There's a lot of on-page SEO advice floating around online. Most of it is written for e-commerce sites or SaaS companies, and if you're a plumber trying to work out what to do with your website on a Sunday evening, none of it really lands.
So here's the version I wish someone had given me when I was starting out. Seven changes, in the order I'd make them, that will genuinely move a small trade website up Google. No plugin recommendations, no theory. Just the stuff that works.
1. Give every service its own page. A proper one.
If your website is one homepage that lists every service you offer, Google has no idea which of those services you're actually good at. It'll rank you badly for all of them rather than well for any of them.
The fix is separate pages. A page for boiler installs. A page for bathroom refits. A page for emergency callouts. Each one should be at least 600 words of honest, useful writing about that specific service, what it costs roughly, what it involves, and what the customer should expect.
This is the single biggest lever most trade websites are leaving alone. Do this and nothing else, and you'll usually see movement within two months.
2. Put the town in the title tag.
The title tag is the big blue link that shows up in Google's results. It's the single most important on-page signal you've got. And most trade websites waste it on their business name.
Instead of "J. Smith Plumbing | Home," try "Boiler Installation in Chelmsford | J. Smith Plumbing." You've now told Google exactly what you do and where you do it, and you've told the person searching exactly the same thing. Both of those matter.
Every page should have a title tag that names the service, names the location if it's relevant, and then your brand at the end. Keep it under 60 characters or Google chops it off in the results.
3. Write a first paragraph that actually answers the question.
Google reads the top of your page more closely than the bottom. So the first paragraph of every service page should get straight to the point.
If someone lands on your boiler installation page, they want to know within about ten seconds: do you install boilers, do you cover their area, and roughly what it costs. If your first paragraph is a poetic introduction to the history of your family business, they're gone, and Google notices when people bounce.
Answer the question in the first paragraph. You can save the story for further down. Both Google and your customers will thank you.
4. Use headings the way you'd use signposts.
Headings (the bigger, bolder bits of text that break up the page) do two jobs. They help readers scan the page on a phone, and they help Google understand the structure of what you've written.
A boiler installation page might have headings like "What a boiler installation includes," "How much a new boiler costs in [your town]," "Which boiler is right for your home," and "What to expect on installation day." These are things people genuinely want to know, and each one is a chance to naturally include the words people are searching for.
Don't invent headings just to stuff keywords in. Write the headings a real customer would want to see, and the keywords tend to arrive on their own.
5. Fix the page speed. All of it, not just some of it.
Most trade websites are slow because they're carrying too much weight. Enormous unoptimised photos are the usual culprit. A single 4MB hero image on the homepage can add three seconds to load time on a phone, and that's enough to lose a good chunk of visitors and to knock you down the rankings.
The rough rule: no image on your site should be bigger than about 300KB, and most can be much smaller. Use a free tool like Squoosh or TinyPNG, run every image through it, and re-upload. It's tedious for an afternoon and it's often the difference between a slow site and a fast one.
Google publishes your page speed score on a tool called PageSpeed Insights. Aim for green on mobile. If you're in the red, no amount of clever SEO writing will make up for it.
6. Link your own pages together properly.
Internal links are the quietest, most underused SEO tool you've got. When your bathroom installation page links to your boiler installation page with the words "boiler installation," you're telling Google that the page it's pointing to is relevant for those words. It's a vote from your own site to your own site.
Most trade websites either have no internal links at all, or they only link back to the homepage using the word "home." Neither helps. Every service page should link to two or three other relevant pages using natural, descriptive words. A page about combi boilers might link to your emergency plumbing page and your boiler repair page.
This costs nothing, takes an hour, and often gives an early ranking bump before any of your other work has had time to land.
7. Add real photos of your own work.
Stock photos of shiny American kitchens are the tell-tale sign of a website nobody trusts. Your customers know it and Google is getting better at spotting it too.
Take a photo on your phone at the end of every job for the next month. The finished boiler on the wall. The tidied-up consumer unit. The garden after the landscaping. Upload them to your website with a proper caption that names the town and what was done. "Combi boiler installation completed in Braintree, February 2026."
This does three useful things at once. It gives Google fresh, original content. It gives customers proof that you actually do the work. And it slowly builds a portfolio that makes your website look more like a real business and less like a template.
The honest truth about how long this takes
If you do all seven of these properly, on a website that isn't in a terrible state to start with, you should see meaningful movement in eight to twelve weeks. Not "suddenly the phone rings off the hook" movement. Steady, visible climbing up the rankings for the things you actually want to rank for.
It's not glamorous work. There's no clever trick in this article. But it's the boring stuff that actually moves trade websites up Google, and I'd rather tell you the truth than sell you a shortcut that doesn't exist.
Frequently asked questions
If you want me to have a look at your website and tell you which of these seven would move the needle most for you, book a free 20-minute call.