How to Get Your Trade Business Found on Google (UK)

Getting a UK trade business found on Google comes down to eight jobs, done in order. Most tradespeople get results from the first three alone.

1. Claim and verify your Google Business Profile. It is free, and it is the only way into the map results at the top of a local search.
2. Fill in every field on that profile. Categories, services, hours, service area, photos. An empty profile ranks below a full one.
3. Ask every happy customer for a review, every time. Google names review count and rating among the things that decide local ranking.
4. Own a website you control. A profile you rent on a lead site sends the customer to your competitors on the same page.
5. Write one page per service and one page per town you cover. One page cannot rank for eleven different searches.
6. Get the basics right on each page. A clear page title, a clear first paragraph, your phone number, fast loading on a phone.
7. Get your business name, address and phone number identical everywhere. Google reads other sites to check you are real.
8. Measure it. Google Search Console and your Business Profile both report, for free, what people searched before they found you.

Google says plainly that local results are ranked on relevance, distance and prominence, and that you cannot pay for a better local rank. That single sentence is the reason this guide is mostly free work rather than a budget.

When someone in the UK searches "electrician near me" or "boiler repair Leeds", Google shows two separate sets of results on the same screen, ranked by different things.

The first is the Local Pack, sometimes called the map pack: the small map with three businesses listed under it, usually at the top. Everything in it comes from Google Business Profile, the free listing Google keeps for your business. No profile, no Local Pack, however good your website is.

The second is the organic results, the ordinary blue links below the map. Those come from websites, and yours appears there only if you have pages that answer the search.

Google Business Profile Help states that local results are based on relevance (how well your listing matches what was searched), distance (how far you are from the searcher) and prominence (how well known and well reviewed your business is), and that you cannot pay for a better position in local results.

	Local Pack (the map results)	Organic results (the blue links)
What it is fed by	Your Google Business Profile	Pages on your own website
What decides the order	Relevance, distance, prominence	How well the page answers the search, and how trusted the site is
Reviews matter?	Yes, directly	Indirectly, through trust and clicks
Can you pay to rank higher?	No	No
How long it takes to move	Weeks	Two to six months
Who you are beating	Other trades within a few miles	Lead sites, directories and national brands

Distance is the part you cannot change, and it is why a plumber in Bristol will never appear in the Local Pack for someone standing in Bath. It is also why your service area setting matters more than any clever wording. The order of work follows from that table: the Local Pack moves in weeks and costs nothing, so it comes first, and website work comes second and never stops.

Your Google Business Profile is the free listing that puts your trade business in the Local Pack and on Google Maps. Creating one takes about twenty minutes. Verifying it takes anywhere from a day to a fortnight, so start it tonight rather than at the weekend.

Claim it. Go to google.com/business and sign in with a Google account. Search for your business name first. Google sometimes creates unverified listings on its own, from map data or from an old directory entry, and claiming that existing listing keeps any reviews already sitting on it. Creating a duplicate instead splits your reviews across two listings and neither one ranks.

Name it exactly as you trade. "Hem Electrical" and not "Hem Electrical EICR Rewires London Electrician". Google's guidelines forbid keywords in the business name and listings do get suspended for it. If you run a limited company, GOV.UK also requires your registered company name on your website and business stationery, so keep the two consistent.

Set a service area, not an address, if you work from home. A service area business appears for searches across the towns and postcodes you list, without publishing your home address. Be honest about the boundary, because listing all of Greater London when you work three boroughs weakens relevance everywhere.

Verify. Google offers a postcard with a code, a phone or email code, or a short video showing your van, tools and workplace. Video verification is now common for trades working out of a van, and it is the step most people put off. Our walkthrough covers exactly what to film: how to record a Google Business Profile verification video without an office. Until verification completes, your listing does not appear in search.

A verified but half-empty Google Business Profile is the most common reason a trade business sits below a competitor with worse work. Relevance is one of the three things Google ranks local results on, and relevance is judged on what you actually filled in.

Primary category. Pick the most specific accurate one. "Electrician" beats "Contractor". "Heating contractor" beats "Plumber" if heating is the bulk of your work. This single field does more for relevance than anything else on the profile.

Additional categories. Add the ones you genuinely serve, and no others. An electrician doing car chargers should add "EV charging station installation". Irrelevant categories dilute the signal rather than widening it.

Services. List every job you take, one at a time, with a sentence each. EICR. Consumer unit replacement. Landlord gas safety certificate. Power flush. Emergency call-out. Each service you add is another search your profile can turn up for, and this list is free to write.

Description. Two hundred to three hundred words covering what you do, the towns you cover, how long you have been trading, and what a customer gets. Write it the way you would explain it on a doorstep.

Photos. Ten to start, then a few more every month. Your van, your team, finished work, a before and after, your accreditation card. Recent photos tell Google the listing is maintained, and maintained listings do better than dormant ones.

Hours. Real ones. Google displays "open" or "closed" beside your listing, and a customer who rings a business shown as open and gets voicemail rarely rings twice.

If missed calls during the working day are the real problem behind those hours, the Tradehand office team answers every call while you are up a ladder, takes the details, and books the job in.

Reviews are the fuel behind prominence, the third of the three factors Google names for local ranking. Google Business Profile Help states directly that review count and review score feed into local search ranking. In practice a trade business with eighty reviews at 4.8 stars will usually sit above one with twelve reviews at 5.0.

Reviews also decide the click. Three electricians appear in the Local Pack, all within two miles, and the customer rings the one with the most reviews first.

Ask at the right moment. The best time is the minute the job is done and the customer has said they are pleased, not a week later. Say it out loud: "If you are happy with it, a Google review makes a real difference to a small business." Then send the link the same day.

Send a direct link. Your Business Profile dashboard gives you a short link that opens the review box on your listing. A customer who has to search for your business to find where to leave a review usually gives up.

Ask every single time. This is the part that fails, because you are on the tools and the job is already behind you. Your Tradehand office team sends the review request the day the job is signed off, with your Google link already in the message, so the count climbs without you remembering.

Never buy or incentivise them. Google's review policies prohibit offering anything in exchange for a review, and prohibit fake content. Bought reviews get stripped and the listing can be suspended with them.

Reply to all of them. Future customers read your replies as evidence of how you treat people. Name the job and the town in a reply to a good review, and keep a reply to a bad one short with an offer to sort it offline. Wording is in how to respond to negative reviews, the asking routine in how to get more 5 star reviews, and the one-page version in the get more reviews checklist.

A Google Business Profile puts a UK trade business in the map results. It does not put you in the blue links below, and it is not yours. Google can suspend a listing, merge it, or change how it displays, and you have no say and no copy of the enquiries.

The same is true, harder, of lead sites. When you pay Checkatrade, Bark or MyBuilder for enquiries, you are renting an audience. The page the customer lands on shows your competitors beside you, the enquiry is sold to several trades at once, and the customer belongs to the site rather than to you. Stop paying and the flow stops the same day. We compared what each one costs a trade in practice in the lead generation sites for tradespeople guide.

Your own website behaves the opposite way. Every page you publish keeps working after you stop paying attention to it, the customer arrives on a page with only your name on it, and the enquiry comes to you alone.

What a trade website actually needs. Not much, and none of it is expensive:

• Your phone number visible at the top of every page, tappable on a phone
• A page for each service you sell
• A page for each town or borough you cover
• Photos of your own work, not stock images
• Your accreditations, with numbers where you have them
• Your business name, address and phone number in the footer of every page
• Loading in under three seconds on 4G

Tradehand builds trade businesses a fast website, free, wired to the same details as your Google Business Profile so the two never drift apart. If your site already exists but never surfaces, why your website is not showing on Google works through the usual causes.

The single biggest missed opportunity on a UK trade website is trying to rank one homepage for everything. A homepage saying "electrical, heating, EV chargers, testing, across Manchester and Stockport" competes for a dozen searches and wins none, because Google matches a search to the page that answers it best, not to the business that is best. The fix is more pages, each answering one thing.

Service pages. One per job you want more of. An electrician might publish EICR testing, consumer unit replacement, EV charger installation, rewires and emergency call-outs. Each page explains what the job is, what is involved, roughly what it costs, how long it takes, and what happens next. Six hundred to a thousand words is plenty when the words are yours.

Town pages. One per place you genuinely work. A page for Stockport should name the estates and roads you cover, jobs you have done there, and how quickly you can get across. What it must not be is your Stockport page with the word swapped for Macclesfield. Google's spam policies treat mass-produced pages with no added value as spam, and near-identical town pages are the textbook example. Ten honest town pages beat a hundred copies.

Price pages. Trades avoid these and customers search for them constantly. A page saying what a call-out costs, what an EICR on a three-bed costs, and what changes the number, catches searches nobody else in your area is answering.

Link the pages to each other. Your EICR page should link to your landlord certificate page and to the town pages where you do that work. That is how Google finds them all.

For a worked example of this on a single trade, see how an electrician gets on page one of Google.

On-page basics means the handful of things on each page of your website that tell Google what the page is for. There are six that matter for a UK trade business, and none of them require code.

What it is	What it means in plain English	Good example
Page title	The blue clickable line in Google's results. Around 60 characters.	EICR Testing in Stockport | Hem Electrical
Meta description	The grey sentence under it. It does not affect ranking, it affects whether anyone clicks.	Fixed-price EICR testing for Stockport landlords, certificate emailed same day. Call 0161 000 0000.
Heading (H1)	The big title on the page itself. One per page, saying the same thing as the page title.	EICR Testing in Stockport
First paragraph	Answer the search in the first two sentences, before any scrolling.	An EICR in Stockport costs from £150 for a three-bed. We test, report and certify the same day.
Image alt text	A short description of each photo, for people using screen readers and for Google.	Consumer unit replaced in a Stockport terrace
Page speed	How fast it loads on a phone on mobile data. Under three seconds.	Compressed photos, no video on the homepage

Two rules cover the rest. Write for the customer first, because Google's own starter guide says pages should be made for people rather than search engines. And use the words your customers use, so "boiler not firing up" belongs on the page as well as "boiler fault diagnosis".

Add your business details as structured data if your website builder offers it. Structured data is a hidden block on the page that tells Google your trade, phone number, opening hours and service area in a format it can read exactly. AI answers and voice assistants read it too, which is increasingly how people find a trade: see how to get a trade business found on ChatGPT.

Citations are simply mentions of your business name, address and phone number on other websites. Google reads them to check a UK trade business is real and to confirm it is where it says it is. Consistency is the whole point: identical details on every site raise confidence, and a mismatched old phone number lowers it.

The listings worth doing, in rough order of value for a UK trade:

• Your own website footer, matching your Google Business Profile exactly
• Your trade body or scheme register entry, where your trade has one
• Yell, Thomson Local, Scoot, Cylex, FreeIndex
• Your local council or town business directory
• Your Companies House record, if you are a limited company
• Your social profiles, where the phone number and address fields are filled in

Write the details down once, in one place, and copy from that. "Ltd" or "Limited", "Street" or "St", 0161 or +44 161: pick one form and never vary it. Old listings carrying a dead mobile number are worth ten minutes each to fix or delete.

This is a one-off afternoon of work, not an ongoing job, and doing twenty listings well beats buying a subscription that sprays a hundred thin ones. If you are a limited company, GOV.UK requires your registered company name on your website and business correspondence anyway, so the consistent version is also the legally correct one.

Google Local Services Ads are the "Google Guaranteed" listings that appear above everything else on some UK trade searches. They work differently from ordinary Google Ads: you pay per lead rather than per click, Google runs a background and insurance check before you can advertise, and the badge appears beside your name.

They are the one paid channel worth a trade business's attention. You pay when someone contacts you rather than when they click, the vetting keeps out the unqualified, and the enquiry reaches your phone directly rather than through a middleman who also sold it to four others.

They are still rented attention. The leads stop the day the budget stops, so treat them as a top-up while the free work compounds underneath, never as the plan. Get the profile, the reviews and the service pages right first, because a Local Services Ad pointing at a business with four reviews converts badly and costs the same. Have your public liability certificate and scheme registration ready for Google's screening, and dispute any lead that was not genuine rather than letting it slide.

Most of the money a UK trade business spends trying to get found on Google is wasted, and it goes to the same handful of places every time.

Guaranteed number one rankings. Nobody can guarantee a Google position, because nobody outside Google controls the ranking. Google Business Profile Help states outright that you cannot pay for a better local rank. An agency promising position one is either selling you an ad or selling you nothing.

Directory listings sold over the phone. A cold call offering a premium listing on a directory you have never heard of is selling you a link nobody follows. The free listings in step seven do the same job.

Bought reviews and review packages. Google's review policies prohibit fake and incentivised reviews. They get removed, and the listing can go with them. There is no version of this that survives.

Bulk link building and auto-generated town pages. Packages selling hundreds of backlinks, and software that spins out four hundred near-identical pages one per postcode, are described directly in Google's spam policies as link spam and scaled content abuse. At best they are ignored, at worst the site is penalised and you are paying to be less visible.

A second lead site because the first one went quiet. Two rented pipelines cost twice as much and still leave you owning nothing. That money buys a year of your own service pages instead.

The rule underneath all of it: pay for work that leaves you owning something. A page, a photo, a review, a profile. Never for a promise about a ranking somebody else decides.

Two free tools tell a UK trade business almost everything worth knowing about how it is found on Google. Neither costs anything and both take a morning to set up.

Google Business Profile insights sits inside your profile dashboard. It reports how many people saw your listing, what they searched to reach it, how many rang, and how many clicked through to your website. The searches list is the useful part, because it tells you which services and towns to write pages about next.

Google Search Console is the free service showing how your website performs in Google search: the searches your pages appeared for, where they ranked, how many people clicked, and any page Google could not read. Verifying your site takes about ten minutes.

What to check	Where	How often	What good looks like
Calls from your listing	Business Profile insights	Monthly	Rising month on month
Searches that found you	Business Profile insights	Monthly	New services and towns appearing
New reviews	Business Profile	Weekly	At least two or three a month
Pages appearing in search	Search Console	Monthly	Every service and town page listed
Average position	Search Console	Quarterly	Moving toward the first page
Where enquiries came from	Ask every caller	Every job	More "found you on Google", less lead site

The last row is the one that matters most and the one nobody records. Ask every caller how they found you and write the answer down. After thirty jobs you know which of these steps is paying. Give the website work three months before judging it: Local Pack movement shows up in weeks, but organic rankings on new service pages take two to six months to settle.

To see the whole picture at once, the free Tradehand AI report scores your Google Business Profile and your website, checks your reviews against the trades ranking near you, and names which of these eight steps is costing you most.

A UK trade business found on Google through its own profile, its own reviews and its own pages owns the customer, while a trade business found through a lead site rents that customer by the enquiry and the rent never stops. The free work compounds: the eleventh review is worth more than the first, and the profile you filled in properly two years ago is still bringing calls this morning at no cost.

What tends to break it is not knowledge but time. Nobody on the tools all day gets round to asking for the review, writing the town page and chasing last month's invoice. That is the whole reason Tradehand exists: an office team that answers the calls, sends the quotes, asks for the reviews and chases the money, without you hiring anyone. It earns 5% of the invoices it chases and collects, and nothing else. An office admin costs £25,000 a year whether or not the invoice ever lands.

Start with the free report and work the eight steps in order. Check how your trade business shows up on Google, then fix the first thing it finds.