You Do Not Need More Traffic, You Need the Right Searches
A tradie does not have a traffic problem. Nobody is browsing. Somebody types a search, rings one of the first few businesses they see, and books the job that afternoon. The whole task is being one of those businesses for the searches that turn into work, and being absent from the ones that never do.
That distinction is sharper for trades than for almost any other kind of business. A plumber in Byron Bay has very little use for ranking on the word plumber. What pays is emergency plumber byron bay at nine on a Sunday night, and hot water system replacement byron bay from somebody whose system died on Friday. Both of those people have decided what they need and are choosing who does it.
A builder is not in the same market at all. Somebody planning an extension or a new home searches for weeks, reads more, compares more, and is worth thirty times a callout. The searches worth owning there are the project ones, and the work behind them is a page that survives being read properly rather than a phone number above the fold.
So the first job is not writing anything. It is working out which searches actually produce the work you want, and which ones would just produce a busy phone.
What I Work On for a Tradie
Six things, and more of them are on the Google listing than on the website.
- Google Business Profile: your trade as the primary category rather than Contractor, every service listed separately, and service areas set to the towns you genuinely get called out to
- Job pages: a page for each job you want more of, written in the words a customer types rather than the trade term, because nobody searches for the thing you call it
- Town pages: a page for each town you genuinely work in, which is how you turn up in the ordinary results for places you are not physically closest to
- Review requests: a text with your review link going out with the invoice, set up once so it happens on every job without you remembering
- Marketplace review: what hipages, Airtasker and ServiceSeeking are actually returning against what they cost, and what that money would do in your own listing instead
Who You Are Actually Competing With Around Here
Not every tradie in Australia. You are competing with the businesses Google already thinks are the most relevant answer for somebody searching in Byron Bay, and that is a much smaller and much more winnable field than it looks.
It does not look winnable at first, because the top of the ordinary results is mostly marketplaces. hipages, Airtasker and ServiceSeeking each publish a page for every trade crossed with every suburb, and a one-van business will not out-rank pages built at that scale on the strength of its own website. That is fine, because those are not the results worth having.
The map results sit above the ordinary ones and are decided mostly by how close you are to the person searching, the primary category on your Google Business Profile and how many recent reviews you have. Every one of those is yours to control and none of them belongs to a marketplace. The second winnable group is the longer searches that name the job, which the marketplace pages are too generic to answer well. The listing and the job pages together are what the local SEO work covers for a trade.
A paid lead platform is a different purchase from a listing, and worth being clear about. hipages charges a subscription and then a credit for each set of contact details, spent whether you win the job or not, and the same job goes to more than one tradie. Airtasker takes a share of the job value instead. Both bring in real work. Both stop bringing it in the day you stop paying, and neither leaves you with anything. Google Ads is the version of that where you choose the search, the enquiry comes to you alone, and the account stays in your name.
Where the work is
SEO for Tradies Across Byron Bay and the Northern Rivers
The people who ring you are searching from Byron Bay, Suffolk Park, Bangalow, Brunswick Heads, Mullumbimby, Ocean Shores, Lennox Head and Ballina, and the point is not a page for every one of them. It is working out which of those towns you genuinely work in and which searches from them are worth having, then building for those. A page for a town you actually service will rank there. A longer list of suburbs in the service area field of your Google listing tells customers where you travel and does nothing at all for where you rank.
Byron Bay is an unusual trade market and it changes which searches are worth having. Byron Shire capped non-hosted holiday letting at 60 days a year in September 2024, which tells you how much of the housing stock here is let rather than lived in. Every one of those properties has a manager rather than an owner answering the phone, and a manager is a repeat commercial customer who searches differently from a homeowner and rings a great deal more often. Winning one of those is worth more than winning ten one-off callouts, and almost nobody writes a page aimed at them.
The work behind this
What actually gets done for a tradie, and what it costs.
Other businesses I work with
Restaurants, clinics and holiday letting have pages too.
On the phone
Frequently Asked Questions
The ones that come up before anything gets quoted.
Is hipages worth it for a tradie?
It can be worth it early on, when you have nothing else running and you need work this week. What it does not do is give you the customer, because the same contact details go to more than one tradie and the calls stop the day the subscription does. The same money in your own Google listing keeps producing enquiries after you stop spending it.
Can I rank in Byron Bay if I work out of the house?
Yes. Set the listing up as a service area business, which hides your home address from the public and lets you list the towns you travel to. Google still measures distance from the address you verified at, so ranking in a town you are not closest to is done with a page for that town in the ordinary results.
How do I get Google Guaranteed in Australia?
You cannot. The badge comes from Google Local Services Ads, which is not offered here, so a Google Guaranteed badge sold as part of an Australian package is not the Google one. Reviews and a finished listing are what carry the same job in this market.
How do I get more reviews as a tradie?
A text containing your Google review link, sent out with the invoice. Set up once, it happens on every job without you having to remember, and review volume and recency are both part of the prominence signal Google uses to rank the map results.