Local SEO for Contractors: How to Get Found When You Work at Your Customers' Homes

A baker has a shop on a street. A roofer has a van, a phone, and customers spread over twenty towns. Google Maps was designed around places, which makes local SEO for contractors a little different from what a shop does. The rules are the same, but the profile is set up another way.

What is a service-area business?

It is Google's term for a business that goes to its customers instead of receiving them. If you do not receive customers at your address, Google's guidelines ask you to hide it and to state the areas you serve instead: towns, postcodes or regions.

If you also have a showroom or a counter where customers come during stated hours, you can show the address and add service areas as well.

Do not list a virtual office or a mailbox as your premises. It is one of the common causes of a suspended profile.

Does the area you declare decide where you appear?

Not on its own, and this surprises many tradespeople. Declaring forty towns does not make you visible in forty towns. Distance from the address you registered, even hidden, still counts among Google's three local ranking factors, with relevance and prominence.

In practice you are strongest near your base and weaker as you move away. To see it instead of guessing, a position map shows your rank at a grid of points. See the rank grid explained.

How should a contractor fill in the profile?

• Primary category: your main trade, as precisely as Google's list allows: "Roofing contractor", "Electrician", "Painter". See how to choose your category.
• Services: every type of job you want, in your customers' words. "Flat roof repair" and "gutter cleaning" are different searches.
• Service areas: the places where you really accept jobs.
• Hours: the hours when you answer the phone.
• Photos: finished jobs, your vehicle, your team at work.

What replaces a shop window?

Two things.

Photos of your work. Before and after pictures of real jobs, taken with the owner's agreement and without anything that identifies the house.

Reviews that describe the job. "New bathroom, finished on the agreed date, site left clean" tells a future customer more than five stars alone. You cannot write a customer's review for them, but you can ask at the right time: on the day you hand over, when the result is in front of them. Send your review link by text. Ask every customer.

What should your website contain?

• One page per trade or type of job, with photos of your own work.
• One page per town only where you have something real to say: jobs done there, types of housing, access constraints. Forty copies of one text with the town name changed help nobody.
• Your business name, phone and service area on every page, matching your profile.
• Your qualifications, insurance and trade memberships, stated as text.

How do you follow several towns?

Track each main service in each town that matters to you, and look at who ranks above you there. Often it is a competitor based in that town: closer, and therefore favoured. Reviews and a complete profile narrow the gap; they do not cancel distance.

Summary

My opinion: a contractor wins more by being unbeatable within fifteen minutes of base than by claiming a whole region on paper.