Tradie
What makes a tradie website actually convert (after building 40 of them)
Forty tradie websites later, here’s the conversion stack that earns calls — and the cliché stack that quietly costs them.
Most tradie websites in Australia look identical: blue-and-orange hero, stock photo of a smiling man holding a wrench, ‘Servicing Sydney since 2003’, three icon cards, a contact form. They convert at about 0.6%.
The ones we’ve built that convert at 4–6% all share six patterns. None of them are cosmetic.
1. Click-to-call has to fill the screen
On a phone, your number should be the largest tappable element above the fold. Not in the footer. Not in a hamburger menu. Not as a contact form. A single, fat ‘Call now’ button — and a sticky version that follows the scroll.
2. After-hours has to be obvious
Half of plumbing and electrical calls happen after 5pm. If your site doesn’t say what happens after hours, the caller assumes nothing — and dials the next result. Add a time-aware badge: ‘Open now’ / ‘After-hours emergency’.
3. Service area as a map, not a list
‘We service the Inner West, Eastern Suburbs, Lower North Shore’ converts worse than a real Leaflet-rendered map showing the postcodes. Suburbs as a paragraph also lose to suburbs as schema-tagged links.
4. Reviews above the call-to-action, not below it
Most tradie sites bury reviews on a separate page. The conversion lift comes from putting three real, named, dated reviews directly under the headline. Real names. Real dates. Pull from Google Business Profile via the API — never paste.
5. Service detail pages, not a single ‘Services’ page
Searches like ‘hot water repair Newcastle’ are won by URLs like /hot-water-repair-newcastle, not by /services with a paragraph mentioning hot water. Each service gets its own indexable page with its own H1 and FAQ.
6. Schema, schema, schema
LocalBusiness schema with explicit areaServed, openingHoursSpecification, and aggregateRating is what fills out your Google Knowledge Panel — the box on the right when someone searches your business name. No schema, no panel, no free advertising.
What we don’t do
- Slideshows (nobody clicks the dots).
- Hero videos that auto-play (kills mobile data, kills LCP).
- Live chat on a one-person business (it’s a phone, just call them).
- ‘Why choose us’ sections (they convert worse than no section).