SEO for home-service contractors.

If you read nothing else: your Google Business Profile matters more than your website for local search. Most contractors have this backwards, because a website is a thing you can look at and a profile is a form you filled in once.

Primary category

The strongest single factor. Use the most specific category available, and check it against the three businesses currently in your map pack. Broad categories feel safer and perform worse. "Roofing contractor" beats "Contractor." "Furnace repair service" reaches people that "HVAC contractor" never will.

Everything else on the profile

Add every applicable secondary category that is genuinely true, up to nine — but do not stuff. Fill in every predefined service item; these now carry real weight. Write the full 750-character description. Set true attributes: licensed, insured, free estimates, veteran-owned where applicable. Real hours, and be open as long as is honestly true, because you rank better while open.

Photos and freshness

Fifteen to twenty real photos of real jobs, refreshed monthly. Real photos beat stock, and stock beats AI-generated, always. A profile that sits idle for a month starts to slip, so the weekly post cadence is doing actual work rather than looking busy.

Seasonal switching

For trades with seasons, switch the primary category when the work switches. HVAC to "furnace repair" in autumn and "AC repair" in spring. Landscaping to snow removal in winter. This is one of the highest-return ten-minute jobs in local SEO and almost nobody does it.

The biggest recent shift in local search is that review recency now outweighs raw review count. A business with 500 reviews collecting seven a week will outrank a business with 5,000 reviews that has had none in three months, because steady velocity signals an active business.

That changes the tactic completely. Stop running review campaigns. Build the ask into the job itself so it happens on every completed job, forever.

Get content, not just stars

Coach customers to mention the service and the town — "they replaced our furnace in Middletown" — and to add a photo. Keyworded, media-rich reviews carry far more weight and feed the AI summaries that increasingly sit above the results.

Reply to everything, for humans

Reply to every review within a day or so. Keep it short and specific. Do not stuff keywords into replies — it has zero ranking impact and reads like a bot to the customers who are the actual audience. Handle negatives offline first, then post a short, calm public reply.

Stay compliant

Ask all customers, never just the happy ones — review gating is against Google's policies and grounds for action. No incentives, no pre-written text, no review kiosks, and do not solicit reviews that name a specific staff member. Service and city only.

The instinct is to build a big site. The better move is a small site where every page targets something a person would actually type before picking up the phone.

Compact, bottom-of-funnel pages win

"Emergency AC repair Hartford" is worth more than "10 tips for summer HVAC maintenance" and has less competition, because everyone chases head-term volume and ignores the searches that convert. Each page needs the service and city in the title, one H1, an answer in the first sentence, and a phone number that cannot be missed. Four to five hundred words is plenty.

Project pages beat city pages

Instead of near-duplicate service-by-city pages that risk being read as doorway pages, build a page per real completed job: "Slate roof repair in Old Saybrook" with before-and-after photos, the problem, what it took, and roughly what it cost. Same local intent, impossible to flag as thin, and it converts better because it is proof rather than assertion. If you can supply photos, this is the best local content format available to a contractor.

Technical basics

Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint under 200ms, Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1. Mobile first, because that is where your customers are. Structured data on every page. None of this ranks you on its own; all of it removes reasons to lose.

Internal linking

Most contractor sites have orphan pages nothing links to. Wire the loop: homepage to service pages, service pages to project pages, project pages back to services, with varied anchor text. Adding internal links to a stuck page is one of the most reliable single-variable wins there is.

Two systems, two sources. Google's AI Overviews cite Business Profiles for local questions, so the profile work above already covers it. ChatGPT and Perplexity do not read your profile at all — they pull from Yelp, trade directories, "best in city" articles and forum threads.

Practically: keep sending most review requests to Google, but route a share to Yelp and your trade's directories. Write answer-first so your pages are quotable. Pursue genuine placements in credible local roundups. And do not mass-generate content to chase it — that trips scaled-content policies and ends badly.

The full AI search guide covers this in depth.