Most marketing advice for tradies starts with the shiny stuff. A new logo, a TikTok strategy, a website with a drone video of your ute. I’m going to start somewhere less exciting, because it’s where the jobs actually come from.
If you want the order in one paragraph: answer the phone, get your Google Business Profile and reviews sorted, send people to a page that books jobs, then run Google Ads for the urgent work and Facebook or Instagram for the work that looks good in photos. Lead platforms can fill a quiet week, SEO is the long game, and through all of it you count booked jobs rather than clicks.
Here’s each of those, with what we’ve seen in our own accounts.
1. Answer the phone first
This isn’t marketing advice, strictly speaking. It’s just the most expensive problem we see.
If you’re under a sink when your phone goes, that caller rings the next tradie on the list, and every dollar you spent getting them to call is gone. A perfectly good Google Ads account can look like a dud for a month if nobody can pick up between 7am and 3pm.
So before you spend anything on marketing, sort out what happens when you can’t answer. A missed-call text that goes out straight away, someone in the office, or a call answering service. Any of them beats voicemail, which almost nobody leaves a message on any more.
2. Your Google Business Profile and reviews
When someone searches “electrician near me” (about 18,100 searches a month across Australia, Semrush, checked 7 November 2026), the map results come up before most of the websites. Your profile is often the first thing a customer sees of you, before your site, before your ads.
Get the basics right: the right category, your real service area, opening hours you keep, photos of actual jobs, and a phone number that gets answered (see point one).
Then reviews, and I mean actively asking for them. Ask every happy customer, the same day, with a direct link in a text message. Melbourne Concrete Cutters went from zero Google reviews to more than 50 in three months doing exactly that, and nothing else clever. You can read how in their case study, and our Google Business Profile guide covers the rest of the profile.
3. A page that books jobs
Your website doesn’t need to win awards. It needs to turn a visitor on a phone into a phone call, and most tradie websites are surprisingly bad at that one job.
For ads especially, send people to a page about the exact job they searched for, with your phone number at the top, real reviews, your licence number and photos of your work. When Dawson Electric’s ads started pointing at pages built that way, the share of visitors getting in touch went from 5% to 25% in under a week, on the same ad spend. That’s in the Dawson Electric case study. Five times the enquiries from the same clicks is the kind of result you don’t get from changing a headline.
4. Google Ads for the urgent work
Blocked drains, burst pipes, power outages, lockouts, roof leaks. When it’s urgent, people search, and they call whoever looks most sorted in the first few results.
That’s what Google Ads is for. Uplumb, a Brisbane plumber we launched in September 2026, gets blocked drain leads at about $33 each by giving that one job its own campaign. SMS53 Locksmiths went from nothing to 116 leads in its first 60 days, which is written up in their case study.
The clicks aren’t cheap. Semrush puts the average click on “emergency plumber” at about $17 and on “electrician near me” at about $10. So the account has to be set up to buy phone calls rather than visits, and the landing page has to do its job. We’ve gone into the set-up for one trade in detail in Google Ads for plumbers, and nearly all of it applies to sparkies, locksmiths and roofers too.
5. Facebook and Instagram for the work that looks good
Nobody searches “new deck” until they’ve seen one they like at a mate’s place or on their phone. Landscaping, decks, kitchens, bathrooms, painting, pools, shutters. This is work people decide on with their eyes, often over a few weeks.
Facebook and Instagram ads put photos and short videos of your jobs in front of homeowners in your area before they start searching. A blinds and shutters business we ran Meta lead ads for got 496 leads at $8.51 each, which no Google campaign in that category would get near.
A word of caution, though. Cheap leads from a two-tap form can be people who barely remember filling it in. Call them back fast, or send people to a page instead of a form and accept fewer, better leads. More on that in Facebook ads cost in Australia.
6. Lead platforms: useful, but you’re renting
hipages, Oneflare and ServiceSeeking can fill a quiet week, especially when you’re starting out and have no reviews and no website to speak of. Just be clear about what you’re buying.
You’re paying for the chance to quote, and the same job is usually offered to several tradies at once. The customer found the platform, not you. When you stop paying, the leads stop, and nothing you’ve built over the years stays with your business.
Compare that with Google Ads, your Google profile and your own website. Those leads come to you alone, and the reviews, the pages and the data keep working for you long after you’ve paid for them. Most tradies we work with use the platforms as a top-up when things are quiet, not as the plan.
7. SEO: the long game
SEO means showing up in Google’s free results, under the ads and the map. It takes months rather than weeks, but once it’s working you’re not paying for every click. For a tradie it usually means a page for each service, pages for the main suburbs you cover, and a steady flow of reviews. We’ve broken down what it costs and what you get in SEO cost in Australia.
8. Count jobs, not clicks
Every platform will tell you it’s working. Google, Facebook and hipages all report on their own results, and they’re all a bit generous with themselves.
The only number that matters is in your job software: how many jobs came from each source, and what each one cost you to win. Watts Needed Electrical went from one electrician to a team of five in under a year on a steady flow of Google Ads leads, and that growth was planned off what the jobs were worth, not off the click count. That’s in the Watts Needed case study. We explain the sum in cost per lead vs cost per booked job.
Questions tradies ask me
How much should a tradie spend on marketing?
There’s no right percentage, whatever the business coaches say. Work out what a job is worth to you and how many leads you win, then decide what you can afford to pay per job. Under about $3,000 a month in ad spend, you can usually run it yourself if you’re willing to learn.
Is hipages worth it?
It can be, for filling gaps. As your main source of work, it leaves you paying for every lead forever with nothing to show for it at the end.
Do I need a website?
You need at least one good page for each main job you want more of, especially if you’re running ads. A Facebook page on its own won’t do that for you.
What’s the cheapest way to get more jobs?
Answer every call, and ask every happy customer for a Google review. Both are free, and most of your competitors don’t do either properly.
Want a hand putting it in order?
Get in touch and we’ll go through where your jobs come from now, what’s leaking, and what I’d fix first. We run Google Ads and Facebook and Instagram ads for trades and plenty of other local businesses, month to month.
