Most trades businesses I speak to want the same thing. More enquiries. And the usual advice is to spend more on SEO, get higher up Google, and the phone starts ringing.
Except that isn’t what happens a lot of the time.
I had a conversation earlier this year with a roofer who was sitting in the top three for his main town term. Genuinely good rankings, the kind most of his competitors would love. He was getting traffic. He was getting almost no calls. He’d assumed the fix was more SEO, because that’s what he’d been sold, and he was about to spend again on it.
We looked at his site together for about ten minutes. There was no photo of him anywhere. No mention of insurance. Reviews were a little Google badge in the footer that you’d never notice. No prices, not even a range. And the only way to contact him was a form with nine fields on it.
He didn’t have a ranking problem. He had a “why would I pick you” problem.
It helps to think about how people actually buy trades work. Nobody rings the first result. They open four or five tabs, they skim, and they close the ones that don’t reassure them. Ranking gets you into the shortlist. Trust gets you the call. If you spend money on the first part while the second part is broken, you’re paying to send people to a page that talks them out of it.
So before the next SEO invoice, I’d get these seven things on the site.
1. A real name and a real face
This is the cheapest one and it gets skipped constantly. A photo of the person who turns up. Not a stock image of a smiling man in a hard hat that half the trades sites in Britain are also using.
Homeowners are letting a stranger into their house. Seeing who that stranger is does more work than any amount of copy about “quality workmanship”. Put it near the top, not buried on an About page nobody clicks.
2. Proof you’re actually insured and qualified
Say the number. “£2m public liability, certificate available on request” beats a generic “fully insured” badge, because anyone can type “fully insured”.
Same with trade bodies. Gas Safe, NICEIC, NFRC, TrustMark, whichever applies to you. Show the registration number. A logo on its own is decoration. A logo with a number next to it is something a cautious customer can go and check, and the ones who do check are usually the ones with money to spend.
3. Reviews on the page, with dates
And this is my pet hate. A link that says “see our Google reviews” is asking your customer to leave your site and go somewhere they might get distracted. Why would you do that.
Pull the reviews onto the page. Show the reviewer’s name, the date, and enough of the text that it reads like a person wrote it. A review from three weeks ago that mentions the specific job does more than fifty five-star ratings with no detail.
Dates matter more than people expect. A wall of glowing reviews with no dates makes me wonder when the last one was.
4. Photos of your actual jobs
Not the manufacturer’s product shots. Not stock. Your work, on a real roof or a real bathroom, ideally with a line about what the job was and roughly where.
The scruffy photo taken on a phone in the rain outperforms the polished stock image every time, because it’s obviously yours. Customers are surprisingly good at spotting the difference.
5. Some indication of price
This is the one that gets the most pushback, and I understand why. Every job is different, you can’t quote without seeing it, and you don’t want to scare people off.
Fair. But “from £X” or a typical range for a common job does two useful things. It stops you wasting evenings quoting for people who were never going to spend that. And it signals confidence, because the businesses hiding their prices are usually the ones the customer suspects will make the number up on the day.
You don’t have to publish a full price list. A range on your three most common jobs is plenty.
6. A clear service area, written like a human
Not a map with a circle on it. A sentence. “We cover Sheffield, Rotherham, Chesterfield and about 20 miles around.”
If someone can’t work out in five seconds whether you come to them, they close the tab. And they don’t come back later to check.
7. What actually happens after they get in touch
Almost nobody does this and it’s the one I’d add first if you only did one.
Three lines under your contact form. “You’ll get a reply the same working day. We’ll book a free 20 minute visit to look at the job. You’ll have a written quote within 48 hours, no obligation.”
Think about why that works. The thing stopping someone filling in a form isn’t usually the form. It’s not knowing what they’ve just signed up for. Are they about to get eight phone calls? A pushy salesman on the doorstep? Telling them exactly what happens next removes the risk, and it costs you nothing but the writing.
The order matters
None of this is complicated and none of it needs a developer. Most of it is an afternoon’s work with the photos on your phone and a bit of honest writing.
What I’d say is that the order matters more than the individual items. Traffic to a site that doesn’t reassure anyone is just a more expensive way of being ignored. Fix the trust layer first, then spend on getting more people to see it, and the same SEO budget starts doing roughly twice the work.
The roofer, for what it’s worth, added his face, his insurance number, eight job photos and a “what happens next” block. He didn’t touch his rankings at all. His enquiries went up anyway, because the people who were already finding him stopped bouncing.
That’s usually where the quickest win is hiding.
About the author
James Tandy runs JTandy, a UK consultancy building conversion-focused websites and Local SEO for trades and home-service businesses.
