SEO for a trade business is two different contests that people lump together. One is the map results, driven by your Google Business Profile. The other is the ordinary web results, driven by your website's pages. Both end the same way: a phone call or a form, then a job, then an invoice. If you can't follow a search all the way to that invoice, you're judging SEO on rankings and traffic, which is how shops end up paying for pages that never book a thing.
This hub is about following the chain. The trade guides below cover what to build for HVAC, plumbing, roofing and contractors in general. This page is the measuring stick they share.
The chain from a search to a paid invoice
Every SEO question an owner asks ("is it working?", "which pages?", "should we write more?") is a question about one link in this chain. The trouble is that the links live in different tools.
| Step | What happens | Where the number lives | Who can see it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Impression | Your page or profile shows for a search | Search Console (pages); Business Profile performance (profile) | Anyone with access to those accounts |
| Click or call | Someone taps through or taps Call | Search Console clicks; Business Profile calls and website clicks3 | Same |
| Lead | A call connects or a form arrives | Your phone system and lead inbox | Your office |
| Booked job | The office books it | Your field service software, on the job's campaign | Your office |
| Completed revenue | The job is done and invoiced | Your field service software | Your office and bookkeeper |
The first two rows are Google's. The last three are yours. An agency report that stops at row two is a report about Google, not about your business. The join between row two and row three is the part most shops skip, and it's the part only you can build, because it happens on your phone lines and in your forms.
The SEO number that matters
Completed revenue from organic search, per page group, per month
A page group is a set of pages that do the same job: all your water heater pages, all your city pages, all your emergency pages. Grouping matters because single pages are too small to read. Ten calls a month from one page is noise; ninety calls a month from your repair pages is a trend.
How to measure it from your jobs
You don't need an analytics degree. You need three habits: a source on every lead, the source carried onto the job, and one monthly look at the numbers.
Metric
Organic booked jobs
Jobs booked from calls and forms that started in a Google organic result or your Business Profile.
count of booked jobs where campaign = organic search (or Business Profile)
Where the numbers come from: The campaign on each job in your field service software, set by the tracking number that rang or the form source.
Metric
Organic completed revenue per 100 clicks
How much finished, invoiced work each 100 search clicks produce for a page group. It lets you compare a city page group with a service page group fairly.
(completed revenue from the page group ÷ Search Console clicks to the page group) × 100
Where the numbers come from: Clicks: Search Console Performance report, Pages tab. Revenue: completed jobs carrying that page group's source.
Metric
Click-to-lead rate
The share of search clicks that turn into a call or form. Low numbers point at the page (no phone number above the fold, slow on mobile, no clear price guidance), not at Google.
(calls + forms from the page group ÷ clicks to the page group) × 100
Where the numbers come from: Calls on the page group's tracking number, forms with that page group's source, clicks from Search Console.
Two practical notes. Search Console keeps 16 months of performance data, so export a monthly snapshot if you want longer history.4 And when a month has no organic jobs, record it as no data, not as zero revenue: a blank tells you tracking may be broken, a zero tells you the channel failed.
What to fix first
Most shops don't have an SEO problem. They have one weak link. Find it before you spend.
| If this is true | The weak link | Start here |
|---|---|---|
| Few impressions anywhere | Google doesn't see relevant pages | One page per service you want to sell, indexed and specific |
| Impressions but few clicks | Titles and snippets don't earn the tap | Rewrite titles to name the service and the area plainly |
| Clicks but few calls or forms | The page doesn't convert on a phone | Tap-to-call at the top, honest hours, a short form |
| Calls but few booked jobs | The office, not the search | Answer rate and booking rate; that's a lead-handling fix |
| Booked jobs but little completed revenue | Wrong job mix | Pages aimed at small tickets; build pages for the work you want |
The fourth row surprises people. If organic calls are coming in and not booking, no amount of SEO spend will help. That's a call-handling problem, and the speed to lead guide is the place to start.
Two rules that keep you out of trouble
Don't mass-produce city pages. Google's spam policies name "multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page" as doorway abuse, and separately warn against generating many pages "for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings."5 A city page earns its place when it says something true and specific about that area: the work you've done there, the housing stock, the permit office. If the only thing that changes is the town name, don't publish it.
Keep the Business Profile honest. Your real name, your real hours, your real service area. The profile is the most-seen page you have, and the Search Console guide covers its website side.
Who does the work
TradesWork doesn't do SEO and doesn't run ads. Many shops do the basics themselves; others use an agency or a marketing platform such as TradesForce. Whoever does it, the question you ask them is the same: show me results by page group that I can check against the booked and completed jobs in my own system. If they can only show rankings and traffic, you're paying for the first two rows of the table above.
Free download · ExcelField Service KPI ScorecardTrack the 12 numbers that run a service business, week by week, with formulas already built in.In this section
- Trade guides: what to build for each trade, and how to measure it. Roofing gets the most detail because its sales cycle is the longest.
- Search Console for contractors: the five reports worth a monthly look, and how to join them to your jobs.
The "how TradesWork handles this" box below lists exactly what TradesWork records for this channel today, and what it doesn't.
Footnotes
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Google Business Profile Help, "Tips to improve your local ranking on Google": local results are mainly based on relevance, distance and prominence; there's no way to request or pay for a better local ranking. https://support.google.com/business/answer/7091 ↩
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Google Search Central, "AI features and your website": no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode; reported in the Performance report under the Web search type. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features ↩
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Google Business Profile Help, "Understand your Business Profile performance & insights": calls, website clicks and searches definitions. https://support.google.com/business/answer/9918094 ↩
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Google Search Central Blog, "Introducing the new Search Console" (January 2018): 16 months of data. https://developers.google.com/search/blog/2018/01/introducing-new-search-console ↩
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Google Search Central, "Spam policies for Google web search": doorway abuse and scaled content abuse. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials/spam-policies ↩