How to Rank Higher on Google Maps as a Tradesperson

When someone searches "plumber near me", Google shows a map with three businesses before anything else. Most people pick from those three. Getting into that box is worth more than almost any other marketing a local trade can do.

Google is open about how it chooses. It says local results are based mainly on three things: relevance, distance and prominence. Everything useful you can do falls under one of them.

Relevance: does your business match the search?

Google is trying to work out whether you actually do the job that was searched for.

• Choose the right primary category. It is the strongest single signal on your profile. Be specific.
• List your services. The services section of your Google Business Profile lets you add each job you do, with a description.
• Back it up on your website. A page for each service tells Google the same thing in more detail. A profile that says "boiler repair" linked to a site with a boiler repair page is a strong match.

Distance: how close are you?

You cannot move your business, but you can make sure Google knows where you work.

• Set your service areas. If you travel to customers, you can list the towns and postcodes you cover and hide your home address.
• Build area pages. A proper page on your site for each main town helps you appear in searches there. More on that in ranking in nearby towns.

Be realistic here. Distance matters a lot, and it is hard to outrank a decent competitor who is based in the town being searched. Win your own patch first, then spread outwards.

Prominence: how well known and trusted are you?

This is where most of the ongoing work goes.

• Reviews. The number, the rating and how recent they are all count. Ask every happy customer.
• Reply to reviews. It shows the business is active and it reads well to the next customer.
• Photos. Add real photos of your work regularly. Profiles that look alive do better than ones with a single logo from five years ago.
• A healthy website. Google says your position in the normal web results also feeds into local ranking. A site that keeps growing lifts the map listing with it.
• Consistent details. Same name, address and phone number everywhere your business is listed. Here is which directories are worth being on.

What does not work

Stuffing keywords into your business name ("Dave Smith Plumber Emergency Boiler Repair Leeds") is against Google's rules and can get a profile suspended. So can fake reviews and fake addresses. The businesses that hold the top spots for years are the ones that did it properly.

The short version

Complete profile, right category, a page per service, a page per town, and a steady flow of real reviews. None of it is clever. It just has to be done, and kept up. That monthly upkeep is the core of local SEO.