It's a fair question to ask before spending money, so it's worth answering properly.
There are three places customers find local trades online, and they do very different jobs. Most tradespeople use one or two of them and aren't sure whether they need the others.
Checkatrade (and the rest)
Checkatrade, MyBuilder, Rated People, TrustATrader — these are directories. Customers go there expecting to compare a few options at once. You pay a monthly fee (Checkatrade is around £80–£100 a month at the time of writing), they list you alongside everyone else in your trade and area, and you get leads through their system.
What they're good at: putting you in front of people who are actively looking and don't know anyone yet. The reviews on these sites do carry weight with cautious customers.
What they're not good at: standing out. By design, every plumber on Checkatrade looks roughly the same as every other plumber on Checkatrade. The page is theirs, not yours. If you stop paying, you disappear.
When someone types “plumber Marlborough” or “electrician near me” into Google, two things appear: a map with three businesses pinned on it, and then a list of websites below.
The map listings come from your Google Business Profile — that's free, and every trade should have one. It's the single highest-impact thing you can set up in an afternoon. I've written a separate guide on it here.
The websites below the map are normal websites — yours, your competitors', and sometimes a Checkatrade page or a directory. To appear in that list, you need a website. Without one, you're effectively invisible to anyone who scrolls past the map.
Your own website
A website is the one place online that's entirely yours. Nobody can move you down a list, charge you more, or take it away.
It does three jobs the others can't:
- It's where people land when they Google your business by name — after a referral, after seeing your van, after a customer recommends you. If there's nothing there, you've lost some of them.
- It's where you can tell your story properly — the jobs you actually want, the towns you cover, what makes you different. None of that fits on a directory page.
- It's what makes the rest more effective. A Google Business Profile linked to a real website ranks better. A Checkatrade listing that links out to your own site looks more established.
So which do you need?
Most successful trades end up with all three, used differently:
- Google Business Profile — set it up, keep it active. Always worth it. Free.
- A website — your home base. Lasts for years, gets stronger over time.
- Checkatrade or similar — useful when you're starting out or want to top up leads. Optional. Stop paying and it vanishes.
The trap is paying Checkatrade £100 a month for years and never building anything that's actually yours. That's spending £6,000 over five years and ending up with nothing to show for it.
A website is the opposite — pay once, and it keeps working.
Last updated: May 2026 · If anything in this guide is out of date or unclear, drop me an email — I'll fix it. nick@neobookworm.uk
Send me what you’re currently using (if anything) and I’ll tell you what I’d do next.