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Check what AI says about your business.

5 checks. Takes about 5 minutes on your phone. Score yourself out of 5 stars, nothing to sign up for.

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Fill these in once.

Every prompt below fills itself in. Skip it if you'd rather type your own bits.

Turn on a temporary or incognito chat first. If you're signed in, the AI already knows who you are and will flatter you. Temporary chat gives you the honest answer.

  1. Are you there at all?

    Prompt 1

    I need a [your trade] in [your suburb]. Who should I call? Answer as a customer, not as the business owner.

    What you're looking for: your own business name, anywhere in the answer.

  2. Do your details agree?

    Prompt 2

    Search the web for [your business name] in [your suburb]. List every version you can find of my business name, phone number and address, and say which source each one came from. Then tell me plainly whether they agree with each other or not.

    What you're looking for: one name, one number, one address. The same everywhere.

  3. How many are ahead of you?

    Prompt 3

    Who are the best [your trade]s in [your suburb]? Give me a ranked list of ten, with a sentence on why each one is worth calling. Then tell me where [your business name] sits on that list, and if it isn't on the list at all, say so.

    What you're looking for: your name in the top three, or not far off it.

    Why three? Google's map pack shows three businesses. If AI can name ten it rates above you, you're not in the running for the only three spots anyone sees.

  4. What do you look like to a customer?

    Prompt 4

    Here is everything I have online: [paste your website, your Google Business Profile, your Facebook, your Instagram, whatever you've got]. Review it the way a customer deciding who to call would. Tell me what you think I do, what I'm known for, and what's missing. Then score me out of 10 and be brutal. I want the honest answer, not encouragement.

    No website? Doesn't matter. Paste your Google listing, or your Facebook page, or your Instagram. Whatever you've got is what a customer has got.

    What you're looking for: it describes your business the way you would.

  5. Is your website fast enough?

    No prompt for this one. Google's own tool, and it takes about 30 seconds.

    Open pagespeed.web.dev
    1. Paste your web address in and hit Analyse.
    2. When it finishes, make sure you're on the Mobile tab.
    3. Read the big number at the top. That's your score out of 100.

    What you're looking for: a mobile score of 50 or more.

    Under 50 is Google's own "poor" band. In plain terms, your site is slow enough that people give up before it loads.

    No website at all? That's a fail, and it's the most common one in the room. Nothing to be embarrassed about, it just means there's nothing for anyone to be slow to load.

Your score

0out of 5

Tick the boxes above as you go.

Five checks, five stars. Then you'll know exactly where you stand.

The one nobody asks

Ask a second question.

Most people ask AI one question and stop. Ask a second and it stops describing the problem and starts writing your to do list. Paste this straight after prompt 1, 3 or 4, in the same chat.

Follow up

You just told me you'd recommend those businesses instead of mine. What would [your business name] need to have for you to put us on that list? Be specific, and put it in order of what would move the needle most.

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All 5 checks on one page.

All 5 checks, the follow up question and the scorecard. Save it to your phone or print it for the ute. No form, no email address, just the sheet.

Download the sheet
What to fix

Free fixes for whatever you came up short on.

All of this you can do yourself, in about ten minutes each, for nothing. Tap the ones you came up short on.

Failed 1Your name didn't come up
  1. Claim your Google Business Profile. Go to google.com/business. It's free and it's the single biggest thing on this list. They verify you by video, postcard or a phone call.
  2. Set the right primary category. Plumber, not Contractor. Electrician, not Home Improvement. That one field does more work than anything else on the profile.
  3. Fill in the Services list properly. Every job you actually do, in the words a customer would use. Blocked drains. Hot water replacement. Not "general plumbing".
  4. List your service areas. Name the suburbs you actually work in. A blank service area means nothing can match you to a suburb.
  5. Say the same thing on your website. If your site never has the words "plumber in Epping" on it anywhere, nothing reading it can work that out.
Failed 2Your details disagree
  1. Write down one correct version. Exact business name, exact phone, exact address, how you'd want it printed. That's your master copy and everything gets matched to it.
  2. Fix Google first. Most other listings copy from it, so fixing Google fixes some of the rest on its own.
  3. Then anything publishing a street address. True Local, Yellow Pages, Hotfrog, Start Local, Localsearch, Word of Mouth. Each one has a "claim this listing" link. A wrong address does more damage than a wrong phone number, so do those first.
  4. Then Facebook and Instagram. The About section, not just the bio. Most tradies fix the bio and forget About.
  5. Then your own site. Footer, contact page, and anywhere the number appears in an image, because nothing can read a phone number in a picture.
Failed 3Too many ahead of you
  1. Reviews, and it isn't close. Biggest free lever there is. Ask every customer the same day you finish, with a direct link, not "look us up on Google".
  2. Get the review link. It's in your Google Business Profile under Ask for reviews. Save it to your phone and text it from the driveway.
  3. Recent beats lots. Ten reviews this year beats fifty from 2019. Keep them coming rather than chasing a number.
  4. Reply to every one. Good and bad. Takes a minute and it is one of the few signals you fully control.
  5. Be known for one job, not twenty. "Driveway excavation in Bayswater" will beat "excavation, demolition, drainage, landscaping and concreting" every time. Pick the job you actually want more of.
Failed 4It scored you under 7

Five things a customer looks for in about five seconds, and usually can't find.

  1. What you actually do. In plain words, near the top. "Blocked drains and hot water across Melbourne's north east", not "quality plumbing solutions".
  2. Where you work. Name the suburbs. "We cover Epping, Mill Park, South Morang and Thomastown" does more than a map.
  3. Proof it's any good. Photos of your own jobs, reviews with real names on them, your licence number. Stock photos of someone else's van do the opposite.
  4. A number they can tap. At the top, on every page, not buried on a contact page three clicks in.
  5. Some idea of price. Even a range, even "callouts from $X". Saying nothing about price reads as expensive.
Failed 5Your site is too slow

PageSpeed gives you a list of what's slowing it down. These four are nearly always on it, and you can fix them without a developer.

  1. Your photos are the problem, nine times out of ten. A photo straight off your phone is 4 or 5 MB. On a website it should be under 300 KB. Run them through squoosh.app, free, in the browser, and re-upload.
  2. Nothing bigger than it's shown. A photo displayed 600 pixels wide does not need to be 4,000 pixels wide. Resize before you upload, not after.
  3. Cut the plugins and widgets you don't use. Chat bubbles, popups, review sliders, booking embeds. Every one loads code on every page. If you can't remember switching it on, switch it off.
  4. Check it on 4G, not your wifi. Turn wifi off on your phone and load your own site. That is what a customer standing in their driveway gets.

No website? Then this one isn't a fix, it's the whole job. Start with the Google profile in fix 1, it's free and it works without a site.

If you've got a marketer

5 questions worth asking them.

Already written as an email. Copy it, put their address in the To line, send. How they answer tells you most of what you need to know.

SubjectFew questions about our setup

Hi,

I've been reading a bit about how AI and Google are changing the way customers find tradies, and it's raised a few questions I'd like to understand better. Nothing's wrong, I just want to know where we stand.

Could you answer these when you get a chance?

  1. Who owns my website, my domain and my customer list, me or you?
  2. If I stopped paying you tomorrow, what do I still keep?
  3. When someone asks an AI for a tradie in my suburb, why doesn't my name come up?
  4. Are my name, address and phone number identical everywhere online?
  5. What is the one thing you are getting me known for?

No rush, whenever suits.

Thanks,

Open it in your mail app
Free, no pitch

Find out what AI says about you.

Put in your trade, your suburb and how to reach you, and we'll send you your map. No charge, no pitch. Tradies have been burned before, so we go first.

Questions after the talk?

Tom Syddall

Founder, 5 Star Tradie

Call 0412 171 950 thomas@5startradie.com.au