Here’s a conversation we have with trades regularly.
“The website’s doing nothing.”
“How do you know?”
“I checked the visitor stats. Barely anyone’s on it.”
The website usually is doing something. It’s just doing it somewhere the visitor stats can’t see — and if you judge it on the wrong number, you’ll switch off the thing that’s actually working.
What happens on a phone
When someone searches “roofer near me” or “electrician High Wycombe”, Google shows three local businesses with a map above them before any ordinary website results. On a phone that block fills the screen. Everything else is below the fold.
Each of those three listings has two big buttons: Call and Directions.
So the customer taps Call. They speak to you. They book the job. And at no point do they visit your website.
Your website analytics record nothing, because nothing happened on your website. The enquiry came through your Google Business Profile, and profile activity lives in a completely separate set of numbers.
The mobile split is stark
On JNC Bespoke Roofing’s listing, the click-through rate on mobile runs more than ten times higher than on desktop.
That’s the signature of the map pack. Desktop searchers behave more like traditional web users — they scroll, compare, open a few sites. Mobile searchers in an urgent trade situation tap the first credible listing and start talking.
Domestic trade work skews heavily to the second group. Nobody researches emergency roof repairs across six tabs. The ceiling is wet.
Where the real numbers are
Open your Google Business Profile and look at the performance section. You want four things:
- Calls — taps on the Call button. The most direct measure of enquiries you have.
- Website clicks — people who wanted more before ringing.
- Direction requests — mostly relevant if you have premises, but a signal of intent.
- Searches that showed your profile — split into direct (people looking for you by name) and discovery (people looking for your trade who found you). Discovery growth is what SEO is supposed to produce.
Check these monthly. Compare like-for-like periods, because trades are seasonal — comparing December against June tells you about the weather, not your marketing.
What movement actually looks like
Jack Cooper’s roofing profile in Amersham had about six interactions across February, March and April combined. No website, a listing barely registering.
In the three months after we built the site, verified the profile properly and started posting weekly: over forty interactions. Forty clicks through to the website. Four calls placed straight from the listing, three of them in July alone.
Four calls doesn’t sound like much until you price a roof. For most trades, one converted job pays a year of the work that produced it.
The full before-and-after is here, including the ranking changes.
Why this matters for judging your SEO
If you measure a local SEO campaign by website traffic alone, you will systematically undercount it — and for a trade, you’ll undercount it badly, because the highest-intent enquiries are exactly the ones that never touch the site.
We’ve seen trades cancel work that was producing calls, because the number they were checking wasn’t the number that moved.
That doesn’t mean the website is pointless. It does the opposite job: it convinces the people who do want a proper look before they ring, and it confirms to Google what you do and where you do it, which is part of why the profile ranks at all. The two work together. They just report separately.
Three things to do this week
1. Look at your profile insights. Not your website stats. If you’ve never opened them, you may find you’ve been getting calls you didn’t know were attributable.
2. Check your phone number is tappable everywhere on your site. On a phone, a number that isn’t a link is a number that doesn’t get dialled.
3. Write down this month’s call count. You cannot tell whether anything is improving without a starting figure, and “it feels quiet” isn’t one.
If you want the underlying tactics rather than the measurement, our guide to ranking higher on Google Maps covers the nine fixes in order of impact. And if you’d rather have someone run all of it weekly, that’s what SEO for tradesmen is.