/ Industries · Trades and home services
Your ranking is fine. Your phone is the leak.
Cleaners, plumbers, electricians, pressure washers, gardeners, removalists. The Maps pack produces a call; the call produces a job or nothing. A trade that answers 70 percent of calls and quotes half of the ones it answers is converting a third of its demand, and nothing in the analytics says so. This page is what we check first, and the calculator that shows you the number in a minute.
Where they look
One surface, then a phone call.
1. The Maps pack.
“house cleaner inner west”, “emergency plumber bondi”, “pressure cleaning northern beaches”. Three pins, decided by category, review count and recency, proximity to the searcher and a complete profile with services listed. For service-area businesses the pin is where the business is registered, not where the jobs are, so the pack you win is often the wrong suburb.
2. The phone.
The pack produces a call within a minute. If it rings out, the searcher calls the next pin. If it is answered and nothing follows, half the callers never book. A text back inside ten seconds with a booking link recovers a measurable share of both.
3. The website, briefly.
Checked for a price, a service list and a real phone number. A builder site with an old number or a single page that scrolls for seven thousand pixels on a phone costs the job at the check. Organic results and AI answers matter for the bigger trades (relining, hot water, solar) and barely at all for the small ones.
The demand data
What New South Wales searches, anchored to “house cleaning”.
“Cleaners near me” is the only term in the set that fell, while the job-specific terms grew: commercial 3.1x, office 4.3x, home 1.8x. People search the job now and let Google handle the proximity, so the profile's services list and the service pages matter more than the “near me” wording.
Seasonality: February and March peak, December trough, end-of-lease spikes in January and July. For plumbing in the same window (anchored to “plumber sydney”), “hot water system” runs at twenty times the anchor and “pipe relining” grew 25 times; the money in trades is in the named job, not the trade name.
Source: Foundlab research snapshot dated 13 September 2026. Relative indices are not search volumes, customer counts or revenue forecasts. Growth compares the last 12 months with the first 12 months of the window. The bars use a square-root scale; exact indices and growth multiples are printed alongside them.
What goes wrong
Three findings we make almost every time.
1. A profile that is claimed and empty.
A spelling mistake in the business name, no hours, no description, no services, no service areas, no booking or quote link, ten photos from the first week. Five reviews, all recent, five stars. Absent from every one of 22 non-brand searches from five points across the city. The evidence is the profile export and the Maps grid.
2. The phone leak.
No missed-call handling, no text back, no record of who called. The calculator uses the business's own numbers: calls a week, share answered, share of answered calls that book, average job. On a $180 clean or a $450 plumbing call-out, the monthly leak is usually larger than any marketing budget the business has ever had.
3. A website that hurts.
A single-page React app that a crawler reads as empty, a 2 MB logo, a form to a free service, an email address in the source, a sitemap that returns a 404 as a 200. Or the opposite: two thousand near-identical suburb pages generated by an agency, fake-looking review cards with “2 hours ago” hard-coded, and two SPF records that break email delivery. Both cost the job at the check.
Findings are described in general terms. Each is from a dated engagement, and the evidence and fix are in the client's report, not here.
Compliance
Reviews and licences. That is most of it.
Trades have less to think about online than clinics, and two things still matter. Reviews: the ACCC publishes guidance on online reviews, and Google has its own review policies; the review engine we build sends one plain request per job to every customer, with the direct link, and nothing else, because that is the version nobody has to defend. Licences: for licensed trades, showing the licence number on the profile and the site is a trust signal the searcher checks, and NSW Fair Trading publishes what it expects on advertising. We check your profile and site against both sets of public guidance and flag anything a competitor could complain about.
Foundlab is a marketing service, not a legal or regulatory adviser. We check wording against the guidance the relevant regulators publish and flag what we find. Decisions about your advertising are yours.
How we help
The phone fix first. The Local plan if you want the map too.
The phone fix is $199 a month: missed-call text-back inside ten seconds with your booking or quote link, replies forwarded to your mobile, and a review request after each job. One recovered job every two months pays for it for most trades. The Local plan is $299 a month and adds the profile rebuilt with services and service areas, service pages written to the jobs your area searches, and a one-page monthly readout. No setup, six months, then month to month. The target is written down: top three in the pack on your named queries from your service area by an agreed month, or the fee pauses.
Trades with a big marketing spend, several brands or a site full of generated suburb pages fit Firm: the rebuild, the consolidation and the compliance review. If the site is the blocker, Builds first.
Proof
Call Loss Calculator.
Free tool
Your calls, your answer rate, your average job. The monthly leak in one minute, no email required.
FAQ
Three questions trades ask.
I am flat out. Why would I want more calls?
You do not. You want the calls you already get to turn into jobs, and to pick the ones you take. The phone fix does the first; the profile and pricing on the site do the second.
Will a text back annoy customers?
No. It arrives within ten seconds of a missed call, says you are on a job and gives them a link to book or a time you will call back. Most trades find it books jobs they would have lost to the next pin.
I have a Facebook page, not a website. Is that enough?
For the phone fix, yes. For the Maps pack, the profile does most of the work and a one-page site with services, prices and the licence number does the rest. That is a build, from $2,500, if and when you want it.
Not sure where to start?
Book a fifteen minute call. If it is not the right thing, you hear that on the call, before you pay.