Yes, though not in the way most agencies mean it. Nobody needs to know how to install a furnace. They need to know how a homeowner picks which furnace company to call.
Those are two different kinds of knowledge. Only one of them changes what you get.
What does trade knowledge change?
Three things, and you can see all three inside the first month.
What the person searches at that moment. Somebody with water coming through a ceiling and somebody planning a kitchen are both searching Google. They compare different things and they decide on different days.
An agency that has never worked a trade writes one page and uses it for both.
How long the decision takes. A garage door spring is a five minute decision. A solar install can take months of back and forth.
Measure both against the same thirty day window and you will switch off the slow one just as it begins to work.
What the customer is afraid of. Roofing customers fear buying a roof they did not need. Auto repair customers fear the upcharge.
The page that names the fear and answers it beats the page that lists services.
Four questions that separate the practised from the prepared
Ask these on the first call. You will have your answer inside ten minutes.
1. Which of your clients is closest to my business, and what did you change for them? Listen for a change to a page. “We improved their local SEO” is not an answer. “We split their emergency page off from their maintenance page because the two searches were fighting” is one.
2. What do people in my trade search that outsiders find odd? Anybody who has worked your trade has one of these ready, and it is the fastest tell in the conversation.
3. What is the slow season in my business, and how will it show in the numbers? An agency that cannot describe your year has not thought about your business yet.
4. Which competitor would you look at first, and why? They should name companies in your market by the end of the call, instead of reading your own list back to you.
What if nobody has worked your trade?
Then you want them to say so out loud.
Plenty of trades are close enough that the work crosses over. A gutter company and a roofing company share almost everything. A med spa and a dental practice share the booking problem and little else.
A good answer sounds like this. We have not done pest control. We have done four home service trades that buy the same way, and here is what crosses over.
The bad answer is the one where your trade becomes their specialty during the call. Proof gets led with. A promise arrives when there is no proof behind it.
We take the same line ourselves. Our pages say which trades we have a client in, which ones we do not, and where the nearest proof comes from.
Does trade knowledge beat local knowledge?
Usually, and that surprises people.
An agency two thousand miles away that has worked twenty roofing companies knows more than one down the road that has worked none. Local counts for your customers. It counts much less for the person doing the work, because the work happens in Google.
What the local shop offers is somebody who can walk into your office. Weigh that if you want it. Do not confuse it with knowing your trade.
One check worth doing yourself
Before the call, search the way your customer would. Not your business name. The words somebody types when they have the problem you fix.
Look at who appears. Read those pages and notice what they say in the first two lines, because that is what works on the person you both want.
Then ask the agency what they saw when they did the same search. If they never did it, you now know how much thought went into your account before anybody asked you for money.
Where to go from here
None of this is about being difficult with agencies. A plan built without your trade in it gets built for an average business, and no such business exists.
Our own work is arranged around that. Read our local marketing by industry pages and you will see which trades we have a client in. Each one says what we would look at first.
If your trade is on that list, or close to something on it, book a call and ask us the four questions above.