Contractors SEO, compared on what providers publish

Agencies with a verified published price

How to buy contractor SEO that pays for itself

1. Work out your cost per job before you shop. Take your average job value, your close rate from enquiry and your target margin, and you have the maximum you can pay per booked job. Every proposal then becomes arithmetic instead of a judgement call, and an expensive retainer with good conversion frequently beats a cheap one without it.
2. Insist on real service and area pages. One page per service you want calls for, and one per town you genuinely serve, written with actual local detail. Generated town pages with a swapped place name are the standard cheap deliverable in this market and they are thin content in the eyes of a search engine and a customer alike.
3. Get the tracking honest before month one. Call tracking with recording, a defined lead definition, and attribution that separates the search enquiry from the repeat customer who always calls. Without it, a contractor retainer is judged on gut feel in a business where the phone rings for a dozen reasons.
4. Ask how the provider handles seasonality. Demand for most trades swings hard by season, so month over month reporting misleads in both directions. Ask how a candidate reports against the same period last year, and how content and paid budget shift ahead of your busy period rather than during it.

What contractor SEO providers publish

Our index records what each agency states on its own site, with the date we checked it, rather than what a survey reports. Home services is one of the more transparent agency markets on price, because providers compete for busy owners who will not sit through a discovery call to learn a number. That is genuinely useful for a buyer, with one caveat: published packages in this market are frequently priced on a volume model where the same template is deployed across many clients, which is why the low end of the range exists at all.

Use the published figures to establish the market rate for your scope, then ask each candidate the same two questions: what the minimum engagement is, and what proportion of the monthly fee is your own custom work rather than a shared platform or template. The answers explain most of the price spread in this category, and they also predict whether the pages you get will read like your business or like a directory listing with your logo on it.

What the work is, and what it is not

Three layers do nearly all the work. The profile layer covers your business listing, categories, service area and reviews, and it is what decides whether you appear in the map results that carry most of the calls. The site layer is service and area pages that a homeowner would actually read, plus the local business structured data that Google publishes guidance for, which hands search engines your hours, address and service area in a form they can read without guessing. The reputation layer is a steady, genuine review process, which in home services is more predictive of conversion than position.

What the work is not is a monthly link quantity with no explanation of where the links come from, or a fake address in a town you do not operate from, which risks your profile rather than the vendor's. It also is not a guaranteed ranking. Google states in its buyer guidance that nobody can guarantee a top position, so a guarantee in a contractor proposal is a promise about something the vendor does not control, usually attached to a term nobody searches.

Questions people actually ask

How many town pages should I have?

As many as you genuinely serve and can write about with real detail, and no more. A page that names local landmarks, typical property types and work you have actually done there earns its place. A page identical to twenty others with the town name swapped is thin content, and a stack of them can drag down the pages that were working.

Is search better than paid ads for a contractor?

They answer different needs. Paid delivers calls this week and stops when you stop paying, which suits emergency trades and seasonal pushes. Search compounds and lowers your cost per job over time, which suits planned work like remodeling and replacement. Most established contractors run both and shift the mix by season and by capacity.

How long before it pays back?

Profile and review work can move map visibility within weeks. Competitive service terms in a dense metro take longer, and a competitor with a decade of reviews is not overtaken in a quarter. Ask a candidate which of your target searches are winnable this year and which are a multi year project, then hold the reporting to that split.

What should I refuse to agree to?

A website or business profile owned by the vendor, call tracking numbers registered to the vendor, guaranteed rankings, purchased reviews, and any address you do not operate from. Each of them transfers an asset or a risk to you while leaving control with somebody else, and none of them is necessary to do the work well.

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