If you're a plumber, electrician, builder, roofer, or any other UK tradesman reading this, you probably already know you need a website. What most tradesmen don't know is what their website needs to do — and there's a critical difference between a website that exists and a website that earns.
This guide covers everything: why most tradesman websites fail, what Google looks for in 2026, which keywords bring in work rather than window-shoppers, and what the best website for tradesmen looks like under the bonnet. Whether you're thinking about getting your first site built, or you've had one for years and it's doing nothing, this is the guide that fills in the gaps.
Why Most Tradesman Websites Don't Work
Let's start with the uncomfortable truth.
The majority of tradesman websites in the UK are doing one job: making the tradesman feel better about having a website. They look fine on a laptop. They have a nice logo, a few photos of completed work, a services page, and a contact form buried at the bottom. Job done.
Except it isn't.
The average builder, plumber or electrician's website converts at under 1%. That means for every 100 people who visit, 99 leave without picking up the phone. Compare that to a properly built, conversion-focused tradesman website — the difference is often a 100% to 200% increase in calls from the same amount of traffic.
The three reasons most trade sites fail are almost always the same:
1. The phone number is buried. On mobile — where over 70% of local trade searches happen — the number lives in the footer, behind a hamburger menu, or on a "contact" page the visitor has to hunt for. On a properly built site, a tap-to-call button lives on every single page, thumb-reachable, always visible.
2. The site loads too slowly. Page-builder sites (WordPress with Elementor, Wix, Squarespace) routinely clock in at 6–10 seconds on mobile. Google's research shows that for every additional second of load time, conversions drop by roughly 20%. A hand-coded site built on a modern stack like Next.js, served from an edge CDN like Cloudflare, loads in under a second. That's not a minor improvement — it's a different product.
3. The copy sounds like every other site. "Welcome to our website." "We are a professional plumbing company." "Contact us for a free quote." Google has read these sentences on 40,000 other trade sites. It can't differentiate you. Neither can the customer. A properly written site — built around your actual trade, your town, your kind of jobs — reads completely differently, ranks differently, and converts differently.
What Google Actually Rewards in 2026
Google's algorithm has shifted dramatically over the past three years. Understanding this is the foundation of a good SEO strategy for any trades business.
E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness
Google's quality raters look for something called E-E-A-T when evaluating content. The first E — Experience — was added in 2022 and it's relevant to every trade website. Google wants to see demonstrated, real-world experience. For a tradesman website, this means:
Real photos of real work (not stock images)
Before-and-after galleries
Genuine customer reviews, ideally from Google
Case studies that show specific problems solved
Credentials and accreditations displayed prominently (Gas Safe, NICEIC, FMB, NAPIT)
A local SEO package that ignores E-E-A-T signals is building on sand. Google is getting better at identifying sites that are thin on real experience — and burying them.
Core Web Vitals
Google's Core Web Vitals measure three things: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP — how fast the main content loads), Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS — whether the page jumps around as it loads), and Interaction to Next Paint (INP — how quickly the page responds when you tap something).
Sites in the green zone on all three metrics consistently outrank sites in the amber or red zones, all else being equal. In a competitive local market — say, "boiler repair Croydon" — Core Web Vitals can be the tiebreaker between you and the company in the map pack above you.
This is why template builders consistently underperform: they inject hundreds of kilobytes of JavaScript and CSS that the browser has to parse before anything appears on screen. A site built by hand on a lean stack has none of that overhead.
Local Signals: The Map Pack Is Where the Money Is
When someone types "plumber near me" at 4pm on a Sunday, Google shows three local businesses before any website results. That map pack — sometimes called the Local 3-Pack — receives significantly more clicks than the organic listings below it for trade searches. Getting into it is one of the most important things a UK tradesman can do online.
The three signals that determine map pack rankings are:
Proximity: How close your business address is to the searcher. You can't control this.
Relevance: How well your Google Business Profile and website match the search query. You can absolutely control this.
Prominence: How trusted and well-reviewed your business appears across the web. Built over time.
A properly set-up Google Business Profile — with the correct primary category, complete service list, regular photo uploads, weekly posts, and a steady flow of genuine reviews — is the single biggest lever most tradesmen have available to them right now.
Topical Authority
Google rewards sites that demonstrate deep, consistent expertise in a specific topic area. For a trades website, this means your site should cover your trade — every service, every location you work in, every type of job — comprehensively. Not thin, repeated content. Real pages with real information.
This is why schema and technical SEO matters: structured data helps Google understand the relationship between your pages, your services, your location, and your business.
The Keywords That Bring Real Work
Not all traffic is equal. A tradesman who understands this will spend their SEO budget very differently from one who doesn't.
There are two types of search intent that matter for trades businesses:
Urgent intent: The boiler's broken. The pipe's leaking. The lights aren't working. These searches — "emergency plumber near me", "boiler repair Croydon", "24 hour electrician London" — come from people who are ready to pay, right now. These are your highest-value keywords. The conversion rate on urgent-intent searches is five to ten times higher than average.
Research intent: Someone's planning a loft conversion and wants to compare builders. They're not calling today, but they're making a shortlist. Keywords like "best builders south London" or "how much does a loft conversion cost" bring in this audience. Valuable, but further from the sale.
A strong keyword strategy targets both. It captures the urgent calls today, and builds the pipeline of research-intent visitors who become paying customers in 30–90 days.
What Keywords to Actually Target
Here's the practical reality for a new trade website: don't target "plumber". You will never, under any realistic timeline, outrank British Gas, Checkatrade, Rated People, and MyBuilder for a one-word national term. These sites have domain authorities in the 40–80 range. A new site starts at zero.
Instead, target the specific searches your actual customers type:
"boiler repair [your town]"
"emergency electrician [your postcode area]"
"kitchen extension builders [your borough]"
"flat roof repair [your county]"
These terms have lower search volume individually, but dramatically higher conversion rates, and far less competition. A page targeting "boiler repair Sevenoaks" will outrank Checkatrade for that specific term faster than you might think — if the page is built correctly.
This is the principle behind the best local SEO for tradesmen: one dedicated page per service, per area. Twenty pages targeting twenty location-service combinations gives Google twenty opportunities to match you with a real buyer.
The Anatomy of a High-Converting Trade Website
This is what separates a site that gets calls from one that doesn't. Every element exists for a reason, and every reason connects back to what the customer needs to feel confident enough to ring.
The Hero Section
The first thing a visitor sees. It has four seconds to do its job. It needs to answer:
What do you do?
Where do you do it?
Why should I trust you?
What do I do next?
"Welcome to ABC Plumbing" answers none of these. "Emergency plumber in South London — Same-day response, Gas Safe registered, 147 five-star reviews" answers all four.
Click-to-Call on Every Page
This deserves its own heading because it's that important. A tap-to-call button that floats, sticks, or otherwise remains visible as the customer scrolls is not optional on a trade website. It's the whole point. The entire job of your online presence is to get the phone to ring — and then to get out of the way.
On mobile (where your customer is), the gap between "I've decided I want to call" and "I'm talking to someone" should be one tap. One. Not: find the menu, tap About, find the phone number, copy it, open the dialler, paste it, ring. One tap.
Every site built by WebWise ships with click-to-call on every page, thumb-reachable, by default. It's not an add-on. It's a design principle.
Social Proof Where It Counts
Reviews work. Not hidden at the bottom of a reviews page, but woven through the site at the moments of highest doubt. A customer on your "Emergency call-out" page is deciding whether to call. A row of recent five-star Google reviews, live and updating, at the top of that page, changes the decision.
The same applies to accreditations (Gas Safe register number, NICEIC certificate, FMB membership), certifications, and associations with recognised brands. These aren't decoration — they answer the "can I trust this person?" question before the customer even has to ask it.
Reviews automation — sending a polite follow-up after each job with a direct Google review link — compounds over time. Thirty reviews become forty, become sixty. The competitor who's been trading five years with no system for asking has three reviews. You'll overtake them in six months.
Location Pages That Actually Rank
A properly built location page for "electrician in Bromley" is not a paragraph of text with the word "Bromley" swapped in. Google is sophisticated enough to recognise thin, templated location content — and to penalise it.
A real location page includes:
A headline that names the trade and the specific town
A paragraph written for that specific area (reference local landmarks, typical property types, common job types in that postcode)
The specific services you offer in that area
Reviews from customers in that area
A map embed showing your service coverage
A click-to-call button in the hero
Done this way, a page for "builders in Lewisham" will rank for that term. And once you've built that playbook for one area, you replicate it across every town you serve. That's how a trade business with a new website starts ranking in 90 days.
Fast Load Times: The Silent Conversion Factor
Load time is boring to talk about and enormously consequential. Google's own data shows that sites loading in 1 second have conversion rates three times higher than sites loading in 5 seconds. For a trade site where a "conversion" is a phone call for a £800 boiler replacement, that's the difference between a job won and a job lost.
The practical implication: if your site was built on WordPress, Wix, or Squarespace, it is almost certainly slower than it needs to be. Page builders add visual editing capability that costs real performance. A hand-coded site — built on a lean stack, images compressed, fonts loaded efficiently, no unused CSS or JavaScript — simply loads faster. The performance gap is structural, not a matter of tweaking settings.
Local SEO: The Unglamorous Work That Wins Jobs
If your trade website is your storefront, local SEO is the signage on the high street. You might have the best shop in town, but if your sign isn't visible from where people are walking, you won't get footfall.
Google Business Profile: Your Free Storefront
The Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) is the single most powerful free tool a UK tradesman has access to. When set up correctly, it determines whether you appear in the map pack for local searches. When set up incorrectly — or not at all — you're invisible to the searches that matter most.
Key optimisation points:
Primary category: Must match your main trade exactly. "Plumber" not "Contractor". "Electrician" not "Home Services". Google uses this to determine which searches to show you for.
Service area: Set up correctly to cover every postcode you serve, not just your home postcode.
Photos: Upload real photos of your work regularly. Businesses with 100+ photos on their GBP see significantly more views and calls than those with fewer than 10.
Weekly posts: Google Business posts have a ranking signal. Post a job completed, a tip, a seasonal reminder — weekly, consistently.
Q&A section: Often overlooked. Pre-populate it with questions customers ask, and answer them. This content is indexed by Google.
WebWise's Google Business setup service covers all of this — including verification, which is often where tradesmen get stuck.
Citations: Consistency Across the Web
A citation is any mention of your business name, address, and phone number (NAP) across the web. The key word is consistency. If your business appears as "ABC Plumbing Ltd" on your website, "A.B.C. Plumbing" on Yell, and "ABC Plumbing Services" on Thomson Local, Google sees three different businesses — and trusts none of them.
Build citations consistently across: Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Apple Maps, Yell, Thomson Local, Checkatrade (even without a full profile), TrustATrader, MyBuilder, and any trade-specific directories relevant to your sector. Each one is a vote of trust in Google's eyes.
Schema Markup: The Language Google Speaks
Schema markup is structured data you add to your website's code that tells Google — in its own language — exactly what your business is, what it does, and where it operates. A LocalBusiness schema tells Google: here is a business, this is its name, phone number, address, opening hours, the services it offers, and the area it covers.
Without schema, Google has to infer all of this from your page content. With schema, you're telling it directly. The difference shows up in rich results — the star ratings, opening hours, and direct call buttons that appear under your site listing in search results — and in overall ranking confidence.
Schema and technical SEO is the invisible foundation of a high-ranking trade website. It's the part that clients never see, that never gets photographed for a portfolio, and that does more for your rankings than almost anything visible.
What AI and Automation Mean for Tradesmen in 2026
This is newer territory, but it's becoming important fast. Tradesmen who handle their own admin — answering enquiries, quoting, chasing, booking — spend an average of 11 hours per week on it, according to business efficiency research. That's 11 hours not spent on tools.
AI workflows, properly set up, can handle:
Missed-call recovery: When a call goes to voicemail, an automated WhatsApp message goes out within two minutes: "Sorry we missed your call — we'll ring back within the hour." Fewer leads lost.
Overnight quote drafting: A customer sends a job description at 11pm. An AI-drafted quote sits in your email by 6am, ready for you to review, personalise, and send.
Follow-up sequences: Sent a quote and gone quiet? Two polite follow-ups, three days apart, in your voice. Most tradesmen don't follow up at all. The ones who do win more jobs.
Review chasing: Job finished, payment taken — an automated text goes out that evening with a one-tap Google review link. Review volume compounds month by month without any manual effort.
These aren't futuristic — they're available today, and the AI workflows that run them are bolt-on additions to a standard trade website build.
The Build Process: From Brief to Phone Ringing
Understanding what goes into a proper trade website helps you ask the right questions when you're commissioning one — and spot the shortcuts when someone is taking them.
Week One: Brief, Copy, Structure
The first week should be entirely about understanding the business before writing a line of code. What trades do you do? Which areas do you cover? What kind of jobs do you most want — emergency call-outs, planned projects, maintenance contracts? Who are your best customers, and where did they come from?
Good copywriting follows from good questions. The copy on a tradesman website isn't filler — it's the thing that persuades a stranger at 7pm to choose you over the three other plumbers they've got open in tabs.
Week Two: Build, Test, Launch
A hand-coded site on a modern stack should be live in two weeks for a standard trade build. That includes all pages, all images optimised, click-to-call wired in, Google Business Profile set up, and schema markup in place. The build process at WebWise follows a seven-stage sprint: listen, write, design, build, review, rank, ship.
The launch is not the end — it's the beginning of the ranking work. The site goes live with strong on-page foundations, but climbing to page one takes ongoing work: citations built over weeks, reviews accumulating over months, blog content published consistently.
Content Strategy: What to Write and Why
A new trade website needs content to rank. Not just service pages — though those matter — but ongoing content that keeps Google indexing the site regularly and builds topical authority over time.
Blog Content That Converts
The best performing blog posts for trades businesses fall into three categories:
Problem-aware content: "Why is my boiler making a banging noise?" — Someone has a problem, searches for it, lands on your page. You explain it, show you know what you're talking about, and offer to come and fix it. This is top-of-funnel content that converts at every stage.
Cost and comparison content: "How much does a rewire cost in London?" — Customers comparison-shopping. They're going to hire someone. If your page gives them a straight, honest answer, you've built trust before they've even called.
Local credibility content: "Extension builders in Bromley — recent projects" — Posts about actual jobs you've completed in specific areas. These rank for hyper-local searches, demonstrate real experience (E-E-A-T), and make the decision easy for local customers.
Publishing one piece of content per week — even short, 400-word pieces — compounds significantly over 12 months. A trade website with 50 pieces of indexed content is a fundamentally different SEO asset than a 5-page brochure site.
Social Content That Feeds SEO
Content created for Instagram and TikTok — before-and-after photos, short videos of jobs completed, tips from the trade — can be repurposed as blog posts, embedded on service pages, and used in Google Business Profile posts. One Sunday afternoon emergency boiler swap, documented properly, becomes an Instagram reel, a before/after in your portfolio, a blog post about emergency boiler repair in your area, and a Google Business update — all from the same 15-minute job write-up.
The AI content service at WebWise handles exactly this: taking raw job details and turning them into multi-channel content that serves both social and SEO simultaneously.
How to Choose the Right Website Partner
The tradesman website market is saturated with options, and the quality range is enormous. Here's how to tell a good partner from a bad one:
They show you their actual work. Not mockups. Live sites, with client names, that you can visit and test on your phone right now. If a web agency can't show you three live trade websites that load quickly, have click-to-call in the right place, and look like they were built for that specific business — move on.
They give you a fixed price before you pay anything. Any agency that starts billing by the hour for a trade website is transferring the risk of their inefficiency onto you. A fixed quote, in writing, before the deposit, is the only acceptable commercial arrangement.
You own everything from day one. Domain registered in your name. Code accessible on a repo. Hosting transferable. If you ever want to move, you take your entire digital asset with you. Agencies that hold your domain or code as leverage are not partners — they're landlords.
They don't promise page one in two weeks. SEO for a new site takes time. Three to six months to see meaningful organic movement is honest. Anyone promising faster results is either lying or planning to use tactics that will eventually get your site penalised.
They understand trades. Not just "we've built websites for businesses." They understand that a boiler breakdown at 4pm on a Sunday is a different market moment than a scheduled bathroom renovation. They understand that a Gas Safe number is not just a detail — it's the thing that makes a customer feel safe enough to let you into their house. They write and build with this understanding.
Getting Started: The Practical First Steps
If you're a tradesman looking to get your online presence working harder, here's where to start — in order.
Step one: Fix your Google Business Profile. Free to do, takes an afternoon, and affects your map pack ranking immediately. Correct your primary category, update your service area, add 20 photos, and write a proper business description.
Step two: Audit your existing site for mobile usability. Open it on your actual phone. Can you see a click-to-call button without scrolling? Does it load in under three seconds on a 4G connection? If the answer to either question is no, you're losing calls right now.
Step three: Commission one location page for your highest-value service in your busiest area. Not a new site — just one page. Test whether a properly-written, properly-structured location page generates more enquiries than what you have now.
Step four: Start building reviews. After every job completed this week, send the customer a WhatsApp message with a direct link to your Google review page. Ask politely. Do this for every job, every week, for six months. The compound effect is significant.
Step five: Get a proper site built. When you're ready to invest properly, choose a studio that builds by hand, has a fixed price, shows you live work, and gives you the keys. A website that generates one extra job per month at £800 average pays for a £950 starter site in the first month.
The phone rings. The work books in. That's the whole point.
Conclusion: What a Website Is Actually For
A tradesman website exists to do one job: transfer the trust of a cold online searcher into the confidence needed to pick up the phone and ring you. Every element — the speed, the click-to-call button, the reviews, the local pages, the schema, the copy — serves that single purpose.
The best websites are the most patient salespeople you'll ever hire. They work the night shift, they don't take bank holidays, and they're never in a bad mood when a customer lands on them at 4am with a leaking pipe.
If your current site isn't working that hard for you, it's not because websites don't work. It's because most trade sites aren't built with that clarity of purpose. The ones that are generate calls. Consistently, measurably, month after month.
That's what we build.
