"Plumber" gets 60,500 searches a month on Google UK, "electrician" 49,500, "locksmith" 33,100, "removals" and "cleaning company" 5,400 each. In Manchester an ad click on "locksmith manchester" costs £19.56 on average, on "cleaning company manchester" £2.77 (DataForSEO, Google Ads, United Kingdom, October 2026). Same kind of customer, someone who needs a person at their door, and first pages that look much less alike than you'd think.
For plumbers and electricians the game is played mostly in the local pack, because half of the organic first page belongs to directories and lead-generation portals; for removals and cleaners the website still counts, because people search for the type of job and the price long before they need it.
Below is a comparison of five trades in the same city, the three things they have in common and the one that sets them apart. The basics apply to all of them and are in our guide to local SEO; here we look at the differences.
Five trades, one city
On 10 October 2026 we read the first page of five searches on mobile, with the location set to Manchester: "plumber manchester", "electrician manchester", "locksmith manchester", "removals manchester" and "cleaning company manchester". For each one we noted volume, cost per click, the reviews of the listings in the local pack, how many of the organic results are portals or directories and whether the "People also ask" box contains a question about price.
| Trade | Searches "[trade] manchester" | Average CPC | "Near me" ratio | Reviews in the local pack | Portals and directories in the organic results | Price question in "People also ask" |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plumber | 4,400 | £2.99 | 150% | 29 to 83 | 5 of 9 | How much should a plumber cost per day? |
| Electrician | 1,900 | £3.38 | 149% | 279 to 415 | 5 of 10 | None (the questions are about pay and DIY) |
| Locksmith | 2,400 | £19.56 | 224% | 2 to 807 | 3 of 10 | How much does a locksmith charge in the UK? |
| Removals | 480 | £9.21 | 100% | 204 to 679 | 5 of 10 | How much do removals usually cost? |
| Cleaning company | 1,000 | £2.77 | 81% | 109 to 812 | 4 of 10 | How much to pay a cleaner per hour in the UK? |
The "near me" ratio is the column that explains the others. In the UK people searching for a locksmith type "locksmith near me" more than twice as often as the bare word: 74,000 searches against 33,100. For plumbers and electricians it's one and a half times. For removals the two are level, and for cleaning companies "near me" is the smaller search, because a move or a regular cleaner is booked weeks ahead. The more urgent the need, the more the search ends on the map.
Three things they have in common
The first is price. In four of the five searches the "People also ask" box asks what the job costs. The answers on page one come mostly from portals: JustFix writes "£90/hr + £50 call-out fee" for a Manchester plumber, Bark shows "£80 - £275 (Avg: £120)" for plumbing and "£175 - £850 (Avg: £370)" for a removal, Checkatrade gives £112 to £199 for a locksmith. A few firms do it too, and they're mostly locksmiths: Locksmith Manchester offers "full lock changes for £85", Access ASAP "From Only £45 with No Call Out Charges". A firm that publishes a clear price range answers the question everyone asks, and most of its direct competitors still leave that to the portals.
The second is the city in the listing name. The five local packs contain 15 listings, and 9 have "Manchester" in the name. All three plumbers ("Manchester Plumbing Services LTD", "24HR PLUMBER MANCHESTER", "24 HOUR PLUMBER MANCHESTER"), all three removal firms, two of the three locksmiths, one cleaning company and none of the electricians. The two plumbers in second and third place link to websites on the same app-builder domain (lovable.app) and have mobile numbers that differ only in the last three digits. Google's guidelines for business names forbid adding information that isn't part of the real business name, and the penalty is suspension. A firm that really is called that is fine; one that added the city to climb the pack is risking its profile, and a competitor can report it. We covered this in the article on keyword stuffing.
The third is Checkatrade. On mobile, all five searches open with a "Find results on" row of five directories, and Checkatrade is in every one of them. It also ranks organically in four of the five, with an aggregated rating: 5.0 from 382 reviews for electricians, 5.0 from 797 for locksmiths. Bark, MyJobQuote and TrustATrader appear in three searches each, MyBuilder and Yell in two. Having a well-kept profile on these portals is part of the job: when you can't beat them, it pays to be inside them. How to choose them is covered in our guide to local citations.
Where they split: urgent call-outs and booked jobs
Plumbers, electricians and locksmiths are urgent trades, and for the first two the organic page shows it. For the electrician, five results out of ten are portals (Checkatrade three times, HaMuch and MyJobQuote), and the "People also ask" box is aimed at people in the trade: "How much do electricians make near Manchester?", "What is the number one killer of electricians?". For the plumber, five of nine results are portals, and the Checkatrade page that ranks is a recruitment page for plumbers ("Full-time plumbers in Manchester earn around £40,000 a year"). The word is searched by customers and by tradespeople looking for work, and Google mixes the two. Locksmiths are the exception: seven of ten organic results are locksmith firms, among them Timpson Security and several local businesses with the city in the domain.
Here the website supports the listing, it doesn't replace it. The place to win is the local pack, where the number of reviews counts but doesn't decide on its own: in Manchester, Locksmith Manchester was first with 363 reviews, ahead of The Locksmith of Manchester with 807, and the third listing had 2. Ads aren't cheap either: £21.52 a click for "emergency plumber", £13.21 for "emergency electrician", £31.34 for "emergency locksmith". The details for plumbers and boilers are in our guide to SEO for heating engineers, and those for locks in the article on locksmiths.
Removals and cleaning are booked trades. On "removals manchester" half of the organic results are firms, and the first is White & Company, with "Professional Removals & Storage in Manchester since 1871" in the snippet. The other half are quote portals (Sirelo twice, GetAMover, Bark, Porta). On "cleaning company manchester" Kinderlee Cleaning is both in the local pack and first in the organic results, and five of the ten results are cleaning firms. Someone handing over the keys to their home or their belongings wants to know who you are, and a site that shows it still ranks.
This is where the website really works, and the price searches are bigger: "removal costs" gets 1,000 searches a month, against 210 for "how much does a plumber cost" and 170 for "how much does an electrician cost". "House clearance" gets 5,400 and "end of tenancy cleaning" 12,100. These are service pages with a price in them, and the removal and cleaning firms that build them well take traffic a plumber will never see.
Recommended reading: how the local pack works and what decides the order of the listings.
Area searches tell you how to divide the site
In Manchester Google suggests searches such as "plumber manchester city centre", "locksmith manchester city centre", "removals didsbury" and "removal companies south manchester", and for locksmiths the nearby towns: Salford, Stockport, Bolton, Prestwich. People search by district and by town, not only by city. For an urgent trade that's where to build local pages: one for each area where you really have a van or a base, with the jobs you've done there and real arrival times. Timpson already ranks with a "South Manchester" page and Faster Locksmiths with one for the city centre.
For removals and cleaning, the related searches go by type of customer instead: "commercial cleaning company manchester", "airbnb cleaning companies manchester", "deep cleaning services manchester", "cheap removals manchester". "Office cleaning manchester" gets 480 searches a month and "man and van manchester" 1,000. Those are the pages to write: one for offices, one for short-let hosts, one for small moves with a "from" price.
In both cases the same rule applies: a page per area or per customer works if it contains something the others don't. A hundred pages with only the district name changed risk becoming what Google, in its spam policies, calls doorway pages. If you'd like an opinion on how to divide your site, that's the work we do in our SEO consultancy.
Frequently asked questions
In Manchester, four of the five searches we analysed show a question about price, 9 of the 15 listings in the local packs have "Manchester" in the name and Checkatrade appears in all five. What changes is how much the website weighs against the Google listing.
The listing. On "plumber manchester" five of the nine organic results are portals and directories, and "plumber near me" gets one and a half times the searches of "plumber". The website is there to give the listing prices, areas covered and services.
In October 2026 the average was £19.56 for "locksmith manchester", £9.21 for "removals manchester", £3.38 for "electrician manchester", £2.99 for "plumber manchester" and £2.77 for "cleaning company manchester". Emergency searches cost more: £31.34 for "emergency locksmith" and £21.52 for "emergency plumber" at national level.
Only if it's part of the business's real name. Google's guidelines forbid unnecessary information in the name and can lead to the profile being suspended; in Manchester 9 of 15 listings contain the city, and any of them can be reported by a competitor.
Only for the areas where you really work, and with different content. Google suggests searches such as "removals didsbury" and "locksmith stockport", a sign that the demand exists, but identical pages with only the area name changed count as doorway pages.
Where to start
Search your trade plus your town on your phone and note the three listings in the local pack. Then open your own profile and read the name the way Google does: if it contains the town or the service and that isn't your registered business name, it's the first thing to fix, before someone else reports it. If it's clean and you're not in the three, look at who is there and how many reviews they have: that's your target for the next six months. If you'd like us to go through it with you, get in touch.
