How to Create a Trade Business Website That Wins Jobs (UK)

A trade business website wins jobs when it answers the three questions a customer has before they ring anyone: can you do this exact job, do you cover my street, and can I trust you. Everything else on the page is decoration. Here is the build, condensed, in the order you should do it.

1. Own the address. Buy a domain and put your email on it. A profile on a directory belongs to the directory, and it sends your customer a list of your competitors on the way out.
2. Write the six things a customer looks for. Services with real prices or price ranges, the areas you cover, photos of your own finished jobs, reviews, your registrations, and a phone number and booking that actually work.
3. Give every service and every area its own page. Google matches a page to a search. One page saying "electrical services" cannot match "EICR in Peckham".
4. Make it work on a phone and load in under three seconds. Most of your customers will only ever see the phone version.
5. Write it so Google and AI assistants can both read it. Plain facts, in plain sentences, on the page itself, not buried in an image.
6. Pick a build route. Do it yourself, hire a designer, or have it done for you. The honest cost and time for each is in the table further down.
7. Launch it properly and then watch four numbers. Calls, enquiries, quotes sent, and jobs booked. Traffic on its own is not a result.

If you would rather see where your current site and Google listing stand before you change anything, the free Tradehand AI report scores both and names the competitors ranking above you.

A directory profile and a website you own are not the same asset, and a UK trade business needs the second one. On Checkatrade, MyBuilder, Bark or a Facebook page you are renting attention. The page carries someone else's brand, the rules change without you, and the enquiry you paid for arrives alongside three rival quotes because the model works by selling the same lead more than once.

A website on your own domain does four things a rented profile cannot:

• It sends nobody anywhere else. A customer who lands on your service page sees your work, your prices and your phone number, with no list of competitors underneath.
• It is the only place you set the price. A directory ranks you against whoever paid more this month. Your own page can say what a consumer unit change costs and why.
• Google treats it as a signal about you. Google says local results rest on relevance, distance and prominence, and that links and general web presence feed prominence. Your site is the one page on the internet that you control completely.
• It survives. Directories change their fees and their algorithms. A domain you own carries your reviews, your photos and your rankings with you.

The directory is not useless. Treat it as one lead source among several, and treat the website as the shopfront everything else points at, including your Google Business Profile, your van, your invoices and your quote emails.

Do this first, because everything else hangs off it. A domain is the address people type, like smithelectrical.co.uk. In the UK, .co.uk and .uk are run by Nominet, and you register one through any registrar for a few pounds a year.

Choosing the name

• Use your trading name if you have one. Customers who see the van want to find the van.
• .co.uk reads as a British business to a British customer, and .uk is the shorter version of the same thing. Either is fine. A .com is not better for a local trade.
• Avoid hyphens and clever spellings. You will read this out on the phone a hundred times.
• Keyword names like leedsboilerrepair.co.uk are not a ranking shortcut, and they age badly the day you move town or add a trade.

Then move your email onto it

An address like info@smithelectrical.co.uk instead of smithelectrical1987@gmail.com is the cheapest credibility you will ever buy, and it costs a few pounds a month with the domain. A landlord deciding between two quotes reads the email address. Use the same business name, address and phone number on the website, the email footer, your invoices and your Google listing, because inconsistent details across those places weaken the prominence signal Google measures.

Also put your legal trading details somewhere on the site. UK businesses have to identify themselves clearly in their advertising, and a limited company shows its registered name and number. A line in the footer covers it.

A trade website wins jobs on six things. Nothing here is optional, and a site missing three of them will lose to a plainer site that has all six.

Services, with real prices or price ranges

Name each service the way a customer says it, not the way the trade says it. "Fuse box replacement" alongside "consumer unit replacement". Then put a number next to it. A range is fine: "EICR for a three bedroom house, £150 to £220, most take about three hours." Traders resist this because every job is different. Customers who cannot find a number ring the trader who published one, and you have just filtered out the people who were never going to pay your rate anyway.

The areas you cover

List the towns, boroughs or postcodes by name. Google uses distance from the searcher as one of its three local ranking factors, and it cannot place you in an area your site never names. "We cover the North West" is not an area. "Bolton, Bury, Radcliffe, Whitefield and Prestwich" is.

Photos of your own finished jobs

Not stock photos. A customer can tell in half a second, and a stock photo of a smiling man in a hard hat tells them nothing about your work. Ten photos from your phone of jobs you actually finished beat one professional shoot of nothing in particular. Before and after pairs work hardest.

Reviews, on the page

Put the actual words on the site, with a first name and a town. A link that says "see our Google reviews" sends the customer to Google, where your competitors are. Pull the reviews onto your own pages instead, and put the service reviews on the service page they belong to. If you do not have enough of them yet, start with how to get more 5-star reviews.

Your registrations, named and current

Gas work in Great Britain has to be done by a business on the Gas Safe Register, and customers are told to check the register. Electrical contractors are commonly assessed by NICEIC or a comparable scheme. Put the scheme name and your registration number on the page. A number a customer can verify is worth more than a logo they cannot.

A phone number and booking that work

The number goes at the top of every page and it has to be tappable on a phone. If you have a booking form, test it yourself from a phone on mobile data, then check the enquiry actually arrived. Broken contact forms are the single most common defect on trade websites, and they fail silently.

One page per service and one page per area is the step that separates a trade website that ranks from one that does not. Google matches a page to a search, and a single home page saying "electrical services in the North West" has almost nothing for Google to match against "EICR in Peckham" or "emergency electrician Dulwich". Our guide on why an electrician website stays off Google covers the same failure in more detail.

The structure

Give every service you actually want more of its own page. An electrician might have EICR reports, consumer unit replacement, EV charger installation, rewires, fault finding and emergency call-outs. Six services, six pages. Then give each area you work its own page, with the same six services described in that area's words.

What goes on a service page

• What the job is, in plain English, including what a customer is usually worried about.
• What it costs, as a number or a range, and what makes it go up.
• How long it takes and what happens on the day.
• Two or three photos of that exact job.
• Two or three reviews from customers who had that job done.
• Your registration for it, and any certificate the customer receives afterwards.

What goes on an area page

An area page is not the service page with the town name swapped in. Write about the housing stock, the common jobs there, the parking, the streets you know. A Victorian terrace in Peckham has different wiring problems to a 1990s estate in Milton Keynes, and a page that knows the difference reads like a local because it was written by one. Thin duplicate town pages are treated as spam, so if you cannot write something real about an area, do not make a page for it.

Plain English, throughout

Write "fuse box" as well as "consumer unit", and "boiler check" as well as "annual service". Customers search in their own words, and half your traffic comes from phrases you would never say on site.

Most people who look at a UK trade website are on a phone, often standing next to the problem. Two things decide whether they stay.

It has to work on a phone

• Text readable without pinching. No two column layouts squeezed onto a 390 pixel screen.
• The phone number at the top of every page, as a tappable link, not a picture of a number.
• Buttons big enough for a thumb, and forms short enough to fill in with one hand.
• No pop-up covering the screen before the customer has read anything.

It has to load fast

Google measures page experience with Core Web Vitals: how quickly the main content appears, how quickly the page responds to a tap, and how much the layout jumps around while it loads. The usual cause of a slow trade website is photos. A photo straight off a phone can be five megabytes, and twenty of them on one page will make it crawl on mobile data.

The fixes are boring and they work. Resize photos before uploading, save them in a modern format such as WebP, load the ones below the fold only when the customer scrolls to them, and delete every plugin, tracker and animated slider you added because it looked good on the desktop preview. Test the result on your own phone, on mobile data, away from the house wifi.

Your website now has two audiences that are not people. Google's crawler reads it to decide where you rank, and the crawlers behind ChatGPT and other AI assistants read it to decide whether to name you in an answer. Both of them want the same thing, which is plain facts written in plain sentences on the page itself.

What both of them need

• Facts as text. A price inside an image, a phone number inside a logo, or an area list inside a PDF is invisible. If it matters, type it as text.
• The subject named in every section. An assistant retrieves a few hundred words out of your page, not the whole thing. A paragraph that starts "we also do this for £120" is useless on its own. "A consumer unit replacement in Bolton costs from £450" survives being read alone.
• Structured data. Local business markup tells a search engine your name, address, phone, hours, area and services in a format built for machines. It does not buy you a ranking, and it does make you easier to quote correctly.
• Consistency with your Google listing. The services and areas on your site should be the same services and areas on your Google Business Profile. Contradictions between the two make both weaker.

Where AI answers differ from Google

An assistant asked "who is a good electrician in Bolton" builds an answer out of a handful of sources rather than a list of ten blue links. Two shapes of page get pulled into those answers far more than anything else: ranked lists, and how-to guides. A page on your own site that lists the five things to check before booking an EICR, or explains step by step what happens during a boiler service, is the kind of content an assistant quotes. A home page that says "quality workmanship, competitive prices" is not.

The two long guides go deeper on each side of this: getting a trade business found on Google and getting found on ChatGPT and AI search.

There is no route that is right for everyone. What differs is who writes the pages, who keeps them current, and who answers the enquiries the site creates. That last one is the part most trades underestimate.

Route	Typical cost	Time to live	Who writes the pages	Upkeep
Do it yourself (Wix, Squarespace, WordPress)	Around £12 to £25 a month, plus the domain	A few weekends if you are quick, longer if you are not	You, every service page and every area page	You. Plugin updates, photo resizing, new prices
Hire a web designer	£800 to £3,000 to build, often plus a monthly retainer	Four to twelve weeks, mostly waiting on you	You still supply services, prices, areas and photos	Paid by the hour, or it goes stale
Done for you (a Tradehand trader website)	Free. The office team earns 5% of the invoice payments it chases and collects	Live in a day, built from your existing services, areas and reviews	The office team writes them and keeps them current	None from you, and every visitor who asks a question gets answered

Do it yourself is the cheapest in pounds and the most expensive in evenings. The builder gives you a blank site, and you are the one writing eleven pages of copy after work. Checkatrade's own 2023 guide puts a typical small business website at two to three months this way. If you enjoy it, it is a real option and the result can be good.

A web designer makes the pages look finished. They do not know what an EICR costs in your town, so you still supply the services, the prices, the areas and the photos, and then the site is frozen the day they invoice you. Ask before you sign who updates prices next year and what that costs.

Done for you means the pages are written from facts you already have. Tradehand builds the trader website out of your real services, areas and reviews, keeps it current, and then answers the visitor who arrives on it. That is the part a builder and a designer both leave with you. There is no monthly fee, no setup fee and no card fees. The office team earns 5% of the invoice payments it chases and collects, so nothing lands and nothing is owed. Set that against an office admin at £25,000 a year, paid whether or not the invoices land.

Our shorter guide on the fastest way to set up a trade business website compares the same three routes on time alone.

Work down this list before you tell anyone the trade website is live. Every item has cost a real trade business real jobs.

1. Ring your own number from the site. Tap it on a phone, on mobile data, and make sure it rings the phone you actually carry.
2. Send yourself an enquiry through every form. Then check it arrived, and check it did not land in spam. Do this from a phone, not the desktop preview.
3. Read every page on a phone. Not a shrunken browser window. An actual phone.
4. Check every price is one you would honour today. A price you would not accept is worse than no price.
5. Check every area page names a real area you will drive to. Delete the ones you would turn down.
6. Check your registration numbers are current and correct. Gas Safe and electrical scheme numbers are verifiable, so a wrong one is worse than none.
7. Point your Google Business Profile at the site, and make the services and areas on both match.
8. Add the site to Google Search Console and submit the sitemap so Google knows the pages exist.
9. Check the site is not blocking crawlers. Site builders often leave a "discourage search engines" setting switched on from the build. It quietly costs you every ranking.
10. Put the address everywhere. Van, invoices, quote emails, email signature, business cards, Google listing.

Then leave it alone for a month. Trade websites get rebuilt far too often and measured far too rarely.

Visitors are not the result. A trade website is working when more of the right jobs land, and there are four numbers that show it. Write them down monthly on the back of a diary if you like, but write them down, because a website you cannot measure is one you will rebuild for no reason.

• Calls from the site. Ask every caller how they found you and keep a tally. It takes four seconds and it is more honest than any dashboard.
• Enquiries through the form. Count them, and count how many you answered the same day. The second number matters more than the first.
• Quotes sent. An enquiry that never turns into a quote is a leak, and it is usually a leak of time rather than interest.
• Jobs booked, and their value. Ten enquiries a month for jobs you do not want is a worse result than three for jobs you do.

Two free tools worth the setup

Google Search Console shows which searches your pages appear for, where they rank and whether Google can read them at all. The most useful screen is the list of searches where you sit around position eight to fifteen, because those are pages that are close, and a better page usually moves them. Google Business Profile insights show how many people called or asked for directions from your listing.

What good looks like after three months

Your service pages appear for the exact service and town phrases you wrote them for. The enquiry form brings you jobs you actually want. And the number of enquiries you answer the same day is close to the number you received, because the response speed is the part of this that quietly decides who gets the work.

That last one is where most sole traders lose, and not for lack of trying. You are under a floor when the enquiry lands. The Tradehand trader website comes with an office team that answers every visitor on the page, sends the quote and chases it, so the enquiries the site creates do not sit until nine o'clock at night. If you want the gaps named before you decide anything, the free AI report scores your current site and your Google listing and shows the competitors ranking above you.

These are the recurring faults on UK trade business websites, in the order they cost the most work.

• One page for everything. A single home page listing twelve services in a paragraph ranks for none of them and converts poorly, because the customer cannot find the one job they came for.
• No prices anywhere. "Contact us for a quote" on every service. The customer who wanted a rough number rings someone who published one.
• Stock photos. The smiling man in the hard hat is on four thousand other trade websites and he has never been to your customer's house.
• A contact form nobody tested. It fails silently, so you find out months later, if ever.
• A phone number as an image. Not tappable on a phone, not readable by Google, not readable by an assistant.
• Vague areas. "Covering the South East" tells Google nothing about distance and tells the customer nothing about their street.
• Nothing updated since it launched. Old prices, a retired registration number, a photo of a van you sold in 2021.
• Enquiries answered days later. The best website in your town loses to the plainest one if the plainest one replies first.