Why your competitor shows up and you don't
It is almost never about who does better work. Plenty of contractors with twenty years in the trade and a wall of five star reviews are invisible on Google, while the guy two towns over with half the experience takes the calls.
The difference is structural. Google ranks pages, not businesses. One page can compete for roughly one thing. If your entire website is a single scrolling page with a nav bar that jumps you down to a services section, Google sees one page, and the one thing it can rank for is your company name.
That is a real problem, because nobody with a dead panel searches for a company name. They search for the problem. Your name only helps you with people who already have it.
What contractor SEO actually consists of
There is a lot of noise in this industry and a lot of invoices that never explain what was bought. Stripped down, SEO for a trade business is four things done consistently.
Service pages
A real page for each thing you do. Panel upgrades, drain cleaning, roof replacement, ductwork. Not bullet points on a homepage. A separate URL, written for the search a homeowner actually types.
Town pages
A page per town in your service area, each one about your trade in that specific place. This is the single biggest structural difference between contractors who rank locally and contractors who do not.
Google Business Profile
Categories, service list, service area, hours, photos, posts, and Q&A kept current. This is what feeds the map pack, and the map pack is where a large share of contractor calls start.
Reviews and citations
Matching name, address, and phone across the directories that matter, plus a steady flow of new reviews. Stale, mismatched listings quietly hold your ranking down.
Pages, not anchors: the part most sites get wrong
This is worth understanding before you pay anyone, because it is where most contractor websites fail without the owner ever knowing.
A lot of designers build a contractor one long page. Click "Services" in the menu and it slides you down the same page. It looks professional. It feels like a real website. But every nav link points to the same URL, so there is exactly one page to rank.
Meanwhile the contractor with /water-heater-replacement-lansdale/ as an actual page has something built to answer a search that a homeowner with a flooded basement is typing at nine at night. That is the whole contest, and it is decided by structure before a word of copy is written.
The same logic applies to your service area. A line that reads "Serving Bucks, Montgomery, and Philadelphia counties" ranks for nothing. Homeowners do not search by county. They search by town, and a page has to exist for the town.
What we do every month
- Build the page structure. One page per service, one per town, each written for a specific search instead of stuffed with keywords.
- Handle the technical layer. Titles, meta descriptions, heading structure, schema markup, internal links, sitemap, page speed, and mobile behavior.
- Run the Google Business Profile. Posts, photos, Q&A, review responses, and accurate categories and services.
- Clean up citations. Matching business details across the directories Google actually reads, so your data stops contradicting itself.
- Publish content. Posts that answer what homeowners ask before they call, which is also what they type into Google.
- Report monthly. Where you rank, what moved, what is next. Plain English, no vanity charts.
What it costs
No custom quotes designed to hide the number. Three plans, published pricing, month to month.
- Starter, $497/mo plus a one-time $1,500 build. A 5 page site, Google Business Profile setup, citation cleanup, one blog post a month, hosting, and a monthly report. Built for solo operators and small crews getting online properly for the first time.
- Growth, $997/mo plus a one-time $3,000 build. A 10 page site, wider keyword targeting, full Google Business Profile management, four posts a month, social on two platforms, and a monthly strategy call. For shops ready to own their area.
- Premium, $1,997/mo plus a one-time $5,000 build. Up to 20 pages, multi-town targeting, Google Ads management, eight posts a month, social on three platforms, and bi-weekly calls.
If a monthly plan is more than you want to take on right now, the $499 one-page website is a reasonable first move, and every dollar of it credits toward a plan's build fee later. You cannot make a wrong first step.
How it starts
- Free audit. We look at what you rank for now, what your Google Business Profile is missing, and what the contractors outranking you are doing differently. You get the findings whether or not you hire us.
- Pick the towns and services. Not every town, just the ones you actually drive to and where the work is worth the trip. Targeting towns you rarely serve produces leads you have to turn down.
- Build. The site goes up in pages: services first, towns second, supporting content after.
- Run it. Profile management, citations, reviews, and content, month after month, with a report that tells you what moved.
Trades we work with
Electricians, plumbers, HVAC contractors, roofers, general contractors, carpenters, painters, remodelers, concrete, landscaping, and the rest. If your customers are homeowners or property managers within driving distance, this is the marketing that pays back hardest per dollar.
We have a dedicated page for SEO for electricians, since that is the trade we work in ourselves.
It is worth the money soonest if you are in one of these spots:
- Strong reviews, but no website, or one that has not been touched since 2015.
- All your work comes from word of mouth and it has gone flat.
- You are buying shared leads and competing on price against three guys who got the same call.
- You rank for your business name and nothing else.
Honest expectations
SEO is not fast. Google Business Profile work can move in two to four weeks. New pages generally take three to six months to settle, because they have to be crawled, indexed, and then earn position against pages with a head start.
What you get for that patience is an asset you own. Cancel a lead subscription and the leads stop that afternoon. Stop paying for SEO and your pages keep ranking. They decay slowly rather than switching off.
We do not guarantee rankings, because nobody can and anyone who does is lying to you. What we commit to is the work: the pages get built, the profile gets managed, the report shows up.
Why a tradesman instead of an agency
Marketing agencies write contractor websites by handing a template to a copywriter who has never been in a crawl space. The result reads like a brochure and misses the words homeowners actually use.
This is run by a licensed electrician who works in the field. That means service pages get written by someone who knows the difference between a service upgrade and a heavy up, knows which jobs are worth chasing and which ones waste a truck roll, and knows what a homeowner means when they say the lights dim when the dryer starts.
It also means no account manager layer, no office, and no ad budget priced into your invoice.
Common questions
How much does SEO cost for a contractor?
Plans run $497, $997, or $1,997 a month, each with a one-time build fee of $1,500, $3,000, or $5,000. Month to month, no contract. Most solo operators start on Starter. Shops running several trucks across a wider area usually need Growth to cover the town count.
How long does contractor SEO take to work?
Google Business Profile work can show movement in two to four weeks. Service and town pages usually take three to six months. Anyone promising page one in thirty days is selling something they cannot deliver.
Is SEO better than Angi or HomeAdvisor?
They solve different problems. A lead platform sells the same lead to several contractors, so you end up competing on price with people who got the identical call. SEO builds an asset that sends leads only to you. The tradeoff is speed. The platform produces calls this week. SEO produces them in a few months and then keeps producing them. The math on shared leads is worth reading before you renew.
Do I need a website before I can do SEO?
Yes, and it has to be built as separate pages rather than one long scroll. Every plan includes the build for that reason. If you already have a site we will tell you honestly whether it is worth keeping or worth replacing.
Am I locked into a contract?
No. Month to month. You own your website, your domain, and your Google Business Profile outright. If you leave, the work stays with you.
Who actually does the work?
A licensed electrician who works in the field and builds these sites. Not an account manager reading a script, not an offshore content team.
Where we work
We work with contractors across southeastern Pennsylvania, South Jersey, and Delaware, plus remote clients nationwide. County pages are live for Bucks County, PA, with more rolling out.
Related reading: local SEO for contractors, contractor website design, and why your business is not showing up on Google.
Start with the audit
Before you spend a dollar, find out where you stand. We will show you what you rank for, what your profile is missing, and what the contractors above you are doing that you are not. It costs nothing and there is no obligation attached to it.