Local SEO for Contractors: A Guide To Ranking Your Business

How SEO for Contactors is Different from Traditional SEO

As a contractor or tradesman, unless you’re part of a nationwide firm, you probably have your own local beat. The vast majority of your projects will be within a certain geographical area, such as a city or county. This means that your SEO strategy should mostly target potential customers within this boundary.

Localizing your SEO- targeting Maps, “near me” searches and AI queries from potential customers in your local area- gives you the advantage that the people who find you are the most likely to make the call and hire your company for their work.

While simply being the number 1 result on a traditional search might be great for some businesses, builders and contractors want to be primarily found by customers within a relatively small area.

Local Searches and Recommendations

Once upon a time, ranking locally was relatively easy. You simply had to have more of a particular keyword in your content than your competitors and an up-to-date Google Business Profile.

Now, the SEO landscape is significantly more complex with more interlinked parts to consider.

Firstly, there are now 3 main ways that people find local businesses:

• Local Searches - Searches for services “near me” or “in my area”
• Maps- even if you don’t have a shopfront, businesses with a defined service area can make use of Maps searches
• AI citations and recommendations- about 60% of searchers get everything they need from the AI summary before they even read the first traditional result.

These three pillars of modern local SEO each overlap to a certain extent. Still, with each placing slightly different emphasis, you’ll need to think about how well your content meets the ranking criteria for each search type.

How Do AIs and Search Engines Decide What Ranks?

Your online presence- your website, social media, reviews, listings, and everything else linked to your business- sends certain signals to search engines and AI bots. These signals are graded through a system we call EEAT (Experience, Expertise, Authority, Trustworthiness).

Google, its competitors, and AIs like ChatGPT or Gemini want to offer helpful content to their users. They determine what constitutes “good” offerings based on:

Expertise, Experience, and Trust

As a contractor, your expertise and experience are what earn you your customers’ trust. They want to know that you can do the job and do it well. When dealing with your digital marketing, the same basic principles apply.

Keep your content clear, honest, and transparent while showing off your skills and knowledge. You could write the content yourself or work with a copywriter in the appropriate marketing niche to populate your site with blogs, landing pages and case studies.

Include things like:

• Pictures from recent jobs
• Detailed case studies about bigger projects you’ve worked on
• Licenses, certifications, and other relevant qualifications
• Positive reviews from happy customers.

If you’re writing blogs (how-tos and other practical content are great for trades sites), include bylines and link to evidence that the author knows what they’re talking about, such as a social media profile where they talk about their involvement in your niche.

This kind of content is great for getting to the top of search results (both local and traditional) and can really help your site stand out to AI, too, as it combs through your content to produce its answers.

Authority

Authority is a measure of how reliable search engines and AI systems consider your content. They want to ensure as much as possible that the suggestions they serve up are accurate and backed up by facts.

There are lots of elements involved in how they evaluate the authority of a site, but the two most important (and easiest to work with) are:

• Backlinks- incoming links from other sites. These act as an endorsement for your content, suggesting to Google and the AIs that it’s reliable enough that other writers want to link to it. Some links are earned naturally through writing great content, and others can be bought as you engage in content marketing.
• Outgoing Links- Links that you place in your content to offer more information on a topic to your readers. These are seen as evidence that you have done your research by the search engines and bots. These have the advantage that you have total control over them, and they’re always free.

Outgoing links should be scattered throughout your content, connecting your site to other trades you regularly work with, licensing boards, and other relevant sites. You can use these links to generate a little authority and share it with the target page.

Backlinks should ideally always be from trusted, high-quality sources wherever possible. As your main focus is on local SEO as a contractor, sources like the local authority licensing board, news sources and blogs based in your city are the most valuable, allowing you to not only ‘borrow’ their authority for your content, but also reinforcing your local credentials.

Picking Backlink Donors for Your Contacting Site

There’s no such thing as a bad link (so long as it’s not a spam site), but some are more valuable to businesses like contractors, builders and other local trades. Unsurprisingly, the highest quality backlinks for local businesses are local and related to your trade.

Reach out to local sites such as:

• Local business directories: find-a-trade sites, local authority lists of approved contractors, and even sites like Yelp help reinforce your locality and prove that you work in the area you’re targeting.
• Partner’s Websites: If you regularly work alongside other contractors like plumbers, roofers or electricians, sharing links can be mutually beneficial. It’s also worth reaching out to manufacturers and suppliers that you have deals with to see if they’ll recommend (and link) you directly.
• Trade Associations: Trade-related links are absolutely invaluable. Proving membership in relevant trade associations strongly signals that you are skilled and trustworthy to customers, search engines and AIs alike.
• Local Press and Blogs: Getting involved in your local community by sponsoring events and working with local journalists can get you noticed in the real world. Ask them to link to your content where possible to carry some of this into your digital marketing.

Content marketing is another great source of backlinks. Reach out to home improvement or industry blogs and offer to write something for them and link back to your own site. This could be a simple how-to guide on basic tasks that homeowners might be able to do on a DIY basis (with a rider that the professionals are always available too), or something like a Top-10 list of home improvements to maximize resale value. This style of marketing can generate a lot of leads directly, and it’s great for your SEO profile too.

Whatever the type of backlink you’re targeting, the general rule is that quality is more important than quantity. That being said, the more backlinks you can get, the better, so long as they’re from reasonably high authority sites.

Backlinks for AI Mentions

Generative AI like ChatGPT and summaries like the ones you see on Google Search results are quickly becoming a major consideration for how we pick our backlinks.

Where it used to be a simple case of “the more the merrier”, now the emphasis should always be on quality and how well each backlink reinforces your authority on the topic in question. This means that trade associations, local developers and other construction-specific sites are absolutely invaluable in helping AIs get an understanding of your business.

How the content that contains your link and the content you’re linking to relate to each other is also much more important when looking for AI mentions of your business.

These semantic links mean that if you’re writing a guest post about building an extension on a home, you should link to a dedicated landing page or blog relating directly to extension building. Likewise, if you’re writing about the process of building a new home, link to content on your site about new builds and so on. These contextual links help AIs determine that your content is worth referencing in their answers.

The very best hosts for your backlinks, if you’re targeting AI recommendations, are sites that the AI in question already references. These will already have been mapped and determined to meet that particular AI’s EEAT criteria. Try running a few relevant questions through your target AI and see which sites you could reach out to and offer a guest post.

Selecting Anchor Text

The highlighted text in a piece of content that shows where a link has been embedded is known as an anchor. The text you choose to highlight sends a signal to search engines and AI crawlers about how relevant your content is to their users. This can have much more impact on your AI and search results than you might expect.

There are various types of anchor texts, and you should avoid overreliance on any one of them, aiming instead for a varied profile. As search and AI algorithms become more sophisticated, penalties for appearing “overoptimized” get harsher and harsher.

Aim for a mixture of:

• Exact matches: Anchors that match a search term exactly. A few of these are fine, but too many will make your content appear like spam to the crawlers and might see your results reduced rather than increased. Aim for less than 10% across your content.
• Partial Matches: Anchors which include an exact match and more content. These read more naturally and target more conversational search terms. These might target searches like “home builders in Detroit” with anchor text along the lines of “Detroit’s award-winning home building firm”.
• LSI: Latent Semantic Indexing means selecting terms that are synonyms rather than matches to a search for your anchors. For example, you might choose the words “builder” or “all trades” rather than “contractor”.
• Naked URLs: Links that aren’t embedded in the general text. You’ll still be able to take advantage of the target’s authority, but these anchors don’t offer any context to AI or search engine crawlers. If you’re talking about building codes, you can use this style of anchor as footnotes to link to the relevant legislation.
• Branded: A branded Anchor is simply selecting a brand name for your link text. These are ideal for when you’re mentioning partners, suppliers, previous clients or any other company that you’ve worked with.

AI pays much less attention to how closely your anchor text matches the wording of a particular query, instead focusing on the semantic relationship between your text and the content of the link. This focus on context means that you should select longer, more descriptive phrases for your anchors.

Picking Keywords for Your Contractor’s Content

Keywords are the signals that tell search engines and AI chatbots that your content lines up with what their users are looking for. To put it simply, keywords are the structure that most of your SEO efforts hang from. These basic units of SEO require a little thought to ensure that your content is capturing traffic from people who are looking to hire you for their projects.

In the past, simply fitting a particular keyword into your text more often than your competitors did was enough. Today, there’s really quite a lot more to it. Around 90% of the sites online get no traffic from Google, so spending some time ensuring that these foundations are in place is more than worth it to ensure that you’re not included in that statistic.

Here’s what you should be thinking about when you’re picking the keywords for your content:

Balancing Volume Vs Competition

The basic aim of all SEO efforts is to bring in more clicks. Clicks equal customers, after all. This means that you want your content showing high up on search engine results pages (SERPs), and the more search queries you rank for, the better. We refer to this metric as “search volume”.

If you manage to find a high-volume and low-competition keyword while researching, target it.

That being said, the highest volume search terms are likely to be the hardest to rank for. All your competitors will be trying to appear at the top of these SERPs, making your job that much harder.

Sometimes these high-volume, high-competition keywords are unavoidable. For example, if you specialize in timber framing, you’re going to have to use the phrase “timber framing” fairly often. This particular phrase will be searched for a lot, but all your competitors will also be competing for that top spot.

However, it might be worth aiming for a lower-volume, but easier to rank for, search term. Though these keywords will show up in fewer searches, a greater chunk of those who are searching for them will find your content. The pie may be smaller, but your slice will be bigger.

Taking our example from above of a timber framer, they might want to put more time and effort into ranking for more specialized terms like “stick framing” or “balloon framing”. These will generally have fewer searches but be much easier to rank for, as there will be less competition.

Ideally, you’re seeking the perfect balance between volume and competition so that you’re not wasting time, effort and money without seeing results.

Use Longtail Keywords

Longtail keywords contain, as the name suggests, longer, more naturalistic phrasing. These are closer to how people actually speak and are invaluable for picking keywords which will show up in AI results, traditional searches and voice assistant questions.

Rather than just saying “Roofing contractor,” you might say something along the lines of “roofing contractor, specializing in natural slate installations” or “Roofing contractor for all your leak repairs”. These would capture searches for queries like:

• roofing contractor, slate roof
• Leaking roof repair
• Slate roof installation
• Roofing contractor
• Roofer

These can be combined with other elements to capture local intent and other elements of your services.

Aim Local

Most of your clients are likely to be within a certain geographical area, so tailoring your keywords to that place makes a lot of sense. You shouldn’t really care if you’re ranking well on the other side of the country, as those searchers are unlikely to hire you.

Picking local keywords, like naming your target cities and regions in your texts, means that search engines can place you more easily. Think along the lines of “Plastering services for the City of Cork”. This covers your location and services in one neat longtail keyword that should appear in “plasterer near me” searches for anyone in Cork.

Tell Them What You Do

It should come as no surprise that your main keywords as a contractor are simply going to be some combination of the services you offer. These are what people are searching for when they find your content, so they should be your main focus.

If there’s more than one way of naming a particular service, it’s well worth mixing and matching between these terms to capture as much traffic from as many different  search terms as possible.

For example, if you are an electrician targeting work installing new outlets, you should target “outlet installation”, “socket fitting” and “installing new plugs” on that particular page. Combine these with your location to localize them, and you’re well on your way to crafting a valuable longtail keyword.

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Don’t Try To Squeeze It All Into One

Every page on your site should serve a particular purpose, and the keywords you target with it should be carefully chosen to match.

Landing pages should be specific to a particular service or small group of services, even if you’re an “all trades” contractor (though you could target the keyword “all trades” itself).

There are 3 reasons for this:

• Readers want clear, concise copy. If they’re looking to hire a contractor, they probably already have a good idea of the work they want done. Each page should be aimed at offering the particular service they’re looking for.
• Search engines penalize “overoptimized” copy. Rather than making you rank for more keywords, you could well end up with the opposite effect and find yourself further down the SERPs for all those keywords.
• You’ll get more relevant traffic. As we said above, your customers are searching for specific tasks. If they find a page that offers to do that task, they’re more likely to follow through and hire you than if they find one that only mentions it in passing.

If you do offer more than one major service, you can list them all with a little explanation on a “services page”, though this will be for people browsing your site rather than search engines or AI.

Semantic Linking

Keywords are bundled together by AI and search engines into broader “topics” through semantic linking. For example, “wall building” and “brick laying” will offer similar results. This is called Latent Semantic Indexing, and it’s worth thinking about while writing your content for a few reasons:

Firstly, your customers will notice if you’re simply repeating the same phrase over and over again. The text will appear unnatural and “clunky” as you struggle to fit it in where it doesn’t quite grammatically work. Both search engines and AIs place a lot of emphasis on natural, human-centered content these days, too.

LSI helps search engines get a better idea of what your content is really about. Content that contains a lot of related terminology is almost certainly about a given topic. A blog that mentions sheetrock, plasterboard and lathe is going to be about putting up internal walls. This means that when a searcher is looking for information on this topic, the search engine can confidently offer it.

Mixing up your keywords with semantically linked phrases and synonyms also helps avoid your site being penalized for “overoptimization”. In the early days of the internet, simply saying the keyword over and over was how you got results, but the search engines soon realised people were gaming their services and put a stop to this by reducing rankings.

Finally, AIs make heavy use of semantic analysis to really understand what their users are asking and craft their answers.

Consider Search Intent

People use the internet for all kinds of reasons, but the two most important from an SEO perspective are arranging services and general information- we call these search intents. With a little thought, we can craft content to capture traffic from both types of searches.

Some searchers might be looking to hire you as soon as possible. These are likely to be mostly made up of “near me” searches. Target landing pages to capture this traffic through longtail keywords which name your service and location. Think “Insulation installs in Caithness”.

Other searchers might be simply looking to see what their options are. They’re likely to be put off by a “hard sell” landing page and much more interested in an informational blog about the topic.

We’ll cover these in more detail in another section, but the basic idea is that they’re great for brand recognition and serve to prove your knowledge to customers, AI and search engines alike. Keywords here might be related to local building codes or traditional building types in your service area.

Picking Keywords for AI

AI and search engines use keywords a little differently from each other. Everything that we’ve already talked about still basically applies, but with AI searches becoming more popular, there are a few extra things to think about.

Firstly, AI can mention you in two different ways.

The first is a direct mention; someone asks ChatGPT something like “Who should I speak to about building my new outbuildings?” and the chatbot directly recommends you.

The second way AI could reference you is as a citation. These are references that the AI uses when constructing a reasonable answer to an informational question. For example, somebody might ask “How do I build domer windows” and the AI might pluck the answer from one of your blogs and provide a link to show its sources.

AI focuses more on the semantic links between words than it does on matching things exactly. This allows it to be more conversational than traditional searches.

Focusing on these semantic links between phrases and answering questions clearly, directly, and honestly are all far more important for earning mentions and citations than stuffing exact match keywords into your content.

How To Write Content for Your Contracting Site

Contactors of all types benefit from 3 main types of content: landing pages, blogs and case studies. All three types have the same EEAT criteria, but each serves a different purpose:

• Blogs: these allow you to explore a topic, offering your potential customers a little more detail. They’re great for building trust and capturing traffic from searchers who are simply exploring their options.
• Landing pages: these are the “hard sell” sections of your site. Their purpose is to turn traffic into calls and bookings.
• Case Studies: showing off your previous work and explaining it in some detail sits somewhere between a landing page and a blog. They’re mostly informational, but you’re definitely suggesting that you could do the same for the reader.

Whatever type of content you’re writing, you should be aiming to build trust quickly with potential customers, search engines and AI chatbots alike. This generally means focusing on answering questions directly.

Blog, Landing Page or Case Study?

Both blogs and landing pages are useful tools for ensuring that when someone searches, it’s your page they find. They both allow you to showcase your knowledge and skills as a contractor, but they target different search intents.

Landing Pages

Each service that you offer should have its own dedicated landing page. These are the directly “salesy” pages that say what you do and what your customers can get from it. If you want to dig in a little deeper, use an internal link to a blog where you discuss the service in a bit more detail (and can share a little of the blog’s authority to boost your SEO efforts).

Having each service on a separate page means you can target your efforts more directly, bringing in more relevant traffic. Someone who wants an extra storey built on their house won’t necessarily want to read content about landscaping, so separating them avoids wasting time with irrelevant traffic.

Include as many details as possible, such as prices (where you can), reviews relating to that work and a detailed description of the service.

Blogs

Blogs are the place to show off your knowledge and skills. They allow you to really explore a topic, establishing your credentials to customers, AIs and search engine crawlers while targeting information-seeking searches.

The ideal content for a contractor’s blog will vary from trade to trade, but generally, things like how-to guides and practical advice on building and construction topics, such as local building codes, will always be useful. Write naturally, as if you were explaining the topic in person, and humans and robots alike will appreciate it.

A good blog that boosts your topical authority can be linked to the relevant landing page, boosting its authority and improving its ranking in SERPs, too.

Case Studies

Case studies let you demonstrate to your customers that you really do know what you’re doing. Mix written content explaining the project with high-quality photos to reassure future clients, AIs and search engines that your work is of the highest quality.

Writing for AI

Writing for AI is a lot more naturalistic than writing purely for search engine prominence. It’s less about trying to squeeze in keywords and preempting what searchers might type into the bar and more about actually taking the time to answer questions directly.

How, what, and why questions are the first things to consider. These are what people are most likely to be asking their preferred chatbots, so aim to answer them as clearly and directly as possible.

Asking the question you’re going to answer in a heading makes your content easy for AI to parse. This could look something like “What to consider when planning an extension to your home?” or “What are the domestic zoning rules in Philadelphia?”.

Once you’ve asked the question, answer it. Use the first couple of lines of each section to give a basic response and then expand as you work your way down. This “inverted pyramid” structure makes the key information easily accessible for AIs when they’re trying to create their answers.

Another thing to think about when writing to earn AI mentions is how you structure your information. There are 3 easy ways to highlight important things for both readers and robots alike:

• Bullet points
• Tables
• Clear headings

As AIs can only really mention 5-8 sources in a response, thinking about your on-page EEAT is just as important as it ever was. While this is generally useful when you’re aiming for mentions from AIs, it’s particularly important for AI search summaries like those at the top of Google results.

Chatbots and AI summaries place a huge emphasis on transparency and expertise, so it’s worth working with someone who has a good track record in your particular sector when crafting new content. Link to their relevant profiles and make it clear that your information is backed up by links to high-authority domains.

Finally, AIs want to ensure the information they’re offering is as up-to-date as it possibly can be. This means that as rules and regulations change, your content needs to be updated alongside them. Likewise, if you earn a new qualification, don’t forget to mention it.

Backend and Technical Considerations

Writing content that AIs will pick up and use isn’t simply a matter of producing some great text. There are a couple of more technical elements that you should put in place that make your site easier for AIs to understand, and therefore increase your chances of getting mentioned.

Schema Markups

Schema Markups are simple codes that allow sites to classify their content and offer extra information to AIs and search engines. These can be configured to include things like your qualifications and certifications, service areas, prices and all kinds of other useful, supplementary information.

There are various families of schemas that could be useful to contractors, the most obvious being HomeAndConstructionBusiness. This lets you highlight your team’s expertise, your service area and various other useful bits of information that might mark your content out as worth offering.

Other schemas that you should think about including in your page’s backend are Service and Review.

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Meta-Titles

When you search for something, the hyperlink that you click on the results page is based on that content's meta-title. These should be short and inviting, describing the content that readers will find should they choose to click on your link.

‍Your meta-title shouldn’t be the same as your H1 header, but it should contain your main keywords. Aim for short, descriptive and concise when writing them for the best results.

Meta-Descriptions

Under your page’s hyperlink on SERPs, there will be a short blurb (called a “snippet”) describing the content of the page. This is generally made up mostly of your page’s meta-description, though it can also be formed from your content or a mixture of the two.

Just like a meta-title, these should be a short description of your content and aim to tempt searchers to click through for a more detailed answer to their questions.

Local SEO For Contractors

Local SEO refers to targeting Maps and “near me” searches. These are usually more “urgent” queries with people looking to make contact and, potentially, book you in to work for them. Targeting these should be a priority for any contractor, regardless of which particular trade you work in.

Businesses, even those that don’t have an office or shopfront, that appear in the top 3 Maps results (the “map pack”) bring in 93% more inquiries than those positioned between 4 and 10. This ranking also plays a massive role in how AIs choose which services to recommend and which get ignored.

Ranking in these localized searches involves a few moving parts, but the general rules are:

Get Google Business Profile Working for You

Google Business Profile is probably your most powerful local SEO tool, and it also plays a considerable role in how AI evaluates your business. They’re basically simple online calling cards, setting out your business name, services, the areas you work in and allowing your customers to leave reviews.

Optimizing them involves:

• Claim and verify your business. This lets Google know you are who you say you are and starts the process.
• Ensure your business name is always consistent. If you’ve listed yourself on directories or other online places, make sure they match your GBP exactly. You don’t want to run the risk of confusing customers, AIs or search engines. We call this NAP (name, address, phone), and it’s the core of all your local SEO efforts.
• Include your main services. These are basically the keywords that will be used to offer up your profile when your potential customers search. Be descriptive and complete, but avoid the urge to be “spammy”.
• Include your service area. If you’re looking for work in a particular city or region, you should specify it here. People don’t want contractors who’re based on the other side of the country.
• Set up direct calling and messaging features. Encouraging people to make contact and start the process of hiring you is the whole point of SEO; make it as pain-free as possible for them.
• Include photos. Your team, van, offices, yard, recent jobs- anything relevant to your business could be useful. Profiles with good quality photos can receive around 520% more contacts than those who neglect this aspect of their GBP.
• Optimize your business description. Include keywords and semantic links, but don’t be tempted to push it too far- being flagged for spam will see your results penalized. You should aim to describe your services in a natural tone.

Dealing With Reviews

One of the best things about Google Business Profile is that it allows your customers to leave reviews. With 96% of all customers regularly making use of these to decide which businesses get their money, it pays to make sure you’re getting them. Search engines and AIs make heavy use of your ratings when deciding if you’re a good contractor to offer, too.

Reach out to happy customers and ask them to review your work. Ask them to describe what you did, as any keywords they mention will be factored into which searches you appear in and how you rank. Google and AIs both use these reviews as relevance signals, so don’t be afraid to ask them to mention the services they’re reviewing by name.

If anyone leaves you a negative review, respond to it politely and professionally. These answers will often be the first thing a potential client sees from you, so manners and conflict resolution skills can go a long way.

Get Listed On Local Directories

Listing your business on local directories, lists of approved trades and find-a-trade sites is a good idea for a few reasons:

• Direct traffic-users of these sites can use them almost like a mini search engine, clicking through directly from the directory page.
• Backlinks-directories and lists of local approved tradesmen provide you with a high-quality, local backlink, increasing your domain authority.
• Reinforcing information-make sure that your business name, phone number, email and all the other relevant contact details match between your site, GBP and other listings. This reinforces your NAP and the areas you work in.

These citations are worth their weight in gold for anyone who’s looking to be recommended by AI or rank in local searches.

Keep Your Details Consistent

When you think about it, making it easy for potential customers to call you and make contact is really what all SEO is about for contractors. Making this as simple and pain-free as possible is absolutely vital.

Your NAP (Name, address and phone) and other contact details should be the exact same across any platform that lists them, including your site, local directories, social media, GBP, and anywhere else they might be mentioned.

Ensuring that they’re always an exact match avoids the risk of AIs, humans or search engines getting confused and serving up the wrong results. If anything changes, make sure you update all your listings accordingly.

Making Use of Maps

While most contactors won’t have a public-facing premises, you can still make great use of Google Maps to boost your local SEO. By defining your service area, you can still rank well in SERPs and Map results from potential customers within that location.

You can even embed a map directly from Google onto your website, sending a very clear signal to customers, AIs and the search engine itself that you’re open for business in that area.

If you do happen to have a shopfront location or offices, use Maps to make it easy for people to find.

Think Mobile

The vast majority of local searches are done on people’s phones- 76% of them, in fact. Not optimzing your site for these users means that they will be much less likely to follow through and actually make contact with you.

Keep things simple, light-weight and clean. Write in short, punchy paragraphs and keep your loading times quick with carefully selected photos. Think about how people will navigate between pages and ensure their journey is simple with clear buttons and menus.

‍Voice search is used by about 46% of mobile searchers. This traffic is best collected via using conversational, longtail keywords. When writing your content, think carefully about how someone who wants to find it might ask a voice assistant or AI chatbot and answer accordingly.

Localize Your Content

Unsurprisingly, local SEO works best when the content itself has been crafted with locality in mind. You should mention your service areas relatively often (without venturing into spam territory).

The nature of your content should also be localized. If your service area happens to contain lots of historic buildings, blogs that talk about the history and problems that come from working on them will be valuable. Likewise, directly addressing local regulations and conditions offers you a chance to address local customers directly while reinforcing your area of operations to search engines and AIs.

While placing yourself via your content is important, it’s equally vital to avoid overstuffing location-based keywords and coming across as spammy. This will stop your content from reading naturally for all 3 of your main audiences: humans, AIs, and search engines and will cost you leads.

Common Local SEO Problems for Contactors

While SEO usually represents the best long-term strategy for digital marketing, it does have one major issue: it takes time. 

While you might see some minor uplift in rankings in the early days of your SEO strategy, real results generally take between 3 and 9 months, or even longer in some cases, to show through. The signals which AI and search engines use to determine that your content is what their users want to see take time to build up, and there are no reliable shortcuts.

This problem is particularly noticeable for newly established contractors or anyone who’s recently changed their website’s domain name. Earning natural backlinks, proving prominence, and building authority is not a particularly quick process.

That being said, SEO is still the best value for money form of digital marketing, bringing in a better return on your investment than pay-per-click options like display ads. This is particularly true for businesses like contractors and tradesmen, where customers are searching with clear intent rather than clicking through on a whim.

The way through this problem is simple: consistency. SEO requires an ongoing effort, constantly refining your offerings to improve your SERP rankings and have AI consistently mention your business. Though it might feel like slow progress, as you build authority, results will often start to snowball.

Conclusion: Why Contractors Should Focus on Local SEO

Businesses with defined service areas, like the vast majority of contractors, should put their digital marketing efforts into local SEO for one simple reason: that’s where your customers will find you.

Reaching the top of the Map Pack and having AIs recommend your services as amongst the best in your area means that when they decide they want to start the project, it’s you that they come to first.