An Essential Local SEO Guide for Contractors to Boost Rankings

There’s a dynamic change clearly seen on the horizon that portrays how people discover small businesses and contractors in today’s age and day.

The digital revolution born out of the fast-paced and affordable internet services has changed the way we use online platforms. Since audiences are becoming more digital-savvy, they have grown a natural aversion to the traditional marketing approach.

Due to this reason, small local businesses like contractors need to adopt digital ways to market their services. Through a local SEO checklist, they can book a digital space for themselves.

However, it isn’t going to happen overnight. The first and foremost step is to implement strategic local SEO optimization practices. Through these best practices, you can build a digital presence for your contracting company and rank higher on Search Engine Result Pages (SERP).

But what do we mean by local SEO for contractors? Let’s find out:

What is Local SEO for Contractors?

Today, bringing new customers is all about being locally discoverable for small contractor businesses. Through a local SEO strategy, you can target and attract more leads and keep the flow of new clients coming in.

Local SEO for contractors is a way to build a local web presence by optimizing your website and other business listings. It considers many on-page, off-page, technical, and behavioral signals to help search engines rank your contractor website and listings higher on localized SERP.

Benefits of Local SEO Optimization for Contractors

Benefits of local SEO optimization include an increase in traffic, more qualified leads, and a boost in conversion rate. Some of the other benefits include:

• Heighten Brand Awareness: One of the greatest benefits of optimizing your business listings and website is to gain a significant rise in your brand awareness. When people start to see your company, they’ll start recognizing you.
• Lower Your Marketing Spends: Marketing is not free and neither is SEO. However, investing in SEO helps you reach a wider audience, get better results, and ultimately reduce costs. The more time you spend on doing SEO, the less you’ll have to pay for acquiring new clients.
• Better Outcome: Great return on investment is something everyone wants for their business. Local SEO for your contracting business may not deliver immediate results, but if things are executed in a strategic manner, it can eventually lead to better outcomes.

Stepwise Local SEO Checklist for Contractors to Boost Their Rankings

Step-1: Add and Claim Your Contractor Listings

Adding and claiming your contractor business listings is one of the crucial SEO aspects that drive local users to your doorstep. Google Business Profile is one of the major platforms to add and verify your contractor listings.

Let’s see how you can add and verify your GBP and other business listings:

• Google Business Profile: Add or claim your listing on GBP and verify it from Google through a postcard, email, phone, or Google Console. Optimize your profile with NAP, categories, open hours, reviews, and images for greater presence.

Here’s an example of optimized GBP:

• Yelp: Yelp is another popular business listing and review platform that makes it easy for small businesses like contractors to connect with new prospects. Here’s an example of an optimized contractor listing on Yelp:

• Now that you have listed your contractor business on Google and Yelp, it’s time to list your business on relevant directories. Start listing your business on relevant platforms such as Ratedpeople, Trustatrader, Yellowpages, Foursquare, etc. which aids in local SEO efforts.

Step-2: Build & Optimize Your Contractor Site for On-Page Factors

As we already mentioned, websites play a major role for success in the digital realm.  Developing a website and optimizing it with on-page SEO factors can help boost your local digital presence.

All small contractor firms may not have the luxury to build their own personalized website. And if you build and optimize it with local SEO, you’ll gain a significant competitive edge over others.

Let’s see what factors you should consider while optimizing your website:

• Keywords: Keywords form an integral part of on-page optimization. Ensure your primary keyword is included in important places like 
  • Title tags
  • Page URL
  • Heading tags
  • Meta description
  • Other relevant places throughout the content.

Keyword format to follow:

[Primary Keyword] + [City/Area] 

E.g. Roofing Contractor in Chicago

• Content: Practice writing original, unique, and high-quality content that’s tailored for users’ needs rather than web crawlers’. If users find it great engaging, it’ll automatically start ranking on top.
• Internal Linking: Linking back to important pages throughout the site will help search engines to understand the most essential pages that need to rank higher.
• Image Optimization: By adding images with proper Alt text would not only help make your page more appealing but also help search engines to understand what the image is trying to say.

Step-3: Implement the Right Technical SEO

Websites with certain technical characteristics get preferential treatment from search engines than the others. Thus, it’s vital to ensure you have implemented the right technical SEO for your contractor website. For the same, you can take help from SEO service providers.

Here are a few things to keep in mind:

• URL & Site Security: Since launching the page experience update, Google considers site security as a ranking factor. So, ensure you have installed an SSL certificate for HTTPS security measures.

An ideal website URL format to follow:

https://examplecontractors.com/keyword-servicearea

• Page Load Speed: Improve your website’s page load speed by using a fast hosting and CDN, compress images to WebP format, and minify or remove unnecessary and unused JS/CSS codes.
• Structured Data: Add structured data markup to your website to help search engines better understand the content on it and rank your web page accordingly. Here’s an example of a post with structured data making it into the top 3.

• Sitemap: An XML sitemap is like a roadmap for search engines to find crawlable and indexable pages on your site. Ensure your contractor website has a sitemap from where Google can index your website’s pages.
• Robot.txt & Crawl Errors: Robot.txt files contain data that restrict search engines from crawling & indexing certain pages like login, checkout, etc. Also, find any crawl errors on your site through Google console and resolve them to keep ranking on SERP.

Step-4: Take Care of Off-Page SEO for Your Contractor Site

Off-page SEO for your contractor site refers to the actions you take outside of your website and business listings that may greatly affect the rankings. Same as on-page SEO, several off-page factors play their part in your website’s SERP ranking.

Let’s take a look at what they are:

• Referring Links: Referring links or backlinks are the most important factors. They help search engines to determine the credibility of your contractor site. Thus, implement a white hat SEO link-building strategy to acquire quality backlinks for your website.
• Citations: Citations are also referring links but from popular review sites and online directories such as Facebook, Apple Maps, BizJournals, among others. Submit your contractor site to quality directories only to improve your website’s rankings.

• Social Shares: Social presence helps improve your brand signals for the web. It’s not only a great way to boost traffic but also helps increase ranking on Google.
• Content Marketing: Content marketing tactics such as guest blogging, infographics, surveys, research, and whitepapers work well and aid your link-building and branding efforts for increasing off-page SEO.

Step-5: Get More Reviews for Your Contractor Listings

Testimonials and reviews from customers not only help build trust for your brand but can also help in achieving higher ranks on Google. They are a sign of reputation and encourage others to choose your contractor business over others.

Reviews with overall positive sentiment are the best way to build an impeccable reputation for your brand. As you can see in the image above, contractors in the local map rankings have overall higher star ratings and a great number of positive reviews from past clients.

Here’s how you can improve your reputation:

• Review Quantity: Try increasing the number of reviews your contractor listing has on Google, Yelp, or others. It greatly impacts users’ choice of a business.
• Review Quality: Another thing about reviews that can highly impact users’ choices is the quality. Ensure your contractor listings get reviews that have high star ratings and overall positive sentiments.
• Review Diversity: Focus not only on getting reviews for your GBP listings but also on others as well. This will ensure your contractor business has a good reputation overall.

• Review History & Recency: If you have a good track record of reviews, a few negative ones won’t affect your rankings. However, when the number of negative reviews starts to increase, get to the root cause and handle them appropriately. Also, ensure your listings keep getting new reviews to sustain the trust factor among your audience.

Step-6: Improve Behavioral Signals for Higher Rankings

Certain behavioral signals help Google to gauge the quality of your site & listings. Even though Google and other search engines may not speak at the volume about behavioral signals being ranking factors, they greatly put emphasis on them while adjusting ranks.

Here are a few behavioral signals to keep in check:

• User Interactions: Interaction signals such as time on the website, page sessions, depth of view, bounce rate, and other local KPIs help Google to be conclusive when ranking your website.
• CTR: Click-through Rate is another behavioral signal search engines consider when ranking websites and business listings on the top.
• Conversions: The search giant also looks at conversion data such as clicks coming from CTA, call, or map direction buttons to determine the ranking for your websites and business listings.

Improve Rankings for Your Local Contractor Business

Search engine optimization to rank locally in your city or neighborhood isn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Thus, it would be great if you could join this digital marketing bandwagon as soon as possible. For contractors, it’s all the more important than ever to capitalize on the local SEO for their business to improve their web presence.

Be it on-page, technical, or off-page optimization, local SEO implementation may require dedication and the eyes of experts. Ronkot is a renowned team of search engine optimization specialists for local and small business owners such as contractors.

If you are interested in learning how we can help you, get in touch with us for the same and get a complimentary hot beverage from us.

Further Reading

A Definitive Guide on Local SEO for Plumbing Companies to Rank Higher for Local Searches

A Complete Guide on Local SEO for Hair & Beauty Salons

A Beginner’s Guide to Optimize Local SEO for HVAC Companies

A Complete Local SEO Guide for Real Estate Agents to Rank Higher on Google

SEO For Non-Profit Organizations: 8 Ways To Increase Online Visibility

An Ultimate Guide for Roofing Companies to Boost Local SEO & Leads