Why your site ranks for trades you do not offer

When a site ranks for a trade it does not offer, the cause is usually how the page describes itself, and the right response is to correct the page and not to chase the searches. In August 2026 we found this on a client site that repairs household appliances and nothing else. Its best-ranking suburb searches were for electricians, air conditioning and carpet repair. Here is what we found, how it happened and what we did about it.

What the data showed

The site fixes nine kinds of appliance: cooktops, dishwashers, dryers, freezers, fridges, microwaves, ovens, rangehoods and washing machines. It does no electrical, air conditioning, plumbing, drainage, carpet or commercial kitchen work. We checked that against the appliance content and a suburb page before relying on it.

On 24 August we looked at which searches its suburb pages ranked for in the range where a better page can realistically reach page one, roughly positions 11 to 30. The top rows were off-service:

Together that was around 900 impressions in the band for work the business cannot do. The searches that fit the business, such as appliance repairs in the main city at position 19 and dishwasher repairs at 17.7, were far fewer.

A report sorted by page makes these suburb pages look like prime candidates for improvement. They are not. The honest answer to "electrician" plus a suburb name is that this business is not an electrician.

What caused it

Our first guess was a thin template with the suburb name swapped in. That was wrong. When we read all 69 suburb pages, each carried between about 370 and 1,200 words written about appliances in that suburb. A search across them for electrician, air conditioning, plumbing and carpet found one mention of electrician and one of air conditioning. The prose was on topic.

What was left was the business name and the template around the prose:

• The business name was a general one with no mention of appliances, so it read like a general trades firm.
• The suburb template used generic labels such as "Our Service Area in" the suburb, "We Also Service", "Rapid Response" and "Local Knowledge". None of them named an appliance.

Our reading is that Google matches a suburb word and a trade word against everything on the page, and the page gave it no reason to rule out the neighbouring trades. We cannot see inside Google, so this is an inference from what the pages say and do not say.

Why we did not write for those searches

It is tempting to see 900 impressions and add a section. We did not, for two reasons. The business cannot do the work, so any click is wasted for the visitor and for the business. And writing about electrical work on an appliance repair page would blur the topic of the page further.

What we changed in the plan

The fix we set out was about the labels, not the prose:

1. Rename the generic template headings so each names appliances, for example by saying appliance repairs and not "service".
2. Add one plain line to each suburb page saying what the business does not do: no electrical, air conditioning, plumbing or drain work.
3. Add per-suburb FAQs drawn from searches that fit the business, such as the specific appliance a suburb asks about most.

We also stopped proposing improvement work on these pages from the page-level report. On this site the pages that were worth working on were the pages for individual appliance brands, which were in band and on service, and the news post that held the real head terms.

Why this matters beyond one site

Impressions for services you do not offer are not harmless. They inflate the numbers in a report, so a page can look like it has hundreds of chances to reach page one when none of them can ever become a customer. They also send the wrong people to a site, and visitors who want an electrician and find an appliance repairer leave quickly. If you pay for reporting, ask whether the figures were filtered to searches the business can actually serve. Our Search Console post shows the same effect with out-of-area searches.

How to check your own site

1. In Search Console, open each important page and read its queries, not just its average. We wrote about why in our post on average position.
2. Write down the services you do not offer. Scan the list of queries for any of them.
3. Read your headings and menu labels as a stranger would. Does any page say, in plain words, what you do?
4. If a business name is vague, make sure the first screen of each page says the actual trade.

Also check that the searches are from where you work. A related problem is impressions from the wrong city, which we covered in the same post.

Where this fits

Deciding which impressions to chase and which to ignore is one of the main jobs of the SEO add-on, and it is why we read searches before agreeing a page needs work. Our post on declaring your business once in schema markup covers another way to tell search engines plainly what you are. See the pricing page for what the plans cost, or get started to talk to us.