Sector
SEO for trades in Portsmouth: win your district, then the island, then across the water
Portsmouth is the densest city outside London, most of it Victorian terraces that need rewiring, re-roofing and re-plumbing on a schedule. The map for the big trades here is crowded and held by firms with fleets. The way in is not to fight them city-wide; it is to own the district your van already lives in, with a profile that says so and reviews from those streets, and then grow outward.
The plan for a trade here
Three rings, in order
Months 1 to 3
Ring one: your district
The profile with the right category, the service area drawn as the streets you actually cover, reviews that name North End or Copnor or Southsea, job pages with photographs from those streets. This is the map you can win in weeks.
Months 3 to 6
Ring two: the island and the mainland suburbs
The service area widened as the reviews justify it, a job page per service with the whole city in mind, mentions on the directories and registers Portsmouth uses. This is the results you win in months.
Month 6 onward
Ring three: across the water
Gosport, Fareham, Havant, Waterlooville: one honest page each, only where you go, with the travel time stated. Never before ring two is earning.
Job pages that work here
What to write first, by trade
- Plumbers and heating
- Boiler replacement in the terraces, bathroom refits, landlord gas safety for the student lets around the university. Boiler searches peak in September.
- Electricians
- Consumer unit replacement, EICRs for the HMO landlords, EV charger installation on the off-street plots in Drayton and Farlington.
- Builders
- Loft conversions (the terraces have the roofs for them), rear extensions, garden rooms; the mainland suburbs bring the bigger jobs.
- Roofers
- Storm damage after a south-westerly, flat roofs on the extensions, fascias and guttering across the grid.
- Landscapers and groundworks
- Small terraced gardens on the island, driveways and patios in Cosham and Drayton; the spring rush starts in March.
Specialist sites
The trade-specific versions
For electricians, garages and builders we run dedicated sites with each trade's registers, seasons and job pages written in depth. A Portsmouth trade gets the local version here, or the national trade version there; the work behind both is the same.
- Electrician SEO: consumer units, EICRs, EV chargers.
- Garage SEO: MOTs, servicing, the map for workshops.
- Builder Web Design: sites and SEO for building firms.
Questions Portsmouth tradespeople ask us
The map for plumbers in Portsmouth is full of big firms. Can a sole trader get in?
In a district, yes. The firms with vans everywhere hold the city-wide map; a sole trader with a complete profile, reviews from the streets around them and a service area drawn honestly wins the map for their own district first, then spreads. That is the plan we run.
I get most of my work from Checkatrade. Why do I need this?
Because Checkatrade takes a fee on every lead, shows your competitors next to you, and can change its terms. The trades in Portsmouth with the fullest diaries have both: the platform for now, and their own profile and pages that send work for free. We build the second so you can turn the first down.
I work from a van, not a shop. Does the address matter?
Your home address stays hidden and the profile shows a service area instead. That is the correct set-up for a trade and Google ranks it fine. What matters is that the area is honest: the districts you actually go to, not the whole of Hampshire.
Do I need a page for every district?
No, and it hurts if you do. One areas page with the districts and the towns across the water named with distances, plus job pages that mention real jobs in real streets, beats twenty district pages that say the same thing.
Fareham and Gosport: worth it?
If you go there, yes: one honest page each, after the island pages have settled. They are separate maps with their own competition and their own searches, and a page written for them wins more than a Portsmouth page with the town name added.
How do reviews work for a trade?
The ask happens at the handover, on site, with a card or a text that opens the review form in one tap. Two reviews a month, steadily, with the street named, beats a burst of ten.
See who holds the map for your trade in your district
Send your trade and your postcode. You get the map for your searches from three districts, the businesses above you, and a fixed price for overtaking them.