If you are a tradesman or run a trades based company such as electricians, plumbers, mechanics, painters and similar then an investment in SEO for your website can pay high rewards.

A very good friend of mine is an electrician in Townsville who started up his own electrical business recently.  As a tradesman his IT knowledge was pretty limited (ok… non existent) so I offered to whip him up his own website to try and capture some enquiries for him. He was going to try the normal avenues open to tradesman such as ads in the newspaper and Yellow Pages. Starting a business is always tough, especially in the middle of the GFC so  I was keen to see what I could extract out of the web could do to help him out.

Most of the SEO work I have been involved in has been with real estate agents and the real estate industry. Because the internet plays such a major part in the real estate industry today  in general it is quite tough to rank well. Not everybody has embraced Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) but enough have to make it a very competitive industry. Not so the electrical industry it appears.

Whilst there were plenty of electricians in Townsville on the internet there were very few who had invested in a quality website and those that had were built by web designers with very little regard for SEO. In once case the company had built quite a fancy website but it was optimised for little other than their own business name. The only people who would find them were those who searched for their specific business name.

In contrast I concentrated less on making it a flashy slick site, choosing to concentrate on an SEO strategy with good content and optimisation. Within a week of turning the website on we were ranking on the front page of Google for our primary keywords targetted.   We are still well inside the first year and Smarterlec is now ranking incredibly.

Here is just a selection of the results from Google searches.

• Townsville Electricians – 2nd
• Townsville Electrical Contractors -2nd
• Townsville Electrical Switchboards – 1st and 2nd
• Townsville Electrical Breakdown – 1st and 2nd
• Townsville Industrial Electricians – 1st and 2nd
• Townsville Domestic Electricians – 1st and 2nd
• Townsville Commercial Electricians – 1st and 2nd

To rank so for the primary keywords of Townsville Electricians and Townsville Electrical Contractors is providing terrific results. As you could imagine traffic is on the rise month after month.

In most cases it was rare to see an actual electrical company return on the first Search Engine Results Page (SERP). In fact virtually all websites returned on these searches link to online business directories. These online business directories then go and sell an entry in their directory for hundreds of dollars.

From these sort of results any tradesman or trades based company considering an investment in SEO is crazy if they don’t go ahead. Their results are multiplied simply because their industry has not got web savvy just yet.

I just wish getting a real estate agent website to rank that well, that quickly was just as easy. As well as competing against other agents we also have to compete against real estate portals who have whole teams tasked to nothing but SEO and generating them more and more traffic from the search engines.