into a handful of bullet points.
The trouble is that people don’t search for “plumbing services”. They search for the job they need done: hot water system replacement, blocked drain Robina, emergency electrician. Google wants to show a page that’s clearly about that exact job. A list with a line on each doesn’t cut it.
The fix: give each main service its own page. It doesn’t need to be an essay. A good service page covers:
- What the job is and the common signs a customer needs it
- How you go about it, step by step, in everyday words
- The areas you cover for that service
- Photos of real jobs, not stock images
- Answers to the questions customers ask you on the phone
- A clear way to call or request a quote
Start with the two or three services that bring in the best work. You don’t have to build twenty pages this week.
Ignoring the suburbs you actually work in
Plenty of tradies cover a big patch, from Coomera down to the border, but their website only says “servicing the Gold Coast”. That’s fine as far as it goes, but it gives Google nothing to work with when someone in a particular suburb searches for help.
The opposite mistake is just as common. Someone builds forty suburb pages that are identical except for the suburb name swapped in. Google’s pretty good at spotting those, and they tend to do more harm than good.
The fix: be specific, but honest. Mention your main service areas naturally on your service pages and contact page. If there are a few areas where you do a lot of work, a dedicated page for each can make sense, as long as it says something real: the type of homes there, common issues you see, jobs you’ve done nearby. If you can’t write something genuinely different about a suburb, it probably doesn’t need its own page.
A Business Profile left half finished
For a lot of trade searches, the map results show up before the normal website results, especially on a phone. Your Google Business Profile is often the first thing a customer sees, and a lot of them are only half set up.
Common gaps we spot:
- The wrong primary category, or a vague one like “contractor” when a more specific one exists
- No service areas set, or a list that doesn’t match where you really work
- No services listed, or no description
- A handful of old photos, or none at all
- Reviews that never got a reply
- Hours that don’t match when you actually answer the phone
The fix: sit down for half an hour and go through every section. Choose the most specific primary category for your main trade. Set the suburbs you genuinely service. Add each service with a short description. Reply to your reviews, good and bad, briefly and politely.
One honest note: if you work from home and don’t have a shopfront customers visit, set yourself up as a service area business and hide your address. Listing a fake office or a virtual address is a fast way to get suspended.
Job photos that never get updated
Tradies do great visual work, then post none of it. The website gallery has the same eight photos from three years ago, and the Business Profile hasn’t had a new photo since it was created.
Photos matter for two reasons. Customers want to see the quality of your work before they ring. And fresh, real photos are one of the signals that a business is active and genuine.
The fix: make it a habit, not a project. Snap a before and after on jobs you’re proud of, with the customer’s permission and without showing their house number or anything personal. Once a fortnight, add a few to your Business Profile and pop the best ones on the matching service page with a short caption, like “Switchboard upgrade on an older home in Burleigh Heads”. Give the image files sensible names before you upload them too, rather than IMG_4021.
Slow pages on a phone at the job site
Think about who’s searching for a tradie. Often it’s someone standing in a flooded laundry or a house with no power, on their phone, possibly on patchy mobile data. If your site takes ages to load, they hit back and ring the next one.
Slow trade sites usually come down to a few culprits: huge uncompressed photos, a heavy theme with sliders and animations, too many plugins, or cheap hosting.
The fix: open your own site on your phone, off the wifi, and be honest about how it feels. Then work through the easy wins:
- Resize and compress photos before uploading them.
- Ditch the homepage slider. One strong photo and a clear headline do a better job.
- Remove plugins you’re not using.
- Make sure your phone number is a tap to call link near the top of every page.
- If it’s still sluggish, talk to your web person about hosting and caching.
You can also check your pages with Google’s PageSpeed Insights. Don’t chase a perfect score, just look for the big red flags it points out.
Fixing SEO for tradies in the right order
If all five of these ring a bell, don’t panic and don’t try to fix everything at once. Here’s the order we’d tackle them in for most trade businesses, based on how quickly each one tends to make a difference.
| Order | Fix | Effort | Who can do it |
|---|---|---|---|
| First | Finish the Business Profile | An afternoon | You |
| Second | Speed up the site on mobile | A few hours | You or your web person |
| Third | Build pages for your top services | A day or two | You with some help |
| Fourth | Add honest suburb detail | Ongoing | You |
| Fifth | Keep job photos flowing | Ten minutes a fortnight | You |
The Business Profile goes first because it’s free, it’s fully in your control, and it’s what shows on a phone for most local trade searches. Speed comes next because there’s no point sending people to a site they’ll abandon. Service pages take more effort, but they’re what lets you show up for the specific jobs you want more of.
If you’d rather hand some of this over, we put together a page on SEO for trades and construction that explains how we’d approach it for a Gold Coast trade business.
Wrapping up
Good SEO for tradies isn’t about tricks. It’s about making it dead easy for Google, and for a stressed customer on their phone, to see what you do, where you do it and that you’re the real deal.
Finish your Business Profile, speed up your site, give your best services their own pages, be honest about your service areas, and keep real job photos coming. None of it needs a big budget, just a bit of steady effort over a few weeks.
And if you’d like someone to take a look and tell you which of these is costing you the most, a quick chat with a Gold Coast SEO team that works with tradies is a good next move.
