SEO for tradespeople in Dublin

Where trade customers search

Someone with a burst pipe searches “plumber near me” or “emergency plumber Dublin 7” on a phone and calls one of the first three businesses shown. They rarely scroll, rarely compare websites, and rarely read past the star rating. That behaviour decides what SEO for a trade is: being in the local pack for the right queries in the right areas, with a rating and a phone number that make the call easy. Everything else is secondary.

Planned work is different. Someone planning an extension or a rewire searches more slowly, reads websites, and compares. For those trades a website with clear service pages and examples of work still matters. Most trades have both kinds of customer, and an SEO company should ask which matters more before proposing anything.

The profile before the website

An SEO company pitching to a trade should look at the Google Business Profile first. Is it claimed and verified? Is the primary category right? Are the services listed? Is the service area set to the areas actually covered? Are there recent photos of real jobs? Are reviews being asked for and answered? A proposal that starts with a new website and leaves the profile for later has the order wrong for a trade. Choosing a local SEO company covers the profile work in more detail.

Service-area businesses

Most trades travel to the customer and do not want customers at their home address. Google supports this: a profile can hide its address and show a service area instead. Two consequences follow. First, the business appears in the pack for searches within that area, weighted by distance from the searcher, so visibility differs across Dublin. Second, the address that is hidden still has to be consistent with the name, address and phone used elsewhere, or listings will be treated as different businesses. A company that proposes opening several profiles at different addresses to cover more of the city is proposing something Google's guidelines prohibit, and it belongs on the red flags page.

Reviews and response

For a trade, reviews are the product page. The number, the recency, the rating and the replies all show in the pack. An SEO company should set up a simple routine: a text or email after each job with a direct link to leave a review, and a reply to every review, good or bad, within a few days. It should not offer to write reviews, buy them, or gate them so that only happy customers are asked; all three are against Google's policies and can get a profile suspended.

Reporting that shows calls

The report a trade needs is short: calls from the profile, calls from the website, quote requests, and where in the area the business appeared for its main queries this month against last. Ranking charts for twenty queries are not useful to someone who is on a roof. What an SEO report should show gives the general minimum; for a trade, the call count is the line that matters.

Illustrative example. A two-person electrical firm in north Dublin, with a verified profile, the right categories, a service area covering the areas it actually works in, forty recent reviews all answered, and a website with one page per service, would be positioned to appear in the pack for its main queries across much of that area. That is a description of what the work aims at, not a client result, and no timeline or number is attached to it.

Questions to ask

• Will you work on the profile before the website, and what will you change on it?
• How will you set the service area, and will you ever suggest more than one profile?
• How will you ask for reviews, and who replies to them?
• How will you measure where we appear across the areas we cover?
• What will the monthly report show, and will it show calls?
• What is the minimum term, and what do you expect to see by the end of it?

The six criteria on the criteria page and the checklist on the selection guide apply as they do to any business. SEO Agency Dublin, this reference's publisher, offers local SEO to Dublin trades among other businesses; its own description is on its site and how it measures against the criteria is on the agency page.