Marketing for Tradies: The Honest WA Guide to Getting More Jobs

For most tradies the work comes from three things done properly: a Google Business Profile with real reviews on it, a simple website that loads fast and makes it easy to call you, and either local search or Google Ads depending on how quickly you need the phone to ring. You can do a large part of that yourself, for nothing, in a couple of weekends.

Digital marketing for tradies gets sold as something far more complicated than it is. What follows is the whole thing, in order, with the parts you should not pay for clearly marked.

What Actually Gets a Tradie More Work

Almost every tradie I speak to says the same thing: most of their work comes from word of mouth. That is usually true, and it is a good sign. It is also the reason growth stalls.

Word of mouth has a hard ceiling built into it. It only reaches people who happen to know one of your existing customers and happen to mention the problem out loud at the right moment. You cannot increase it directly. What you can do is catch the much larger group who have the same problem but nobody to ask, and who therefore go straight to their phone.

That group is substantial. A True Local survey of more than 1,000 Australian homeowners found around two-thirds check a business listing and read up to five reviews before deciding who to call, and that two-thirds of Australians find it genuinely hard to tell a good tradie from a bad one.

Sit with that second finding for a second, because it is the whole opportunity. Your customers cannot judge your work. They cannot look at a switchboard or a roof and tell whether it was done well. So they judge the things they can assess: how many reviews you have, what those reviews say, whether you answered the phone, whether you turned up when you said you would, and whether your website looks like a real business.

That is not cynicism about customers. It is just what buying a service you do not understand looks like. Marketing for tradies is mostly about making those judgeable signals honest and visible.

Google helps here by publishing how local results work. It comes down to relevance, distance and prominence: how well your profile matches the search, how close you are, and how well known you are. Google states plainly that businesses with complete and accurate information are more likely to show up, and that more reviews and positive ratings can help your local ranking. It also states there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking, which is worth remembering next time someone rings offering exactly that.

What You Can Do Yourself This Week

This is the free part, and it is most of the value on this page. Do all of it before you pay anyone a cent, including me.

If you do nothing else from this article, do steps one and two. I have seen those two alone change how busy a business is, and neither costs anything but an afternoon.

Google Ads or Local SEO First

This is the question I get most often, and the honest answer depends entirely on how busy you are right now.

Choose ads if you need work this month. Emergency and callout trades in particular, because those searches convert quickly and the job is worth enough to cover the click. If you have a quiet fortnight coming, ads are the only lever that responds fast enough to matter.

Choose local SEO if you are ticking along and want to stop worrying about next year. It takes a couple of months before anything moves, but it compounds, and it does not switch off the day you stop paying.

Most tradies I work with end up doing the free work first, then ads while SEO builds underneath. That sequence is usually right, because ads on top of an empty profile with four reviews is paying to send people somewhere that does not convince them.

There is a third option that gets overlooked, which is doing neither for a while. If your Google Business Profile is finished, your reviews are coming in steadily, and you are getting enough work, then the correct move is genuinely nothing. Tradies get sold ongoing marketing at exactly the point they least need it, usually by someone who rang them. Being busy is not a problem that requires a monthly invoice to solve.

The other thing worth understanding about ads specifically is that they are not a switch you flip once. The first month is largely spent finding out which searches waste money, and you claw that back over the following months by cutting them. If you are not prepared to look at the account, or pay someone to, ads will quietly cost you more than they return. That is not an argument against them. It is an argument against setting them up and walking away, which is how most tradies I meet have tried them before.

What Tradie Marketing Actually Costs

Numbers move, so treat these as a starting range and check them before you budget. Prices below are what current Australian trade specialists publish, not what I charge.

For Google Ads, one Australian trade specialist puts metro clicks between roughly $3 and $25 depending on the trade, with electricians and plumbers at the top end and cleaners and gardeners at the bottom. Sensible starting budgets run around $500 to $1,500 a month depending on the trade and whether you are metro or regional, and the typical cost per real lead across Australian trades lands between $30 and $80. On top of ad spend, management is commonly a few hundred to a couple of thousand a month.

For SEO, the same source puts tradie retainers between about $500 and $3,500 a month, with most established trade businesses sitting between $1,000 and $2,000, and suggests most tradies start seeing steady enquiries within 60 to 90 days.

Two things worth saying about those figures. First, below about $500 a month on ads you generally do not gather enough clicks to work out what is and is not working, so you spend without learning. Second, watch out for management priced as a percentage of your ad spend, because it quietly rewards whoever is managing it for pushing your budget up rather than making it work harder.

The Common Mistakes

Living on lead platforms. Platforms like HiPages send the same job to several tradies at once, which means you are competing on price, for a lead you paid for whether or not you win it, in a relationship you do not own. It fills a quiet week. It does not build anything, and the day you stop paying it all disappears.

Sending ad clicks to the homepage. You paid up to twenty-five dollars for someone who searched “emergency plumber”. Landing them on a homepage about your company history since 1998 wastes it. Send them to a page about that exact job with the phone number at the top.

Treating reviews as something you will get around to. Two tradies, same suburb, same price, one with ninety reviews and one with six. There is no clever campaign that closes that gap.

Posting to social media instead of doing the basics. Social is fine once the profile and reviews are sorted. It is not a substitute for either, and for most trades it is the lowest-return thing on this page.

Marketing when the actual problem is capacity or pricing. If you are turning work away or booked two months out, more enquiries will not help you. Raise your prices. That is not a marketing job and nobody should be charging you for it.

Not tracking where the calls come from. This is the quiet one that costs the most, because it makes every other decision guesswork. If you cannot tell whether a job came from your ads, your listing or a mate, you cannot know what to stop paying for. Asking every caller how they found you, and writing it down, costs nothing and is better than most reporting I have seen sold to tradies.

Your Trade, Specifically

The fundamentals above apply to every trade, but the emphasis shifts depending on what you do and how urgent your work is. The main variable is how quickly your customer needs to decide.

Urgent trades live or die on being findable and answering the phone, and paid ads work well for them because the search converts on the spot. Trades with long decision cycles, where a customer is planning something months ahead, need visible evidence of previous work far more than they need speed, and their marketing is about staying credible over a stretch rather than winning a ninety-second decision. Most trades sit somewhere between the two, and it is worth knowing which end of that scale you are closer to before you spend anything.

• Marketing for electricians leans on emergency intent and local search, because a lot of electrical work starts with something that has just gone wrong.
• Marketing for plumbers is the most urgency-driven of the trades, where being findable and answering at 11pm matters more than anything clever.
• Marketing for builders and renovators works differently again, because the decision takes months and your photos do most of the selling.

When It Is Worth Getting Help

For a lot of tradies reading this, not yet. If your Google Business Profile is half-finished and you have under twenty reviews, you have a month of free work in front of you that will do more than any invoice I could send you. Do that, then see where you are.

It is worth a conversation when the free work is genuinely done and you are still quieter than you want to be, or when you are already spending on ads and cannot tell which jobs came from them. That second one is extremely common, and it is almost always a tracking problem rather than a campaign problem.

If you want a second opinion before you spend anything, I offer a free 15-minute chat. No pitch, just straight answers about whether you need help or just need to finish your profile. You can also run your site through the free audit first, or read how I approach SEO, Google Ads and website builds if you would rather see the method before talking to anyone. If you are based around the city, there is more on local SEO across Perth too.

Questions Tradies Ask Me