You know your work is better than theirs. You’ve seen their jobs. You’ve been called out to fix their jobs. And yet when someone in your town searches for a plumber, an electrician, a roofer, there they are at the top, and you’re nowhere.
It’s a fair thing to be annoyed about. Here’s what’s actually going on, and what you can do about it this week without paying anyone.
Google isn’t ranking the best tradesperson
This is the bit that stings. Google has no idea who does good work. It can’t inspect a boiler install or climb up and look at a roof. What it can do is read signals: how complete your Google Business Profile is, how many reviews you have and how recent they are, whether your website mentions the town someone searched from, and how fast that website loads on a phone.
Your competitor almost certainly isn’t better at the trade. They’re better at the signals, usually by accident. Someone set their profile up properly once, they ask for reviews, and their website says the name of your town more than yours does.
The Maps pack decides most local jobs
When someone searches “emergency electrician near me”, the first thing on the screen isn’t a website. It’s the map with three businesses on it. Most people ring one of those three and never scroll past them.
Getting into that three is a different job from ranking a website. It’s driven mainly by:
- Distance from the person searching, which you can’t change
- Your Google Business Profile, which you completely control
- Reviews, in number, rating and recency
- Categories on your profile, which is where most trades quietly lose
If your primary category says “Contractor” and your competitor’s says “Emergency plumber service”, Google is being told two different things about what you do. That one setting moves rankings more than most people believe.
Recency of reviews matters more than the total
A business with 40 reviews from this year usually outranks one with 90 reviews from four years ago. Google is trying to work out who’s actively trading right now, and a steady trickle of recent reviews is the clearest evidence available.
This is the single easiest thing to fix, and it costs nothing. Get your review link from your Business Profile, save it as a text shortcut on your phone, and send it to every customer the same day you finish the job. Not a week later. Same day, while they’re still pleased with you.
Your website probably doesn’t say where you work
Open your own site and read the homepage as if you were a stranger. Does it say the towns you cover? Not “Essex and surrounding areas”, but the actual place names people type: Basildon, Wickford, Billericay, Chelmsford.
Plenty of trade websites never name a single town. Google then has to guess where you work, and it guesses badly. Your competitor’s site has town names on it, and that’s often the whole difference.
Slow websites lose the job before the phone rings
If your site takes five seconds to load on 4G, a good share of people have already gone back to the results and tapped the next name. That behaviour is measurable, and it teaches Google that your result wasn’t the useful one.
Check yours honestly: open your site on your phone, on mobile data rather than wifi, and count. If it’s slower than three seconds, that’s costing you jobs today, regardless of rankings.
What to do this week
In order of what pays off fastest:
- Fix your Business Profile categories. Primary category should be the exact service people search for, not a vague trade description.
- Add photos to your profile. Real jobs, taken on your phone. Profiles with recent photos get more calls.
- Start asking for reviews the same day. One text, every job, no exceptions.
- Put your towns on your website. Homepage and service pages, written naturally in sentences, not stuffed into a list at the bottom.
- Test your site speed on a phone. If it’s slow, that’s the next job.
None of that requires an agency. It requires about two hours and then ten seconds after every job.
When it’s worth getting help
If you’ve done all five and you’re still behind, the gap is usually competition. Some towns have three or four trades all doing this properly, and moving past them takes consistent work over months: more pages for the searches that matter, more reviews, more reasons for Google to treat you as the established option.
That’s the work we do at LiftMyTrade, and we only do it for one business per trade in each town. Not as a gimmick. Because doing it for two plumbers in the same town would mean working against one of our own clients.
If you want to know whether your town is still free, check here and I’ll tell you straight, usually the same day.