You do good work. Your customers rate you. But search your own trade and town on your phone, and you’re nowhere — while a firm you’ve never heard of sits at the top with a map next to it.
That’s not a reflection of the work. It’s a reflection of what Google can see, and Google can only see what you’ve given it. Here’s what’s usually missing, in the order that matters.
1. You haven’t verified your Google Business Profile
This is the big one, and it’s where most trades stall.
Anyone can create a profile in ten minutes. Verifying it — proving to Google the business is real — takes longer, sometimes involves a postcard or a video call, and gets abandoned halfway through more often than any other step. An unverified profile is effectively invisible in the map results.
If you do nothing else on this list, finish the verification. It’s the difference between having a listing and having a listing that ranks.
2. Your primary category is wrong
Your primary category is the single biggest lever you control, and “Roofing contractor” and “Roofer” don’t behave the same way. Neither do “Plumber” and “Plumbing contractor”.
Set the primary to the service you most want to be called about, then add every secondary category that genuinely applies. Businesses move into the top three from nowhere on this fix alone. It takes two minutes and costs nothing.
3. You only cover one town, as far as Google knows
Most trades travel. Most trade websites don’t say so.
If your site mentions your home town and nothing else, you’ll struggle to appear for “roofer in [the next town over]” — even when it’s fifteen minutes away and you work there every week. Google matches the search to the words on the page and the areas on your profile.
The fix is a page for each area you genuinely cover. Not twenty thin copies of the same page with the name swapped — Google spots that immediately and ignores all of them. A handful of real pages about the areas you actually work in, each saying something specific about the work you do there.
4. Your profile has been sitting untouched since you set it up
Google notices activity. Most local businesses post once when they create the profile and never again, which means consistent weekly posting is a genuinely low bar to clear and almost nobody clears it.
A photo of a finished job, a note about a service, a seasonal reminder. Five minutes on a Friday. The direct ranking effect is modest on its own, but combined with reviews and a complete profile it compounds — and your competitors won’t keep it up.
5. Your reviews arrive in bursts, or not at all
Reviews decide who gets the call. Two roofers side by side, one with 9 reviews and one with 70 — the choice is made before either website is opened.
Steady beats spiky: ten reviews a month for six months does more than sixty in one week. Build the ask into finishing a job — text a direct review link while you’re still in the driveway — and reply to every one that comes in. We’ve written a full guide to getting more Google reviews if you want the exact wording.
6. Your listing points at a Facebook page, or nothing
Profiles backed by a real website outrank profiles that link to social media or nowhere. The site confirms to Google what you do and where you do it, and it catches everyone who wants a proper look before they ring.
It doesn’t need to be elaborate. It needs to load fast on a phone, name your services and your areas, and have your number tappable on every screen.
What this looks like when it works
Jack Cooper runs JNC Bespoke Roofing in Amersham. Good reputation locally, no website, and a Google listing that had picked up roughly six interactions across all of February, March and April. Meanwhile established firms in the same town — one with over 140 reviews — were taking every search in the area.
We built the site with a page per area, created and verified the profile properly, and posted every week.
In the three months that followed, the profile went from about six interactions to over forty. Forty of those were clicks through to the website, and four were calls placed straight from the listing, three of them in July alone. JNC now sits at position 2 for “roofer in Amersham” and consistently top of the map results for “roofing Amersham” — above the firm with 140 reviews.
You can read the full case study, numbers and all.
The honest timeline
Category and verification fixes can move things within days. Reviews, posting and content build over two to four months and then keep compounding.
Nobody plans a new roof. They search when the ceiling’s wet, they call one of the first names they see, and they don’t scroll. Being one of those first names is the whole game — and it’s mostly a matter of doing unglamorous things consistently, which is precisely why so few of your competitors manage it.
If you’d rather not do it yourself, that’s what our SEO for tradesmen service covers — the profile, the posting, the site and the reporting, every week, for £149 a month with no contract.