SEO for trades and home services around Cincinnati

Some trades are fought over and some are wide open

Trades are the most uneven part of this market and the reason is simple. HVAC companies have been sold search marketing every week for fifteen years, and it shows. HVAC came out at 17.0 in my scan, the second strongest group of the sixteen I measured. If you are an HVAC company you are not competing against neglect, you are competing against people who already do this properly.

The rest of the trades look nothing like that. Plumbing averaged 32.7, landscaping 31.6, roofing 27.0. There is real ground there, and it is ground a competitor with a bigger budget has often not taken, because the money in those trades tends to go into ads rather than into the website.

The buying behaviour is what makes trades worth doing properly. Somebody with water coming through a ceiling is not reading your about page. They are searching on a phone, they are calling the first two or three results, and the whole decision takes under a minute. That puts the weight on the Google profile, on the phone number being text rather than part of an image, on the address being readable, and on reviews that are recent rather than merely numerous.

The second thing is service area coverage, and it is the cheapest win available. 27% of the businesses I scanned name fewer than three of the communities they actually serve. A plumber working the whole west side who only ever says Cincinnati is invisible in Delhi, Green Township and Cheviot, and those are exactly the searches with the least competition sitting on them.

If you run a trade around here the honest starting point is the audit, because it will tell you which situation you are in. Whether the basics are already table stakes in your trade, or whether nobody has bothered and the first month of work does most of the lifting.

What that means in practice

I also work with Restaurants and cafes, Accountants, attorneys and insurance.