A visible street address for a business that works on site
It suppresses you outside the immediate area and can get the listing suspended if the address is a residence with no signage.
Guide
Local SEO for contractors
A contractor is usually a service area business, which changes how Google treats you before any of the work starts. You work at the customer’s property rather than your own, so the profile should hide the address and declare a service area instead. Get that one setting wrong and you are either invisible outside your street or flagged for claiming a radius you cannot justify.
8 steps
Free to read, in the order it pays to do it. Nothing to sign up for and nothing to download.
The second thing that decides it is trust. Somebody about to let a stranger take a wall out of their house is checking whether you are licensed, insured, and have finished a job like theirs nearby. Those three things, said plainly and evidenced, convert better than any amount of copy about quality and craftsmanship.
Most contractors have the evidence already. It is sitting on a phone as photographs of finished jobs and has never made it onto the site.
What contractors are actually competing for
These are the shapes the searches take. The words in brackets are whatever the searcher puts there, which is usually a town, a neighbourhood or a brand.
- general contractor near me
- kitchen extension builder [town]
- licensed and insured contractor [city]
- how much does a loft conversion cost
- commercial fit out contractor [area]
- builders near me with reviews
The work, in the order it pays to do it
- 1
Set the profile up as a service area business
Hide the address if you work at customers’ properties, then set the service area to the places you genuinely travel to. A radius covering three counties you have never worked in is worse than a tight one you can back up.
- 2
Put the licence and insurance on the page, with numbers
Licence number, insurer, cover level, and the trade bodies you belong to. This is the single fastest trust signal in the trade and most contractor sites bury it or leave it off entirely.
- 3
Make a page per job type, not per service word
Kitchen extensions, loft conversions, bathroom refits, commercial fit outs. Somebody searching a loft conversion does not want a page about building work in general, and the pages that win these searches are specific.
- 4
Turn finished jobs into project pages
One page per project with photographs before and after, what the job involved, how long it took, and the town it was in. This is the only content in the trade that is genuinely yours and cannot be copied, and it puts real place names on the site honestly.
- 5
Ask for reviews at handover
The moment the customer is happiest is the day it is finished, not two weeks later. Reviews that name the job type and the area do double duty.
- 6
Answer the cost question without quoting a price
What drives the cost of a job like theirs, what makes it go up, what a quote will cover. People search cost constantly in this trade; a page that explains the variables gets the enquiry from somebody who then expects to discuss a number on a call.
- 7
Add the service area pages only where you have worked
And tie each one to a real project on that page. A town page with a job and a photograph in it is a page. A town page with the name swapped is a doorway.
- 8
Get the phone number right everywhere
Profile, site, directories, van, invoices. Contractors change numbers more often than most trades and the old ones linger in listings for years.
What usually goes wrong
A gallery instead of project pages
A grid of forty photographs with no text ranks for nothing. The same forty photographs split into ten project pages with a paragraph each ranks for ten job types in ten towns.
Copy about craftsmanship instead of evidence
Every competitor says the same thing. The licence number, the insurer and a finished job down the road say something they cannot copy.
Service areas claimed far beyond where you travel
It dilutes relevance everywhere and produces enquiries you turn down, which costs you the time and Google the signal.
How to tell whether it is working
Rankings are not the measure. These are, and all of them come from accounts in your own name rather than from a report you have to take on trust.
- Quote requests, separated from general enquiries
- Calls and direction requests from the profile
- Which job-type pages the enquiries came through, so you can see which trade the site is actually selling
- Search Console impressions for the town plus job-type combinations, which is where this traffic lives
If you would rather not do it yourself
Everything above is work you can do without hiring anybody, and the profile half of it is worth doing whatever else you decide. If you want it done for you, this is the service that covers it, and we scope it on a call before anything starts.
Other guides
Questions about local SEO for contractors
Should a contractor show an address on Google?
Only if customers come to you. If you work at their property, hide the address and set a service area. Showing a home address with no signage risks suspension and does not help you rank further out.
How many service area pages should we build?
As many as you have genuinely worked in, and each one should carry a real project from that area. Beyond that you are building doorway pages, which do not rank and can drag the rest down.
Can I do local SEO myself as a contractor?
The profile, the reviews and the licence details, yes, and they are most of the early gain. The project pages take time you probably do not have between jobs, which is where most contractors stall.
Do project photographs need to be professional?
No. A clear phone photograph of a finished job beats a stock image of a kitchen every time, because the reader can tell which one is real.
Book a call with us
A 30-minute call in your working hours. Tell us what you sell and where, and we will tell you what we would do first and what it involves. Prefer email? Send your website through the form and the Passieon Team will reply within two working days.