TL;DR

Most tradie websites rank beautifully for one search: the business name. That only helps people who already know you. The work is in ranking for what you do plus where you do it — "bathroom renovation Cambridge", "concrete driveway Te Awamutu", "heat pump installer Hamilton". That takes a page per service per town, and most tradie sites have one "Services" page trying to do all of it at once.

The test that shows you the problem

Open a private browser window. Search your business name. You'll be first — congratulations, that's the easy one.

Now search what you actually do, plus your town. No business name. Just "electrician Ngāruawāhia" or "roof repairs Morrinsville".

If you're not on page one, that's the gap. Everyone searching the first way already knows you exist. Everyone searching the second way is a stranger with a job that needs doing, and right now they're finding someone else.

Why one "Services" page can't rank

Here's the bit that trips most trade businesses up.

You do six services across eight towns. That's forty-eight different things a customer might search. Your website has one page listing all six services, and it mentions "the Waikato" once in the footer.

Google is trying to work out which page on the internet best answers "gib stopping Te Awamutu". A page that mentions gib stopping alongside five other services, and mentions the Waikato but not Te Awamutu, is a poor answer. A page that is about gib stopping in Te Awamutu is a good answer.

This isn't a trick. It's just that specific pages beat general ones, every time.

What actually moves the needle

A real page per service, per town you'd travel to. Not forty-eight thin copies with the town name swapped — Google spots that immediately and it does more harm than good. Each page needs to be genuinely about that job in that place: what it costs there, what's different about the housing stock, jobs you've done nearby.

Your Google Business Profile, properly filled in. Services listed individually. Real photos of your work, not stock. Your service area set to the towns you actually cover. It's free, it takes an afternoon, and for local searches it often does more than the website.

Reviews, continuously. Not a burst of fifteen and then nothing for two years. A steady trickle signals an active business. Ask at the moment the customer is happiest — when the job's finished and they're looking at it.

Speed and mobile. Around 80% of trade searches are on a phone, often standing in the room that needs fixing. If your site takes six seconds to load, most of them are gone before they see it.

A phone number that's tappable. Sounds obvious. It isn't — plenty of trade sites still have a number typed as plain text, so tapping it does nothing.

What this looks like when it works

Airmax, heat pump installers in the Waikato, went from around 63 Google clicks a month to 396 after we rebuilt their site around the services and towns they actually cover. Search visibility went up 29× in two months, and the phone went from about one call a day to ten or more.

NZ Concrete Group got 5.6× the Google impressions in their first seven weeks, 2.9× the clicks, and 3.4× as many pages earning search traffic — that last number is the real story. It wasn't one page doing better. It was lots of pages that previously didn't exist starting to bring people in.

Neither of those is a trick. Both are the same boring thing: build the pages that answer what people are actually typing.

The order I'd do it in

Google Business Profile first. Free, fastest payback, most local impact.
Fix the phone number and the load speed. No point ranking if the site loses them.
Build service-and-town pages for your best three services in your best three towns. Nine pages. Do them properly.
Set up a review habit. One ask, every completed job.
Then expand the matrix — more services, more towns, once you can see the first nine working.

Most tradies try to do step 5 first and skip steps 1 to 4. It's why so many websites cost a lot and return nothing.

How long does it take?

Local SEO is usually faster than national. You're competing with a handful of other trade businesses, not the whole internet. We typically see movement in weeks and something meaningful by month three. Anyone promising page one next week is selling you something else.

Where to start

If you want to know where your site currently stands, run it through our free website check. It scores how findable you are on Google and in AI search, and tells you the specific things costing you enquiries — takes about twenty seconds and you don't have to sign up to see the result.

Or read the broader marketing for tradies guide, which covers the whole system — ads, reviews, missed calls — not just search.

SEO for Tradies NZ: How to Show Up When Someone Searches Your Trade