Local search rewards businesses that have a real page for each thing they sell in each place they sell it. Most of the rest is noise sold at a markup.
Contractor SEO and local SEO for home service businesses
How it works
Three things decide it.
Local search is not the same game as national SEO, and most of the advice you have read is about the other one. When someone searches a trade plus a town, or just the trade with location turned on, Google is weighing three things.
Proximity
How close you are to the person searching. The one thing nobody can optimise, and the reason a page per town matters so much.
Relevance
Whether your site and listing clearly match what they searched. This is structure and wording, and it is the part most sites get wrong.
Prominence
How established you look: reviews, consistent details across the web, and other sites mentioning you.
You cannot move your business closer to everyone. You can be unmistakably relevant to each search that matters, and you can look established. That is the whole job, and it is why our search work and our web design are the same service.
Pages
One page, one search, one promise.
A page ranks for a search when it is obviously the best answer to it. For a trade that means a page dedicated to that service, in that place, written by someone who has clearly done the work.
Our service pages run well past what most competitors publish, not for the word count but because there is genuinely that much to say: what the job involves, what it costs to get wrong, what you do differently, what happens if it does not hold. We measure what the pages currently ranking actually weigh before writing, so the target is the market's, not a number we made up.
City pages are where most contractor SEO collapses. The usual approach is one template with the town name swapped, twenty times. Google has been able to spot that for years and it can pull down the whole site. A city page earns its place by saying something true about working in that town: the soil, the housing stock, the age of the neighbourhoods, the route your crew already runs. If there is nothing to say, the town belongs as a mention on a page that does have something to say.
Picking the targets
Which pages are worth building.
Before anything is written we pull the actual search data for your trade in your towns: what people search, how often, and what it costs an advertiser to buy that click. That last number matters more than volume, because it tells you what a lead is worth to the businesses already competing for it.
The data usually reorders what an owner expected. A service you think of as a sideline turns out to be the one people search for by name. A town you barely work in has more demand than your home base. Occasionally the strongest term is for work you are not licensed to do, in which case we say so and leave it, because ranking for a job you have to turn down costs you the call and the goodwill with it.
We also measure what the pages currently ranking actually weigh, so the length target for each page comes from that specific search result rather than a house number. Then the page gets built to win that search, or it does not get built at all.
Google Business Profile
The listing that earns the calls.
For most trades, the Google Business Profile produces more calls than the website does. It is also the asset owners most often leave half-filled, because it is not obviously anyone's job.
We manage it: categories, services, service area, description, photos and posts, kept consistent with the site so the two reinforce each other rather than contradicting each other on something as basic as your hours. Your reviews are pulled in and published to your site, where they do conversion work as well as ranking work. Call activity from the listing lands in the same portal as everything else, so you can see what it is actually producing.
All we need from you is Manager access, which takes about a minute. We never ask for ownership of your listing.
AI search
The part that is changing.
A growing share of people looking for a local trade now ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google's own AI overview instead of scrolling results. The question becomes "who should I call for a leaking water heater in Plano", and something answers with two or three names.
Being one of those names is not the same job as ranking, though the two overlap. An answer engine has to be able to read your site, work out unambiguously what you do and where, and find claims specific enough to be worth repeating. Structured markup, clean page structure and plain factual writing all matter more here than they do for a traditional result.
Every site we build ships with that markup from the first draft. It is not an upsell or a later phase, because retrofitting it means rewriting the pages. We would rather be early on this than explain in two years why your competitor is the one being recommended.
What we never do
The shortcuts that cost you later.
Buy links. Against Google's guidelines, repeatedly targeted, and expensive to clean up when it catches up with you.
Mass directory submissions. A handful of citations matter. Hundreds of junk listings do nothing except create wrong details about your business on the internet that you then have to chase.
Doorway pages. Twenty near-identical town pages is the single most common way a contractor site gets penalised, and it is still being sold.
Review gating. Asking only your happy customers breaks Google's terms and risks the listing that produces most of your calls.
Invent claims. No licence number, certification, founding year or guarantee goes on your site unless you told us it is real. Publishing a regulated claim you cannot back is a bigger problem than a slow month of leads.
What to expect
An honest timeline.
| When | What is usually happening |
|---|---|
| 2-5 business days | Site live on your domain, tracking wired, listing linked. |
| Weeks 1 to 4 | Pages get crawled and indexed. Direct and listing calls come through first. |
| Days 60 to 90 | Rankings start reflecting the new structure. The first real read on what is working. |
| Every 90 days | Tune-up: new pages where the business grew, changes where a page is not converting. |
If we are six months in and the phone has not moved, something structural is wrong and we would rather have that conversation than keep billing you quietly.
Common questions
What owners ask about SEO.
How long until I rank?
Expect 60 to 90 days after launch before search engines have fully caught up with a new site, and longer in a competitive metro. Calls from your Google Business Profile usually move first because that listing is already established. Anyone promising page one in 30 days is either buying links or counting a search nobody makes.
Do you guarantee a number one ranking?
No, and it is worth being suspicious of anyone who does. Nobody controls Google's results. What we control is whether you have a real page for each thing you sell in each place you sell it, whether it loads fast, and whether it says something a competitor cannot honestly copy. That is what moves rankings.
Is this the same as buying links?
No. Paid link schemes are against Google's guidelines, and the sites that relied on them have been hit repeatedly. We do not buy links, run private blog networks, or submit you to hundreds of junk directories. Citations on the handful of directories that genuinely matter, yes. That is a different thing.
What about reviews?
Reviews are one of the strongest local ranking factors and the one most owners under-use. We will help you ask properly and we publish them to your site, which is where they also do conversion work. What we will not do is gate them, filtering unhappy customers out of the request. That breaks Google's terms and risks the listing that earns you the most calls.
Can you do SEO on my existing site?
Usually not in a way worth paying for. Most contractor sites are missing the structure that rankings depend on: a page per service, a page per city, and internal linking between them. Adding that to a template is rebuilding the site with extra steps. We would rather build it right and redirect your old URLs so nothing is lost.
What do I actually get reported?
Rankings, calls, form fills and review trends in your portal: calls, forms, your google listing, ask trey. You see which pages are producing and which are not, and every 90 days we act on it.
Does AI recommend you?
When someone in your town asks Google AI Mode, ChatGPT or Perplexity who to call, we show you who they name. Free, twenty seconds, no signup.