True Blue Tradie Marketing
Resources15 guides & comparisons

Tradie marketing guides and comparisons

hipages vs your own ads. SEO vs Google Ads. What a lead should cost. Written by the people who run the campaigns — with our own account numbers where they help, and sources where we quote someone else's.

Comparisons17 September 20269 min read

hipages vs your own marketing: what a job really costs a tradie in 2026

hipages looks cheap on the surface — a monthly plan, leads to your phone. Here's the maths on cost per booked job once shared leads and credits are counted, against running your own Google Ads.

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Comparisons8 min

ServiceSeeking vs Google Ads for tradies: shared leads or your own?

ServiceSeeking charges a flat membership and sends you jobs to quote on — alongside several other businesses. Here's how that compares with an exclusive enquiry from your own Google Ads campaign.

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Comparisons10 min

hipages, ServiceSeeking and Airtasker compared — and what happened to Oneflare

A straight comparison of the tradie lead marketplaces still operating in Australia in 2026, how each one charges, what a lead really costs on each, and why the Oneflare shutdown is a warning about renting your pipeline.

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Google Ads8 min

Google Ads vs Meta Ads for tradies: which should you run first?

Search catches the customer with a burst pipe; Facebook and Instagram catch the one saving deck photos. Which one comes first depends on your trade — and our own accounts show what each channel costs per lead.

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SEO8 min

SEO vs Google Ads for tradies: rent the traffic or own it?

Ads work tomorrow and stop the day you stop paying. SEO takes months and then keeps working. Here's how to decide which to fund first, and why the best answer for most tradies is a sequence, not a choice.

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Websites9 min

Wix, Squarespace or WordPress vs a purpose-built tradie website

Builders are cheap and quick, and for a lot of tradies they're fine. But the site is where every ad click and search visit lands, so it's worth knowing exactly what you give up — speed, conversion, tracking — before you drag-and-drop one.

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Google Ads7 min

Performance Max vs Search campaigns for tradies: what our accounts show

Google pushes every new advertiser toward Performance Max. In our trade accounts it earns its place alongside Search — but not instead of it. Here's the split in the accounts we run and how we decide.

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Lead generation8 min

What should a lead cost a tradie? Real cost per enquiry across 13 accounts

Everyone quotes benchmarks; almost nobody shows their own numbers. These are ours — cost per enquiry from every Google Ads and Meta account we run, by trade — and how to work out what a lead should cost your business.

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SEO7 min

What SEO really costs a tradie — and why nobody can give you one number

SEO quotes for trade businesses run from a few hundred dollars a month to several thousand. Here's what drives the price, what you should get for it, and the tactics that make a cheap quote expensive.

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Google Ads6 min

Reading your own Google Ads account: the five numbers worth checking

If someone runs your Google Ads and you've never logged in, ten minutes with these five reports will tell you whether the account is being managed or just billed.

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Local SEO6 min

Getting Google reviews without buying them: the system that works

Reviews are the strongest local ranking and conversion signal a tradie controls, and faking them is the fastest way to get a profile suspended. The businesses with hundreds of reviews aren't luckier — they ask, every time, in a way that's easy to say yes to.

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Websites6 min

What a tradie website needs above the fold

Above the fold is the few centimetres of phone screen a customer sees before they scroll. Most tradie sites waste it on a photo and a slogan. Here's the five-second test, and the five things that pass it.

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Local SEO7 min

The Google Business Profile checklist for tradies (the free marketing most ignore)

Your Business Profile is what shows in the map pack — the three businesses with the map, above the organic results. It's free, most tradies set it up once and forget it, and working it for twenty minutes a week beats a lot of paid marketing.

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Lead generation8 min

12 questions to ask any marketing agency before you sign (and the answers to walk away from)

Most tradies have been burned by a marketing company at least once. These are the questions that expose a bad one in a single phone call — and the answers we'd give, so you can hold us to them too.

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Meta Ads7 min

Meta Ads for tradies: the creative, the lead form and the five-minute callback

Facebook and Instagram ads produce leads for visual trades at $10–$35 each in our accounts. The ads are the easy part — here's the creative that works, why we use lead forms, and the follow-up that decides whether a $12 lead becomes a $3,000 job.

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New guides are added as they're written — never spun, never padded. If there's a comparison you'd like us to do, ask.

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