Local SEO for a trade business comes down to two things: telling Google exactly what you do and exactly where you do it, then proving it with a profile people interact with. Most contractor websites fail on both — one Services page listing eight trades, no mention of the towns the trucks drive to, and a Google Business Profile that was claimed once and never touched. Below are ten fixes, in roughly the order we work through them.
1. Set the primary category correctly
Your primary Google Business Profile category does more to decide where you show up in the map pack than anything else on the profile. An electrical contractor that picked "Contractor" instead of "Electrician" is competing in the wrong pool. Pick the category that matches the work you most want to be called for, then add secondary categories for the rest. Do not add categories for work you do not actually sell — they dilute the signal and produce calls you have to turn down.
2. Make the services list match your site
The profile has a services list. Fill it with the same service names that exist as pages on your website, written the same way. If your site has a page called "Furnace Replacement," the profile should say furnace replacement, not "heating work." Matching language between the profile and the site makes it obvious both belong to the same business and both cover the same jobs.
3. Build a page for each service
This is the single biggest structural fix on most trade sites. A page that lists drain cleaning, water heater installation, repiping and sewer line repair as four bullet points cannot rank for any of them. Each service needs its own page: what the work involves, what a typical job looks like, what the customer should expect, and how to reach you. Four pages instead of four bullets. Our website design work usually starts here because everything else depends on it.
4. Build a page for each town
Same logic, different axis. If you dispatch to nine towns, you need pages that say so — a real page per town describing the work you do there, not a footer list of place names. A page written for one town can answer what a person in that town is actually searching. A footer list answers nothing.
5. Write title tags as service plus town
The title tag is the line that appears as the clickable headline in search results. For a service page it should read like the search: the service, the town, the company. Titles that just say "Services | Company Name" throw away the most valuable line on the page. Every service page and every town page needs its own title, written once, deliberately.
6. Make name, address and phone consistent everywhere
Your business name, address and phone number should be byte-for-byte identical on your website, your Google profile, and every directory listing that mentions you. A suite number on one and not the other, or an old tracking number left on a directory from three years ago, creates doubt about which record is real. Pick one format and fix every listing to match it.
7. Ask for a review at job completion
Reviews arrive when you ask at the moment the customer is happiest — the tech is packing up and the problem is solved. A text with a direct link, sent that day, works far better than an email a week later. Build the ask into the job-close step so it is not left to whoever remembers.
8. Post geotagged job photos
Photos taken on real job sites, uploaded to your profile regularly, do two things: they carry location data from where the work happened, and they show a person comparing three companies that yours actually does the work. A roofing company posting a tear-off in progress in a specific neighborhood is more convincing than a stock photo of a clean roof.
9. Link service pages and town pages to each other
Your service pages should link to the towns where you sell that service, and your town pages should link to the services you offer there. This gives search engines a map of how the site fits together and gives a visitor a path from "AC repair" to "AC repair in the town I live in" without going back to the menu.
10. Use Search Console to find terms ranking 4 to 10
Search Console shows the searches your site already appears for and the average position for each. The terms sitting in positions four through ten are the ones worth attention: you are close, and a better title, a clearer opening paragraph, or a dedicated page often moves them. Terms with impressions and no matching page are your next page to write. This is where our SEO work gets its priorities — from what the data says is already close, not from a guess.
Where to start
Do them in order. The profile category and services list take an afternoon and affect the map pack immediately. Service pages and town pages are the real work and take weeks, but nothing else compensates for missing them. Once those exist, Search Console starts producing a queue of specific fixes, and the work becomes maintenance instead of construction.