Local SEO checklist for Perth trades

Local SEO for a trade business is mostly four things: a properly configured Google Business Profile, a genuine page for every service and area you want work from, consistent business details everywhere you appear, and a steady flow of reviews. Almost everything else is a distraction until those are done.

Do these first

1. Claim and verify your Google Business Profile. Unverified profiles do not rank. Check you actually control it — plenty of businesses are running on a profile a previous marketer set up.
2. Set the right primary category. The single most common fixable mistake. An electrician listed as "Contractor" will struggle regardless of what else is right.
3. List real service areas. The suburbs you genuinely cover, not a radius over the whole metro. A huge area dilutes relevance rather than extending reach.
4. Fill in every field. Services, hours, description, attributes, photos. Empty fields are a signal of an inactive business.
5. Get your NAP consistent. Name, address and phone identical on your website, your profile and every directory. Mismatches quietly undermine everything else.

NAP consistency, specifically

Name, address and phone. The instruction is always “keep it consistent” and it is rarely explained, so here is what actually matters: Google is trying to work out whether the business it found on three different sites is one business or three. Small differences make that harder.

• Pick one format and use it everywhere. “Unit 2/14 Smith St” and “2/14 Smith Street” are the same place to you and not obviously the same to a machine.
• One phone number. If you have a mobile and a landline, choose which one is the business number and use it consistently. A tracking number that differs from your listed one is a common own goal.
• The legal name, not a slogan. “Smith Electrical”, not “Smith Electrical — Perth’s Best Sparkies”. Adding keywords to the name is against Google’s guidelines and is the most commonly reported violation.
• Fix the old listings, do not just add new ones. A directory entry from 2016 with a disconnected number is actively working against you.

If you changed address or number in the last few years, that cleanup is probably the highest-value hour available to you, and almost nobody does it.

Then the website

• A page per service. Not one "Services" page listing eight things. Eight searches, eight pages.
• A page per area you actually want work from. Four or five real ones beat twenty thin ones — near-identical suburb pages get filtered and then none of them rank. That is why we publish a handful of suburb pages rather than forty.
• Your address and phone in the footer, as text. Not in an image. It needs to be readable and it needs to match your profile exactly.
• Tap-to-call on mobile. Not strictly SEO, but it is where the ranking turns into a phone call.
• Local business schema. Structured data telling Google your address, hours and services in a format it does not have to guess at.

Which citations are worth the time

Submitting to hundreds of directories is a waste of a weekend. A small number of quality Australian listings, all with identical details, does the job. The point is corroboration, not volume.

• The big general ones. Yellow Pages, True Local, Hotfrog, Localsearch. Free listings are enough; the paid upgrades rarely pay for themselves for a trade business.
• The other two map providers. Bing Places and Apple Business Connect. Both are free, both take about ten minutes, and Apple is what every iPhone user gets when they ask Siri.
• Your industry bodies. Master Electricians Australia, Master Plumbers, HIA, Master Builders WA. If you are a member and not listed in their directory, that is a wasted membership benefit.
• Anywhere you genuinely appear. A supplier’s “find an installer” page, a local chamber of commerce, a council business directory.

Then reviews, forever

Reviews are the clearest prominence signal Google has for a local business, and there is no shortcut. Build asking into the job: at completion, while you are still standing there, followed by a text with the link. Ask for specifics rather than a rating — "would you mind mentioning it was in Ellenbrook?" produces reviews containing the words people search for.

Reply to all of them, including the bad ones. A business with only five-star reviews and no replies tells a customer less than one that answers a complaint properly in public.

Things that do not matter as much as people think

• Posting to your profile daily. Fortnightly is fine. Posts are not a ranking factor.
• Keyword-stuffing your business name. Against the guidelines, and competitors report it.
• Submitting to hundreds of directories. A handful of quality Australian citations beats two hundred junk ones.
• Meta keywords. Ignored since 2009. If someone quotes you for them, question the rest of the quote.
• Blogging constantly. Useful for broader search, largely irrelevant to the map pack.

How long before any of it shows

Honestly: category and service-area changes can move things inside a week or two, because you are correcting relevance and that is the fastest signal to update. Review counts and citation cleanup work far more slowly — think months, not weeks, and the curve is gradual rather than a step change.

That gap is why so many people give up. They fix the easy things, see a fortnight of improvement, then stop asking for reviews because nothing dramatic happened in March. The businesses that pull away are the ones still asking in September.

Measuring it without fooling yourself

Do not check your own rankings from your own phone in your own suburb. Proximity means you will always look better than you are, and you will make decisions on a number nobody else sees.

Use the performance tab on the profile: calls, direction requests and website clicks, month over month. Those are outcomes rather than positions, they are not distorted by where you happen to be standing, and one of them is the thing that actually pays you. If calls are up and your ranking looks the same, you are winning.

The thing you cannot fix

Distance from the searcher is a genuine ranking factor. A business in Midland will not rank in Fremantle no matter what it does. That is not a fault in your setup. Dominate where you actually are, and use real service and suburb pages to compete in ordinary search, where distance matters far less.

John Ocello

Founder, PC Madness Web Services, Midland WA