SEO for contractors selling jobs people research for weeks
SEO for contractors targets a buyer who reads for weeks before calling: cost pages, comparison content, permit questions, project galleries and reviews. We run it as a monthly retainer reported from your own Search Console.
A burst pipe gets one search and one call. A kitchen remodel or a 600 square foot addition gets six weeks of reading, three quotes, and an argument about cabinets. Your marketing has to survive that, not just the first click.
So the useful question is not where you sit for one near me phrase. It is whether you turn up at the cost stage, the comparison stage, the permit stage and the who did my neighbour use stage. Most contractor sites turn up at one.
Andmotive has built and maintained WordPress sites since 2018 and now sells SEO monthly, the newer half of what we do. There are no contractor case studies to hand you. What there is: work in the repository and a report you can open.
More on this:what a monthly SEO retainer includes·contractor website design and build·speeding up an image heavy WordPress site·talk to us about your service area
Where contractor marketing breaks down
One page for every trade you sell
Kitchens, bathrooms, additions and decks on one Services page lose to specialists who gave each job a page.
No prices anywhere on the site
Cost is the first thing a homeowner searches and the one thing contractors will not publish. The directories answer it instead.
A gallery with no words in it
Forty photographs named IMG_4471 say nothing about the town, the material or the job.
Leads credited to the wrong thing
A six week cycle means the last click is usually a brand search, so organic reads as if it did nothing.
What we do each month
A page per job type, with real projects on it
One page for kitchen remodels, one for additions, one for siding, each carrying jobs you finished, with the town and the material.
Cost pages that give a real range
A dated range with the four variables that move it beats silence. It also filters the caller wanting eight thousand dollars of work for two.
Contractor SEO mapped to the whole decision
Content gets matched to the stages a homeowner passes: cost, material, permit, who nearby. Each earns a page.
Business Profile treated as a ranking surface
Categories, service areas, the products section, the questions strangers post. Google says local ranking runs on relevance, distance and prominence. Prominence counts reviews.
Photographs a search engine can read
Project images get renamed, converted to WebP, given alt text and dimensions. Forty unoptimised JPEGs blow past Google's 2.5 second threshold for Largest Contentful Paint on a phone, and the buyer leaves first.
Every retainer includes
- A month one audit of crawl depth, image weight, schema and Core Web Vitals
- Business Profile setup or repair, service areas included, up to the 20 Google allows
- Monthly reporting from your own Search Console and your form submissions
- Page writing at 1,200 words or more, briefed from a call with whoever runs estimates
- A quarterly review that reforecasts, or says spend it on vans instead
Why contractor SEO has to cover a six week decision
How the retainer runs on a long cycle
Month one is spent working out where you already appear in search, and where the decision actually gets made. We pull Search Console, crawl the site, and list the jobs you sell against the pages that exist for them today. Half have no page at all.
Then we argue about pricing, because that is the page that decides everything downstream of it. You do not have to publish a fixed number, and most contractors should not. A range, the variables behind it, and the date it was last checked is enough to take that query back from the directory pages that currently answer it for you.
Technical work runs underneath all of it. Image weight, a quote form that posts somewhere reliable, schema for the service area you cover, and the redirect map from the last rebuild that quietly lost sixty URLs. None of it is interesting. All of it compounds.
Links for a contractor come from suppliers, manufacturers, trade associations and the local paper, not from a package. A manufacturer certification page that lists approved installers is a real link most contractors already qualify for and have simply never asked for. We make the asks, and we report the ones that failed.
- A page for each job type you want more of
- A dated cost range on the site, agreed with you first
- Quote form submissions tied back to the landing page
- Fixed monthly hours, logged and shown to you
The first quarter
- 01
Week one, the job type audit
Every service you sell gets checked against whether a page exists and whether it earns impressions. The gaps are usually where the margin is.
- 02
Week two, the technical sweep
Redirects, image weight, the quote form, whatever URLs survived the previous build. None of it needs a design decision. It all ships.
- 03
Week three, the cost conversation
We agree what you are willing to publish about price and how it gets qualified. This one argument decides the quarter, so we have it early rather than in month four.
- 04
Monthly, build and ask
One or two pages, the backlog, the supplier and trade association link requests. You read every draft in full before it goes live.
- 05
Day 90, then quarterly
Impressions, clicks and quote requests get set against the dated baseline. Month three is the earliest point at which any of it reads as a trend rather than noise.
What it costs
How many job types you want pages for
Two done properly is a smaller retainer than seven done thinly. Seven thin ones read as templated.
How wide your service area is
One town and four counties are different jobs, because each county brings its own competitors and permit rules. Typing towns into the Business Profile does not widen the radius you rank in.
How many photographs there are
Ten years of project photos on a phone is an asset and a week of work. Renaming and compressing them is slow.
Whether the site can take the pages
A WordPress install with one theme and a working editor is cheap to add to. A page builder site costs hours per page.
The service area box nobody explains
Here is the setting that quietly caps a lot of contractor profiles. Google allows up to 20 service areas on a Business Profile, and its own guidance says to remove your address if you do not serve customers there. What nobody mentions: adding towns does not move the point Google measures distance from, which is still your verified location. Ten more towns will not put you in a map pack forty miles away.
Sources:Google's guidance on service areas for service area businesses·Google on how local search ranking is decided
Answer one question and we can start: are you willing to publish a price range? If yes, send the site with the three job types you want more of, and you will get back a draft range with the variables written into it, which is the page a directory is currently answering for you. If no, that is a legitimate answer and the whole plan changes shape, so say it in week one rather than in month four. Either way the first read is free and there is nothing to sign.
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What contractors ask first
What is SEO for contractors?+
SEO for contractors is the work of appearing at every stage of a considered purchase, not only the near me stage. That means job type pages, a cost page, comparison content, a maintained Business Profile, and galleries a search engine can read.
How much does contractor SEO cost?+
We quote hours, not packages, so the figure comes after we read the site and the market. What moves it: how many job types you want covered, how wide the service area runs, and how much photograph cleanup is needed.
Is SEO worth it for a contractor?+
It depends on job value and how much work already arrives by referral. A remodeler averaging 40,000 dollars a job clears about 10,000 of gross margin at 25 percent, so two extra jobs a year is 20,000 dollars to hold any quote against. A handyman charging hourly is better served by the profile alone.
How do contractors get more leads from Google?+
Three surfaces, and they are not equal. The local pack runs on relevance, distance and prominence. Organic rewards the page answering the question. Local Services Ads are paid and sit above both. Most contractors have only ever worked the first.
How long does contractor marketing take to show results?+
Technical fixes and Business Profile work register within weeks. Written pages need three to six months to earn steady impressions, and the buying cycle adds weeks more before a click becomes a signed job. Month three is the earliest honest read.