Local SEO for contractors

Google explains local ranking with three factors. Relevance is how well a business matches what someone is searching for, so complete, detailed information helps. Distance is how far the business is from the person searching; if they don't share their location, Google uses what it knows about it. Prominence is how well known the business is. Google says it's based partly on how many websites link to the business and how many reviews it has, and that more reviews and positive ratings can help.

Two more facts shape everything below. Google uses the mobile version of your site for indexing and ranking, so what your site shows on a phone is what counts. And Google says there's no way to request or pay for a better local ranking.

The map results are built around Business Profiles, so set yours up first: our Google Business Profile guide walks through it. The rest of this guide is about your website and your reputation around town.

Homeowners search for the job, often with a town: “emergency plumber,” “roof replacement Plano,” “ductless mini split installation,” “retaining wall contractor.” Give each main service its own page, so there's one clear answer for each kind of search. Each service page needs:

• A clear title and address. Google's SEO Starter Guide asks for a title that's unique to the page, clear and concise, and for words in the URL that help people: /water-heater-replacement, not /page?id=17.
• The answers a homeowner wants: what the job involves, the signs they need it, how long it takes, whether a permit or inspection is part of it, and what your warranty covers.
• Photos from your own jobs, sharp and placed next to the text they belong to, with short alt text that says what they show.
• A visible FAQ with the questions you hear on the phone. Google stopped showing FAQ rich results on May 7, 2026, but the answers still help the reader decide.
• The towns you serve for that service, the call button and the quote form.
• No padding. Google says the length of content alone doesn't matter for ranking. Answer the questions and stop.
• Links in and out. Google says every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site. Link the home page to each service, each service to the projects that show it, and each town page to the services you offer there.
• Link text that says where it goes. “See our tankless water heater installs” tells people and Google more than “click here” or “read more.”

Swapping the town name on twenty copies of the same page is the most common local SEO shortcut, and Google names it. Its spam policies list “pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page” as doorway abuse, and “blocks of text that list cities and regions that a web page is trying to rank for” as keyword stuffing. Google says sites that violate its spam policies may rank lower or not appear in results at all. Its guidance on helpful content asks the same question from the other side: is a page made mainly to attract visits from search engines, or for the people reading it?

If you can't write a real page for a town, don't make one yet. Name the towns you serve in one plain list on a service-area page and in your Business Profile, and add the town page once you have real jobs there. A town page earns its place when it says something only you could write about that town:

• Jobs you've done there, with photos and what the problem was, without customers' addresses.
• The local permit and inspection steps for your kind of work, where there are any.
• The houses you work on there: 1950s ranch homes, older houses with galvanized pipes, newer subdivisions with HOA rules on fence height or roof color.
• The weather that matters for your trade: hail, freeze and thaw, hard water, long cooling seasons.
• How soon you can usually get there and who on your team covers that area.

Google needs to be sure that the business on your website, on your profile and around the web is the same one. Use the same business name, phone number and, if you show it, address everywhere: website footer, contact page, Business Profile, Facebook page, directory listings, invoices and truck wraps. When you change your number or move, update every one of them.

Then describe the business in structured data, a small block of code (JSON-LD) in the page that Google reads. Google's guide for local business markup says to use the most specific LocalBusiness subtype possible. Schema.org has types for several trades: RoofingContractor, HVACBusiness, Plumber, Electrician, GeneralContractor, HousePainter, Locksmith and MovingCompany. A trade without its own type, such as concrete or fencing, can use the broader HomeAndConstructionBusiness. Google says it doesn't guarantee that features using structured data will show up in search results: the markup helps Google read your details, and the page still has to earn the click. What to include:

• Required by Google: the business name and its address. If you hide your street address, use the parts you do show, such as city, state and ZIP.
• Recommended: the phone number with country and area code, your site's URL, map coordinates with at least five decimal places, opening hours, and a price range under 100 characters if you use one.
• areaServed, a schema.org property, for the towns you serve.
• Not your own star rating. Google recommends review and rating markup only for sites that collect reviews about other local businesses, so don't mark up your own testimonials.
• The same markup on phone and desktop, as Google's mobile-first guidance asks.

Prominence is the factor you build over years, and Google ties it to how many reviews you have and how many websites link to you.

For reviews, ask every customer after every job with a link or QR code, and reply to what they write. Never offer anything in return, never ask only the happy ones, and never write or buy reviews: Google's policies forbid it, and under the FTC's rule on fake reviews courts can impose civil penalties for knowing violations. Our guide on how to get more Google reviews has the whole routine.

For links, think of the places in your area that would mention you anyway, and don't buy them: Google's spam policies name buying or selling links for ranking, excessive link swaps (“link to me and I'll link to you”) and low-quality directory links as link spam. Good places to start:

• Manufacturer or supplier pages that list certified installers, if you hold the certification.
• Your chamber of commerce or trade association's member directory.
• A youth team, school event or charity you really sponsor.
• Local news or a neighborhood group covering a project you did.
• Builders, property managers or real estate agents who list the trades they trust.

Google recommends that site owners achieve good Core Web Vitals. On contractor sites, slow pages usually come from the same few things: full-size job photos straight from the phone, a hero video with no light poster image, chat widgets and tracking scripts that load before the page, and fonts that hold up the first screen. These are the three measurements and their “good” thresholds, judged at the 75th percentile of page loads, with phones and desktops counted separately:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), how fast the main content appears: 2.5 seconds or less.
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP), how fast the page responds to a tap: 200 milliseconds or less.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), how much things jump around while the page loads: 0.1 or less.

1. 1Measure first: PageSpeed Insights for one page at a time, the Core Web Vitals report in Search Console for the whole site. Both use data from real Chrome users.
2. 2Resize and compress job photos before they go on the site.
3. 3Give a hero video a light poster image, and load the first image right away and the rest as the visitor scrolls.
4. 4Remove chat widgets and scripts you don't use, and load the ones you keep after the page.
5. 5Test again on a phone after every change.

Search Console is free and shows how Google sees your site. Verify your site and submit your sitemap, then check these reports once a month. Put them next to your Business Profile's calls and website clicks and your own lead log: rankings only matter when they turn into calls and booked jobs.

• Performance: clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position, by query and by page. Search Console keeps 16 months of data, so compare a month with the same month last year; contractor searches swing with the seasons. Some rare searches are hidden to protect privacy, so the query list won't account for every visit.
• Your services and towns in the queries. Are you showing up for “roof repair” with your towns, or only for your company name? A new service or town page should start to collect impressions for its searches.
• Pages with impressions but few clicks. Rewrite the title and description so they match what people searched for.
• Page indexing: which pages Google has indexed and which it hasn't, and why. “Not indexed” isn't always an error, but server errors, redirect errors and soft 404s need fixing.
• URL Inspection: check a single page, and request indexing after an important change Google seems to have missed. Don't keep re-requesting; Google recrawls pages by itself.
• Core Web Vitals: pages that fall below the “good” thresholds on phones.