Your First 90 Days of Online Leads: A Realistic Plan

The first thing to do is claim and complete your Google Business Profile. It is free, and it is the fastest way to start appearing in local searches. Fill in every section: your trade, your areas, your phone number, your hours, and your services. Add a few photos of your van and your work. Verify the profile. This alone can start generating calls within the first two weeks, especially for less competitive trades and areas.

At the same time, get a basic website live. A one-page site from £350 is enough to start. It needs your phone number, your trade, your areas, a list of services, a few photos and a simple enquiry form. The goal is not a perfect website — it is a professional online presence that confirms you are a real, active business when a customer looks you up after seeing your Google profile. You can expand the site later.

Reviews are the fuel that powers your Google ranking. From your first job, ask every happy customer for a Google review. Send a text with a direct link to your review page — it takes the customer 30 seconds and costs you nothing. Aim for at least one new review per week. Respond to every review with a brief thank you. By day 30, you should have 3 to 5 reviews, which is enough to start looking credible.

If you are missing calls while on jobs (and you will be), set up missed-call text-back from £49 per month. This sends an instant text to every missed call, capturing the enquiry while you work. Without this, every missed call in the first 90 days is a lost lead. With it, you keep the lead and can call back after your current job. This is the single most impactful tool for a new trade business.

Once your basic site is live and you have a few reviews, start adding individual service pages. One page per service: "Boiler Installation in [your area]," "Emergency Plumber in [your area]," and so on. Each page should have the service and area in the title, a description of what you do, a starting price if possible, and your phone number. These pages help you rank for specific searches and give potential customers the information they need to call.

Start posting regular updates on your Google Business Profile — at least once a week. A post can be a photo of a completed job with a one-line caption. This signals to Google that your business is active, and it gives potential customers more evidence of your work. Posts take two minutes and cost nothing.

Create a page for each area or town you cover. "Plumber in [town 1]," "Plumber in [town 2]," and so on. These area pages help you rank for searches in each specific town, not just your main location. Keep them genuine — describe the area and confirm you cover it. Do not create hundreds of thin pages with the same content; one solid page per town is enough.

If your organic presence is not yet generating enough calls, consider a small, controlled Google Ads campaign to bridge the gap. Target your specific trade keywords and area, keep the budget tight, and monitor it closely. Pause it once your organic presence is strong enough. Ads are a supplement, not a replacement, for the SEO work you have been building.

At the 90-day mark, with consistent effort, you should have: a complete Google Business Profile with 10-plus reviews, a multi-page website with individual service and area pages, missed-call text-back capturing every enquiry, and a growing number of organic calls from local searches. The exact number of calls depends on your trade, your area and your competition, but the foundation is solid and growing. From here, the focus shifts to consistency: more reviews, more content, more calls.