A plain local SEO checklist for contractors, covering the work you can do yourself this month, the parts worth paying for, and the pitches to skip.
For a contractor, SEO comes down to four things: a Google Business Profile that's filled out correctly, one real page for each service you sell, a steady stream of honest reviews, and a website that loads fast and shows your phone number. You can do most of it yourself. The parts worth paying for are the ones that take hours, not the ones sold as secrets.
One thing nobody can sell you honestly is a ranking. Google's own SEO guide says there's no guarantee that any particular site will even be added to its index (Google SEO Starter Guide), so nobody can honestly promise where you'll rank. If a proposal promises page one by a date, walk away.
Disclosure: we sell a platform that includes SEO work, so we have a stake in this. What it does for you is near the end, along with the case where we can't help.
It means showing up in two places when someone nearby searches for what you do: the map results (your Business Profile) and the regular results (your website).
Google says local results are based mainly on relevance, distance and prominence. Relevance is how well your profile matches the search. Distance is how far you are from the person searching. Prominence is how well-known you are, and Google says "More reviews and positive ratings can help your business's local ranking" (Google Business Profile Help).
Distance you can't change. The other two you can work on.
Seven things, in the order we'd do them.
Use your real business name, the one on your truck, invoices and website. Google's guideline is that your name "should reflect your business's real-world name, as used consistently on your storefront, website, stationery, and as known to customers", so don't add "Best Roofer Tampa" to it (Google guidelines).
If you work from home and travel to customers, Google says to hide your address: "if you're a plumber and run your business from your residential address, clear the address from your Business Profile." Then pick your main category, list your services, set your service area, and add real photos of your own jobs.
"Water heater replacement" and "panel upgrade" are different searches, so they deserve different pages. Each one needs what you do, who it's for, the towns you do it in, a few photos from real jobs, your phone number, and a short form.
This is the SEO advice that gets contractors in trouble. Google's spam policies list pages "targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page" as doorway abuse, and list repeating "cities and regions that a web page is trying to rank for" as keyword stuffing (Google spam policies).
Write a page for a town when you have something true to say about it: jobs you've done there, permits or rules that are specific to it, a neighborhood you work in a lot. If the only difference between two pages is the town name, it's one page.
Google's advice is that titles should be unique to each page, clear and short, and an accurate description of the page. That's "Water heater replacement in Springfield | Hartley Plumbing", not a list of keywords.
Ask every customer after the job. Our post on how to get more Google reviews has the scripts and the rules Google and the FTC set.
A tappable phone number, a short form, and a site that loads on a bad signal matter as much as ranking. Why your website gets traffic and no leads walks through the six leaks.
One honest post a month beats ten generic ones: a real job, what was wrong, what you did, roughly what it cost. Google's guidance is to make content that's useful, original, well organized, easy to read and kept up to date. Customers read the same way.
Pay for hours, not secrets. These take real time, which is why people hire them out:
The budget math is in how much a service business should spend on SEO, and the reasons retainers fail are in why most agency SEO retainers fail.
Then repeat: one new service page or post a month.
On sites we build, or any site whose code is in GitHub, the TechBridge Platform runs a weekly site audit and daily rank tracking, and drafts blog posts and "Fix this" site edits that wait for your approval. It makes no ranking promises, and if your site is on Wix or Squarespace, SEO is the one part we can't run. Request access.
If people in your area search for what you do, yes, because that search is where the call starts. If all your work is referrals and repeat customers, a correct Business Profile and a simple site may be all you need.
Most of the basics, yes: the profile, service pages, reviews and a fast site. Google's guide says it can make sense to hire an SEO if you lack the time or the technical comfort, as long as you pick one who follows Google's guidelines.
There's no honest date. Changes to a page take time to be found and judged, and Google doesn't guarantee either. Don't grade a page by its first week.
No. Write one when you have something true and useful to say about that town. Otherwise list your service area on the service page and in your Business Profile.
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