Contractor SEO

Start with the profile, not the blog

For most contractors the Google Business Profile produces more leads than the website does, and it is free. Correct primary category, accurate service area, hours including holidays, fresh photography every month, and Posts published on a schedule.

Do not stuff keywords into the business name. It is a guideline violation that can get the listing suspended, and suspension costs far more than the ranking bump was ever worth.

Service area pages are the biggest opportunity

Homeowners search for a service plus a town. If your site has one page listing the towns you cover, you rank for none of them.

Real pages mean local content: projects you completed there, specifics about that market, neighbourhoods you actually worked in, and links to the relevant services. Ten genuine pages outperform forty templated ones, and templated ones can actively suppress the site.

Technical foundations come first

There is no point writing content for a site that is slow or that Google struggles to crawl. Before anything else: load time on mobile, unique titles and descriptions, one canonical version of the site, a reachable sitemap, and schema that describes the business accurately.

Search Console is free and tells you exactly which pages Google has indexed and which it skipped. Most contractors have never opened it. If you do one thing from this page, set it up.

Reviews and local links

Review count and recency feed prominence, which feeds rankings. Ask at the moment the job finishes, by text, with a one-tap link.

For links, contractors do not need a sophisticated campaign — chamber of commerce, trade associations, manufacturer dealer locators, supplier partner pages, local sponsorships. Make sure your name, address and phone are identical everywhere they appear; inconsistency creates doubt and doubt suppresses rankings.

Schema and the technical details that are easy to miss

Structured data tells search engines explicitly what your content means rather than leaving them to infer it. For contractors the useful types are LocalBusiness with your name, address, phone, hours and service area; Service markup per service page; and FAQPage wherever you answer real questions.

Schema will not lift rankings on its own. What it does is make you eligible for richer results — stars, FAQ dropdowns, extra detail in the listing — which increases clicks at the same position. It is one of the few purely technical changes with a direct effect on traffic.

The other detail most sites get wrong is NAP consistency. Your name, address and phone must be identical everywhere they appear, on your site and across every directory. When Google finds three different phone numbers for you it trusts all three less, and that doubt suppresses local rankings.

Measuring the work

Rankings are not the result; calls and form fills are. Conversion tracking should be live before the content work starts, so every page can be judged on what it produced rather than where it sits.

Set up Google Search Console if you do nothing else from this page. It is free, and it shows which queries you appear for and which pages Google indexed or skipped — information most contractors are missing entirely.