For contractors who want the map pack
Local SEO for contractors who want the map pack, not a report
When a homeowner searches for your trade plus their town, three companies get the map, the stars, and the Call button. This is the monthly work that puts you in that three, and keeps you there.
- Roofing, HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and restoration companies that work a defined service area
- Owners who rank at their own address and vanish two towns over
- Companies paying a monthly SEO fee and unable to say what the work is
- Anyone whose Google Business Profile was set up once and never touched again
What ships with every build
Google Business Profile, managed
Category, services, hours, service area, and photos of real work kept current every month. Name, address, and phone identical to the site. This is the asset that puts you in the map pack.
A page per service and per town
New service and city pages added as you grow, written with local detail rather than a town name swapped into a template. This is what the organic results have to match against.
Reviews asked for and answered
A review request the day the job closes and a reply to every review within a day. Count and recency both feed prominence, and both are habits.
Citations made consistent
The directories that list you, checked and corrected so every one agrees on your name, address, and phone.
AI visibility tested monthly
The buyer prompts a homeowner would ask, run across ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, with the fixes that get your site cited. Ranking on Google and being named by an assistant are different problems.
A one-page monthly report
Calls, form fills, profile views, and the towns you rank in, in plain numbers. What moved, what did not, and what changes next month.
Local SEO for contractors is not a report. It is a short list of jobs, done every month, that decides whether your company shows up when someone in your service area searches for the thing you do. The list is the same in every trade we work with, and most of it is undone in most shops.
This page is what that work is, what it costs, and how you can tell whether anyone is doing it.
The three places a contractor can show up
Search your trade and a town name and Google shows three different things on one screen. Each one is fed by different inputs, and a company can win one while being invisible in the other two.
| Where | What the homeowner sees | What puts you there |
|---|---|---|
| The map pack | Three businesses with stars, a map, and a Call button | Your Google Business Profile: the right category, distance, review count, and how complete it is |
| The organic results | The blue links under the map | A page on your site that matches the service and the town, loads fast, and Google can read |
| AI answers | The paragraph at the top, or the ChatGPT answer that names three companies | Both of the above, plus plain answers on your pages an assistant can quote |
Google's own explanation of local ranking names three factors for the map pack: relevance, distance, and prominence. You cannot buy a better map position, and Google says so on that page. What you can do is feed each of the three, in the order they pay off.
What local SEO for contractors actually involves
1. The Google Business Profile, built out and kept current
For a contractor who drives to the customer, the profile is more of the game than the website. It sits above the organic results and gets the tap from anyone on a phone. In the shops we audit it is the asset most often half-done: the wrong primary category, no services listed, no photos of real work, hours that say closed on Saturday when the crew is out.
The work: the right category and every relevant secondary, every service listed with a description, your real service area, photos of your crews and finished jobs added every month, and a post when there is something worth posting. Name, address, and phone identical to the site, to the letter.
2. A page per service and a page per town
This is the structural fix, and it is the one that changes where you show up. The organic results match a search against a page. If the search is "water heater replacement Tomball" and your site has one Services page and a footer listing twenty towns, there is nothing to match. Six services in nine towns needs a site built like a grid, not a brochure.
Every service you want work from gets a real page. Every town you want work in gets a real page with local content on it: jobs you did there, the neighborhoods you actually cover, a review from a customer in that town. Not a search-and-replace of the town name. Google has been ignoring those for years.
3. The on-page basics, done once and checked monthly
Titles that say the service and the town. A tappable phone number on the first screen. Structured data that tells Google and the AI assistants what you do, where, and what your customers say. Pages that load fast on a phone on a cell connection. None of this is clever. All of it is measurable, and the free audit checks it.
4. Reviews, asked for every time and answered every time
Review count and recency are part of prominence. A profile with 40 reviews and one from last week beats a profile with 60 reviews and none since spring. The fix is a habit, not a campaign: a text with your review link the day the job closes, and a reply to every review, good or bad, within a day. How to get more Google reviews as a contractor has the exact wording that works.
5. Citations, cleaned up and consistent
The directories that list contractors matter less than they used to and still matter. What matters most is that every listing agrees: same name, same address, same phone. A shop that moved three years ago and still has the old address on half the web is telling Google it is two businesses.
How to tell if your current SEO company is doing any of this
Open your Google Business Profile and look at the date of the last photo. Search your trade plus a town you want work in, from your phone, and see whether you are in the map. Ask for the list of pages added in the last 90 days. If the answers are last year, no, and none, you are paying for a report.
What it costs
Local SEO is monthly work, so it is sold monthly. It is also useless on a site that cannot hold a page per service and per town, which is why the one-time builds come first when the site you have is the problem.
- Managed Marketing, $349 a month, 6-month minimum. The site, hosting, and upkeep, plus local SEO and your Google Business Profile managed monthly, AI visibility tested monthly, and new service and city pages added at up to two a month. The domain, the site, and every lead stay yours.
- Growth Partner, from $975 a month, 3-month minimum. For a site we built or host: ongoing work to climb and hold the local rankings, your profile and reviews answered and managed, new pages as you grow, and a monthly report in plain numbers. Paid ads managed for an extra $500 a month or 15% of spend, only once the site earns them.
- Website + Lead Engine, from $6,500, one time. When the site is the problem: the full build with a page per service and per city, your Google Business Profile built out so Maps has a complete listing, and call and form tracking in your name, then 30 days of tuning.
For what the monthly number buys at each tier across the industry, how much SEO costs for a contractor has the breakdown. Trade-specific versions of this work are in the roofing SEO guide and the contractor SEO guide.
What you get each month
A one-page report in plain numbers: calls, form fills, profile views, the towns you rank in and where you moved. Not a dashboard with forty metrics. If a number did not move, the report says why and what changes next month.
And the ownership terms do not change because the billing is monthly. The domain is registered to you, the site is yours, the profile is in your Google account, and the leads go to your phone. Leave and we migrate the site to any host you pick, free.
If you want to know where you stand first, run the free audit on the site you have now. Or send a question and get a straight answer about whether local SEO is your problem or something cheaper is.
Questions people ask
What is local SEO for contractors?
Local SEO for contractors is the ongoing work that makes a contracting company show up when someone in its service area searches for its trade, especially in the Google map pack. It has five parts: a complete and current Google Business Profile, a page on the website for each service and each town served, correct on-page basics like titles and structured data, a steady flow of Google reviews with replies, and consistent name, address, and phone details across directories. It is monthly work rather than a one-time setup because reviews, photos, and pages have to keep arriving.
How much does local SEO cost for a contractor?
Riptide Growth publishes its prices. Managed Marketing is $349 a month on a 6-month minimum and includes the site, hosting, local SEO, Google Business Profile management, monthly AI visibility testing, and up to two new service or city pages a month. Growth Partner starts at $975 a month on a 3-month minimum for ongoing ranking work, reviews, new pages, and a monthly report on a site Riptide Growth built or hosts. If the existing site cannot hold service and city pages, the Website + Lead Engine build from $6,500 comes first and includes the Google Business Profile buildout.
How long does local SEO take to work for a contractor?
Changes to a Google Business Profile, such as the correct category and new photos, can move map pack visibility within a few weeks. New service and city pages typically take two to four months to rank for the terms they target, depending on how competitive the town is and how many other companies have done the same work. Reviews compound over time. A fair check-in is 90 days for early movement and six months for a clear before-and-after, which is why the managed plan carries a six-month minimum.
Do I need a new website for local SEO to work?
Not always. If the current site can hold a separate page for each service and each town, loads fast on a phone, and can be edited, local SEO can run on it. If it is a single-page template, a rented site the vendor controls, or a builder that cannot add pages, the structural part of local SEO has nowhere to live and a rebuild comes first. A free 31-point audit will tell you which situation you are in.
Why does my contractor business rank in one town but not the next one over?
Google's map pack ranks on relevance, distance, and prominence. Distance is measured from the searcher to your listed address, so a company naturally ranks best near its own shop and fades a few miles out. The way to rank in a town where you have no address is a real page on your site for that town, with local jobs, local reviews, and the neighborhoods you cover, plus a Google Business Profile whose service area includes it. A list of towns in the footer does not do this.
Is local SEO different from getting recommended by ChatGPT or Google's AI answer?
They overlap but they are not the same. AI assistants read the same signals local SEO builds, including the Google Business Profile, reviews, and service pages, but they also depend on plain-language answers on the site that an assistant can quote, and on structured data that states what the company does and where. In an August 2026 test of 13 roofing companies, 12 never got their own website linked in any AI answer, including companies that ranked well on Google. Riptide Growth tests AI visibility monthly as part of the managed plan.
Related reading
Local SEO
Roofing Company Not Showing Up on Google?
There are three different things people call "Google," you can be invisible in one and fine in another, and the fixes are not the same.
Reviews
More Google Reviews for Contractors
Reviews are the hinge in every guide on this site, so here is the whole system: the link, the ask, the timing, the reply, the rules, and why the count matters for ranking.
Local SEO
Roofing SEO: The Work, in Order
Roofing SEO is nine jobs done in a fixed order. Here is the whole list, what each one costs, and the parts you should never pay for.
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