TRADELOCKAI
Checklist
The contractor SEO checklist.
34 things to check, grouped by impact. Work top to bottom — the order is the point. No email required, no gated download.
What should be on a contractor SEO checklist?
A contractor SEO checklist should cover four areas in this order: Google Business Profile completeness and category accuracy, review generation and response, website technical health and high-intent service pages, then tracking and AI visibility. Profile work comes first because primary category is the strongest local ranking factor and costs nothing to fix.
Google Business Profile (do this first)
- Primary category is the most specific option for your main service
- Primary category checked against the three businesses in your map pack
- All genuinely relevant secondary categories added (up to 9)
- Every predefined service item filled in
- Full 750-character description written
- All true attributes set — licensed, insured, free estimates
- Hours accurate, including holiday hours
- 15–20 real job photos uploaded
- Five Q&As seeded from a personal account
- Map pin verified in the correct location
- No duplicate profiles for your business
Reviews
- A review request goes out on every completed job, automatically
- Every review replied to within 24–48 hours
- Replies written for humans, not stuffed with keywords
- Negative reviews handled offline before a public reply
- Customers coached to mention the service and the town
- A share of requests routed to Yelp and trade directories
- No gating, no incentives, no pre-written review text
Website
- One page per core service, with the city in the title tag
- Exactly one H1 per page
- An answer in the first sentence, before any preamble
- Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds on mobile
- Interaction to Next Paint under 200ms
- Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1
- LocalBusiness or trade-specific structured data on every page
- Phone number tappable and visible without scrolling
- No orphan pages — everything linked from somewhere relevant
- Project pages built from real completed jobs with photos
Tracking and AI
- GA4 installed with conversion events on every form
- Search Console verified and monitored
- Call tracking enabled on the Google Business Profile
- Name, address and phone consistent on key citation sources
- Listed and reviewed on the directories your trade's customers use
- Category prompts checked monthly across ChatGPT, Perplexity and AI Overviews
Doing it yourself?
Genuinely, go ahead. The first two sections are most of the value and cost nothing but time. If you work through the profile and review sections properly you will be ahead of most of your competitors, and we would rather that than sell you something you did not need.
What people usually find is that the checklist is easy and the cadence is hard — weekly posts and review requests on every job, for months, while you are running a business. That is the part that breaks, and it is the actual reason contractors hire this out.
If you want to know which items you are currently failing, the free audit checks all of them and tells you.
Keep reading
Ready to Start?
Want to know which of these you are failing?
We run the full audit on your site and Google Business Profile, then send you the PDF within 24 hours. No call required to get it.
- Technical SEO score with the exact failures listed
- Google Business Profile completeness + category check
- Who currently holds the three map-pack spots in your city
- Whether AI assistants can read your business at all