The trades website guide.

The search that decides the job

Here's the moment this whole guide is about. A homeowner asks on the street or in the family group chat, someone replies "we used Steve for ours, he was spot on", and before anyone rings Steve, they do the thing nearly everyone now does: they search his name. Word of mouth hasn't been replaced by Google - it's been routed through it. The recommendation opens the door; the search decides whether the customer walks through it.

What happens next depends entirely on what the search turns up. A tidy website with photos of real jobs, visible reviews and a phone number confirms everything the neighbour said - the customer rings, half-sold, price barely questioned. Nothing at all, or a dead Facebook page last updated three years ago, plants the first seed of doubt, and doubt sends people back to the directories, where you're one quote among five and the cheapest usually wins. The bitter irony is that trades with the best word of mouth often have the least web presence - the work always came anyway - so they leak their warmest leads to whoever looks most alive online.

A trade's website has exactly one job: make the person who already has your name pick up the phone. Everything below serves that.

Directories versus your own site, stated fairly

Checkatrade, MyBuilder, Rated People, Bark and the rest deserve a fair hearing, because plenty of advice about them is written by people selling websites. What they genuinely do well: they put you in front of strangers who don't know a single trade to call, they matter most when you're new in an area or filling a quiet patch, and their vetting badges do reassure a certain kind of customer. For a trade starting from nothing, they can be the difference between working and not.

What they cost, in the round: membership fees or per-lead charges that have climbed year on year, leads sold to several trades at once so you're quoting against three others before breakfast, and - the structural one - every job stays on their pipeline. Stop paying and the phone stops; the reviews you spent years earning live on their platform, next to a "get more quotes" button that offers your competitors to anyone who looks you up.

The sensible position for most trades isn't directories-or-website, it's knowing which lead is which. Directory leads are bought, shared and price-shopped. Website leads - the recommendation-checkers, the searchers who found you directly - are free, exclusive, and arrive predisposed to hire you. The aim over a few years is to shift the mix: let your own name, reviews and website carry more of the load, and treat the directories as a tap you can turn down rather than a landlord you rent your reputation from.

What a customer checks before ringing a trade

People choosing a tradesperson are wonderfully predictable. Before ringing, almost all of them look for the same short list, roughly in order:

• Is this the right kind of trade? Your trade and patch, stated in the first screen - "Plumber & heating engineer covering Blackpool and the Fylde coast." Vague headlines ("quality you can trust") answer nothing and cost you the visit.
• Are they any good? Photos of real jobs and real reviews. This pair does more convincing than everything else on the site combined - both get their own sections below.
• Are they legit? Gas Safe, NICEIC, TrustMark, insurance - whichever apply to your trade, shown with the registration numbers, not just the logos. Customers increasingly check the registers; make it easy.
• Will they come to me? Areas covered, spelled out by town. "Blackpool, Bispham, Cleveleys, Poulton, Lytham St Annes" beats a mileage radius nobody can picture.
• Can I reach them, right now? A tap-to-call number and WhatsApp button on every screen. Someone with water coming through the ceiling is not filling in a contact form with a dropdown for "how did you hear about us".

Notice what's not on the list: your company history, a mission statement, or anything animated. A five-page site that nails these questions converts; a bigger one that buries them doesn't.

Job photos: your unfair advantage

For a trade, photos of finished work are what a portfolio is to us and a menu is to a restaurant - the product, shown rather than claimed. And they're the one part of your marketing no competitor can copy, because they'd need to have done your jobs. The working standard:

• Before and after, religiously. Thirty seconds when you arrive, thirty when you finish. The transformation is the story - a bathroom rip-out to a finished suite persuades in a way no paragraph can.
• Real, not stock. Customers can smell a stock photo of a smiling model in a hard hat from a different postcode, and it reads as "nothing of their own to show". An honest phone photo of a real boiler install beats it every time.
• Named by job, ideally by area. "Full rewire, semi in Marton" does double duty - it reassures the customer in Marton and tells Google where you work.
• Current. A gallery that stops two years ago whispers that the business did too. On our plan photo updates are covered by unlimited edits, so last week's loft conversion can be on the site this week, no invoice.

If you're starting from zero photos, start on your next job - see the FAQ below. Two months of habit builds a gallery most competitors will never bother to match.

Service pages and the areas you cover

The single biggest search mistake on trades websites: one page trying to be everything. "Plumbing services" as a heading, one paragraph mentioning boilers, bathrooms, leaks and landlord certificates - and the site ranks properly for none of them, because nobody searches "plumbing services". They search for the job they have: boiler repair Blackpool, bathroom fitter Cleveleys, flat roof replacement, EV charger installation.

The fix is structural and simple: a page per service you want more of. Each one says what the job involves, what affects the price, shows photos of that work, and answers its common questions. A separate page can rank for its own search, and it lets you steer the work - if you want more full rewires and fewer socket swaps, the rewire page is where you say so. The same logic applies to areas covered: name the towns and estates you actually work, in the words locals use. This is exactly how we structure the trades sites we build - the full approach is on our trades & builders page.

A note of restraint: a page per service is not a page per keyword. Ten thin pages saying "plumber in [town]" with the town swapped out is the sort of thing Google has spent a decade learning to ignore. Write pages for real services you genuinely offer in places you genuinely go, and the search side follows.

Google Business Profile: the other half

When someone searches "electrician near me", the top of the page isn't websites - it's the map with three businesses pinned to it. Those three come from Google Business Profiles, which makes the profile the other half of a trade's web presence, and it's free. The groundwork:

• The right category - "Plumber", "Electrician", "Roofing contractor" - as the primary, with secondaries for genuine sidelines. The category is the strongest single signal for what searches you appear in.
• A service-area setup done honestly: the towns you cover, without a shopfront address if you work from home (Google's rules for tradespeople differ from shops, and getting this wrong is a common cause of suspended listings).
• Reviews as a habit, not a campaign - ask at the moment the customer is happiest, usually the day the job finishes, and reply to every one. A steady trickle beats a suspicious burst.
• Photos posted to the profile - the same job photos as the website, doing a second shift.

Profile and website reinforce each other: the profile gets you into the map pack, the website converts the click that follows and confirms the business is real. The full setup, including the mistakes that get listings buried or suspended, is in our guide to getting your business on Google.

What this costs, and what it replaces

The wider market for a trades website runs from DIY builders to four-figure local agency builds - the full, even-handed picture is in our website cost guide. Our own answer is the same plan we build everything on: £99 setup, then £29.99 a month, including the design, hosting, your domain, business email and unlimited edits - which for a trade means new job photos, another service page or a changed coverage area are always included, never invoiced. The site and domain become yours after 12 months, and you can cancel anytime with 30 days' notice.

Against that, do your own arithmetic with your own numbers: what a directory currently charges you per month, or per lead, and what one extra decent job a year is worth. A website that merely stops your recommendations leaking - never mind winning new searches - tends to make the sums short. We've been building for trades on the coast since 2016, we're rated 5.0 on Google, and the trades approach is laid out on our trades & builders page.