How to get more local trade enquiries
There is a sensible order to this, and most trade businesses do it backwards — buying leads before fixing the basics. Here is the order that actually works, cheapest and highest-impact first.
1. Finish your Google Business Profile
For local trade searches the map results usually appear above everything else, and they are free. Fill in every field: services, areas served, hours, phone, website. Add at least a dozen photos of real jobs. Answer every review, including the awkward ones.
This is the single highest-return hour available to a trade business, and a surprising number of them have a half-finished profile.
2. Get recent reviews, continuously
Recency beats volume. Ten reviews from this year outperform forty from years ago, because both customers and search engines read them as evidence you are still good.
Build the ask into finishing a job rather than doing it in batches. The day you finish, while they are pleased with you, is the only reliable moment.
3. Have a real page for every town you work in
A single page listing twelve towns rarely ranks for any of them. Write, or have drafted, a page about each town: the housing you find there, the jobs that come up, the neighbouring areas you cover.
The rule is that each page must be genuinely different. Copies of the same paragraph with the town name swapped are the fastest way to be ignored, and they read badly to humans too.
4. Make the site fast and phone-first
Most people searching for a trade are on a phone, often on a poor signal. If your page takes four seconds to appear you have lost a proportion of them before they see your name. Pages sent as finished HTML from the server appear immediately.
Put the phone number on every screen. A tap-to-call button beats a contact form for urgent work every time.
5. Reply faster than the next business
Speed of reply is the most reliable predictor of who wins a job. Whoever answers first usually gets it, which is why missed calls are so expensive.
If you cannot answer while working, arrange for something to answer for you and take the details, so you can ring back knowing what the job is.
6. Measure, then repeat what worked
Track how many people visited, how many enquired, and where they came from. Most local trade sites convert somewhere between two and five in every hundred visitors, so if you are far below that the problem is the site, and if you are in range the problem is traffic.
Knowing which of those two it is saves you from spending money in the wrong place — which is what most trade marketing budgets do.
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Last reviewed 2026-09-11.