SEO service for contractors, compared on evidence

Agencies with a verified published price

How to shortlist an SEO agency for a contracting business

1. Write down your true service radius and your best jobs. Name the towns you will genuinely drive to and the two or three job types with the best margin. Almost every wasted dollar in contractor search work comes from ranking for the wrong geography or the wrong job, and both are prevented in one page written before any agency is contacted.
2. Check the business profile and listings before buying content. Correct categories, real service area, hours that match reality, photographs of your own finished work, and consistent details across listings. This is cheap, finite and skipped constantly. Any proposal that jumps straight to a monthly content package without auditing this is selling volume rather than results.
3. Ask for the disclosed minimum engagement in writing. The smallest retainer a firm will accept and the shortest term it will sign will remove more names from your list than anything else, and each takes one email to answer. Treat a published starting price as the floor for the narrowest scope, never as a forecast of your programme cost.
4. Fix call handling before you increase call volume. Decide who answers during working hours, what happens to missed calls, and how fast a quote request gets a reply. Buying more enquiries into a system that loses half of them converts a marketing budget into voicemail, and it is the single most common reason a technically sound campaign looks like a failure.

What contractor SEO agencies publish, and what they hold back

Our index records what each firm states on its own website, with the date we checked it, rather than what a badge or a directory profile claims. Agencies selling to trades publish starting prices more often than most categories, because price is how they compete against national franchise style pitches aimed at the same buyers. That makes this one of the easier markets to compare on paper, and it means a firm that refuses to indicate any range should be asked directly why, and what its smallest current client pays.

Read a published figure as the floor for one location and a narrow service set. Multi location contractors, or those competing in a large metro against established players, will pay well above it. The value of the published number is not that it predicts your bill, it is that it gives you a reference point to hold up against a quote that arrives with no explanation of how it was calculated.

What the work should actually contain

A page for each job you want more of, written with real specifics: what the work involves, what drives the cost, photographs of jobs you did, and the areas you cover. A generic services page competes for nothing. Alongside that, the local layer: an accurate business profile, consistent listings, and correct markup. Google's documentation on local business structured data sets out the properties available, including address, opening hours and areas served, and this is the sort of unglamorous item that separates an agency doing the job from one producing blog posts.

Then reviews, gathered honestly and continuously, because they decide who gets the call among the companies a homeowner is looking at. The FTC's rule on consumer reviews and testimonials prohibits fake and misleading reviews and undisclosed insider reviews, and the exposure sits with your business rather than with the vendor who suggested it, so an agency offering to generate reviews should be removed from the list rather than negotiated with.

Finally the measurement layer: call tracking that identifies the source of each call, a clear definition of what counts as a lead, and analytics accounts in your name. Without these you cannot tell a good campaign from a busy one.

How to judge whether it is working

Seasonality makes month on month comparisons close to meaningless for most trades, so agree at the start that year on year is the real comparison and that leading indicators carry the first few months. Those indicators are pages shipped, indexation, impressions on target queries, and calls by source. If none has moved by month four, the usual cause is that very little has been published, which is a conversation to have before a renewal rather than after it.

Watch quality as well as quantity. An agency that doubles enquiries while halving the share that are jobs you actually want has made its report better and your week worse. Listen to a sample of call recordings monthly. In practice that is where the truth of a contractor campaign lives: whether the calls are for the work you make money on, from the towns you actually serve.

Questions people actually ask

How long before contractor SEO produces booked jobs?

Usually months rather than weeks, and the first visible signs are impressions and rankings rather than calls. Emergency trades sometimes see movement faster because the queries are less contested and the intent is immediate. Track the leading indicators from month one so a stalled programme is caught early instead of at renewal.

Do we need pages for every town we serve?

Only where you genuinely work and can say something specific about doing so. Pages that swap a place name into otherwise identical text help nobody and risk being treated as thin content. Where you have a real yard or crew in a town, give that page real substance and mark up the location properly.

Should we run ads at the same time?

Often yes, because search work is slow and ads buy visibility while it builds. Keep the budgets and the reporting separate so you can see what each is producing, tighten location targeting to your actual radius, and point ads at the specific job page rather than the homepage. Bundle them and you will never know which one is carrying the result.

What if we mostly do commercial rather than residential work?

The channel mix changes considerably. Commercial work is won through bid lists, relationships and past performance, and search plays a supporting role: being credible when someone checks you out, being found for capability queries, and helping with recruitment. An agency that pitches residential lead generation for a commercial pipeline has not understood the business.

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