Local SEO for contractors: the leads that stop costing money.
Every paid channel rents attention; local SEO buys the building. The map pack, your reviews, and city/service pages decide what you pay per lead on every other channel — and eventually replace some of them. Here’s how contractor local SEO actually ranks, plus a calculator for what your blended cost looks like as it kicks in.
Where the money goes — and why.
The map pack formula
Proximity you can’t change; relevance and prominence you can. Complete GBP with real service data, weekly photo posts, review velocity with keyword-bearing replies, and citations that agree with each other. That’s 80% of it.
The review engine
Not review count — review velocity. A steady drip of new reviews (automated 2 hours after each job) outranks a big stale pile. Replies mentioning service and city feed relevance. This is the compounding asset.
City + service pages
One page per city you serve, one per service you sell, each with real local proof. This is how you rank beyond your shop’s zip code — and it’s the part competitors skip because it’s work.
What is your ad spend producing — and what should it produce?
Drag the sliders to what you spend and pay per lead today. The right column shows the typical range after proper management — tighter targeting, weekly negative keywords, faster landing pages — plus leads recovered by missed-call text-back.
Estimate based on typical results from removing junk clicks (15–30% of unmanaged budgets), landing-page fixes, and missed-call recovery (contractors miss 20–35% of calls). Ranges, not promises — your audit shows the numbers for your actual market. Ad spend is always paid straight to Google/Meta, never marked up.
Your first 90 days, week by week.
No mystery retainer. This is the exact rollout order, the same one we run for every client — each phase starts producing before the next one starts spending:
Audit + foundations
We audit your rankings, ad accounts, tracking and competitors, then fix the free stuff first: Google Business Profile completed, review engine on, tracked numbers on everything. You get the findings in writing within 24 hours of the first call.
LSA live
Google Guaranteed screening submitted day one — it takes 1–3 weeks to approve, so it runs while everything else is built. Pay-per-call only. First calls typically land here.
Search ads launch
Campaigns split by service and intent, each with its own landing page and budget. Emergency terms and big-ticket terms never share a campaign. Weekly negative-keyword pruning starts immediately.
Website + conversion
Fast pages, click-to-call everywhere, instant estimator, proof blocks. Every channel lands here — fixing it mid-rollout means every dollar before and after works harder. Automations (missed-call text-back, review requests, reminders) go live.
Content, Meta & SEO compound
Monthly film day starts feeding Meta ads and GBP. Retargeting switches on. City/service SEO pages publish and start their climb. From here it’s weekly tuning and a Friday text with the four numbers that matter: spend, calls, cost per call, estimates booked.
Want the full channel-by-channel playbook? Read the digital marketing for contractors guide →
Straight answers.
How long does local SEO take for a contractor?
GBP fixes can move calls in 4–8 weeks. City/service pages typically need 3–9 months. It’s the slowest channel and the only one whose leads get cheaper every quarter — which is why it runs from day one in our roadmap, behind the fast channels.
Can I rank in cities where I don't have an office?
In the organic results, yes — city pages with real local proof (jobs done there, reviews naming the city) rank. The map pack is proximity-biased, which is why the plan pairs SEO with LSA to cover the whole service area.
Is local SEO enough by itself?
Eventually it can carry most of the load — established contractors get 40–60% of leads free. But 'eventually' doesn't make payroll this month, so we stack it behind LSA and search ads and let it take over gradually.
Get a free audit — see your market's real numbers.
One call. Within 24 hours you get it in writing: where you rank, what leads cost in your market, and what your top three competitors are running.
No card. No contract. Takes one phone call.
See what working with us actually looks like — no mystery, no lock-in:
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