A sparky I know spent close to four grand on a shiny new website last spring, then rang us wondering why the work had dried up. His Google Business Profile hadn’t been touched in about two years. Wrong primary category, no service areas set, three photos, and the last review sitting there with no reply. We sorted the profile before we touched a single line of the site, and the enquiries started trickling back within a fortnight.
For most Melbourne trades, your Google Business Profile is the shopfront now. It’s the thing that shows up in Maps when someone in Preston types “emergency electrician near me” at 9pm, and it’s usually the first and only impression you get. I came into SEO sideways, from a hospitality-marketing job where a good listing meant a full room on a quiet Tuesday, and the same pattern holds for trades: the businesses that win locally are rarely the ones with the prettiest websites. They’re the ones whose profile actually answers the question the customer is asking.
Here’s the bit most people skip. Setting the profile up takes ten minutes; setting it up so it actually wins jobs is a different exercise, and it’s the second one that moves the needle. Below is the order we run it in for tradies.
Why the profile beats a website for trade leads
Think about how the job actually starts. A pipe bursts under the kitchen sink in a rental off Sydney Road in Brunswick. The tenant doesn’t open ten browser tabs to compare plumbers. They pull up Maps, tap the top two or three results, and ring whoever looks closest and has decent reviews. The website barely gets a look in.
That’s the uncomfortable truth I’d put money on: for a lot of trades in their first year or two, the website matters far less than the profile does. A tidy site helps with trust and it does feed your ranking signals, but the decision is usually made in the Maps pack before anyone clicks through. If your profile is thin and the competitor down the road has fifty reviews and photos of finished jobs, you’ve lost the call before you knew it existed.
None of this means ignore your site. The two work together, and there’s real detail in how local search SEO actually ranks a business that’s worth a read. But if you’ve only got an afternoon spare, spend it on the profile.
Get your categories right (this is where most go wrong)
Your primary category is the single biggest lever on which searches you show up for, and it’s the setting tradies get wrong most often. Google asks for a category, a chippy picks “Carpenter” and moves on, and that’s the mistake. The primary category should match the job you most want to be called for, not just the trade on your ABN.
If you do a lot of kitchen work, “Kitchen remodeler” as your primary might pull better than the generic “Carpenter”. Then stack the secondary categories for everything else you genuinely do: deck builder, door supplier, whatever fits. Don’t pad it with categories you don’t service, because Google has got good at spotting when a listing is stretching itself.
One thing worth checking every few months: Google adds and renames categories quietly, and a better-fitting one can appear with no announcement at all. We re-check our clients categories each quarter for exactly that reason. It’s five minutes, and every now and then it’s the thing that nudges you into the top three.
Service areas beat a fake shopfront address
Most tradies don’t have a shopfront. You work out of a ute and a garage, and that’s completely fine, Google has a setting built for it. Mark your business as a service-area business, hide the home address, and list the suburbs and regions you actually cover.
Be realistic with the radius. If you’re based in Dandenong and you list every suburb from Werribee to Lilydale, you dilute your relevance and you’ll get called out to jobs that aren’t worth the drive up the EastLink anyway. List the areas you genuinely service well. Ten to fifteen suburbs you can reach without resenting the trip beats forty you can’t.
The old trick of inventing addresses across town to rank in more suburbs is dead, and it can get your listing suspended, which is a world of pain to recover from. If you want reach in a suburb you’re not physically in, you earn it with reviews from jobs done there and content on your site, not by faking a location. Slower, but it sticks.
Photos, your services list, and the Q&A everyone leaves blank
Photos that show the work
Upload real photos of finished jobs, not stock. Before-and-afters, a clean switchboard, a tidy pipe run, the van with your signage on it. Ten good photos beats a hundred blurry ones, and profiles with genuine job photos get more calls, plain and simple. Add a few every month so the listing looks active, because a profile that hasn’t changed since 2022 reads as a business that might not still be going.
Fill out every service
The services section is basically free keywords, and hardly anyone completes it. List each service on its own line: hot water system replacement, gas leak detection, blocked drains, and so on. Write a proper sentence of description for each. This is the stuff that helps you turn up for specific searches, and it’s the low-effort win our team ticks off first.
Own the Q&A before someone else does
Anyone can post a question on your profile and anyone can answer it, including a bloke who has never used you. So seed it yourself. Post the five questions you get asked every week (after-hours rates, do you do emergency callouts are you licensed and insured) and answer them properly. If you leave it blank, you’re handing strangers a pen to write your FAQ.
Reviews are the job-winner (and so is how you reply)
If one thing decides who gets the call, it’s reviews, both the count and how recent they are. A profile with steady, recent reviews outranks and out-converts a dusty one with a slightly higher average from three years back. Ask every happy customer, every time. The best moment is right when you’ve finished and they’re standing there telling you what a good job you’ve done. Send the review link before you leave the driveway.
Then reply to them. All of them. A short, specific thank-you on the good ones (mention the suburb or the job, it reads as real and it quietly adds keywords) and a calm, professional reply on the rare ordinary one. Respond to the good reviews aswell, not just the negative, because prospects read your replies to work out what you’d be like to deal with.
Never buy reviews or get mates to post fake ones. Google’s filters are better than people assume, and a batch of suspicious reviews can get the whole lot wiped. If you’re stretched, this is exactly the sort of follow-up you can automate without it feeling robotic, and we’ve written up how tradies are using AI to automate the boring parts of a trade business elsewhere on the site.
Posts, hours and the details that quietly matter
Google Posts are the underused one. They’re short updates that show on your profile, and they’re free real estate. Put one up when you’ve got capacity, a seasonal reminder (gutters before the autumn leaves, heater checks before winter), or a finished job you’re proud of. Once a week is plenty. It signals an active business and gives Google fresh content to chew on.
Keep the boring fields correct, because they cost you jobs silently. Your hours, including public holidays. A phone number that rings a person, not a dead voicemail. Your service area accurate. If you’ve changed your hours for the Melbourne Cup long weekend and forgotten to update them, someone rings, gets no answer, and calls the next tradie down the list. That’s a lost job you’ll never even see in the data.
There’s an official run-through of every field on the Google Business Profile Help site if you want the exact steps, and the government’s own online and digital business guidance is worth a look for the broader setup around it.
Start with the profile, then build out
If you do nothing else this week, fix the primary category, set your real service areas, upload ten proper job photos, and ask your last three happy customers for a review. That’s an afternoon, and it’ll do more than most website tweaks will.
The profile isn’t the whole picture. Once it’s pulling, that’s when a proper site and a wider plan start to compound, and the two together are what real marketing for local businesses looks like. If you’d rather have our team set it up properly and keep it maintained, that’s a fair chunk of what we do at Growth Factory, and it sits alongside the broader Melbourne SEO services we run for trades right across the city.
Get the profile right first though. It’s the cheapest lead source you’ll ever have, and most of your competitors still haven’t bothered with it properly. If you want a hand getting yours sorted, get in touch and we’ll take a look.
— Mia Trentham, Head of Search, Growth Factory