Contractor SEO: What You Need, What It Costs, What's Already In Your Site
Contractor SEO is two jobs sold under one name. The first is structural: service pages, city pages, correct titles and headings, schema markup, and a fast site, all decided when your website is built. The second is ongoing: link building, content campaigns, and review velocity, run month after month by an agency. The first is construction and should come with the building. The second is marketing, and only some contractors need to buy it.
The on-page half: an audit you can run today
You can audit the structural half of contractor SEO in ten minutes without paying anyone. Pull up your own website and check:
- One page per service you sell. A remodeler offering kitchens, bathrooms, and additions needs three pages, because those are three different searches.
- One page per town you work in. The homeowner one suburb over searches with their own town's name, and a page that names that town is what shows up for it.
- Titles that match the search. The kitchen remodeling page for Frisco should say "kitchen remodeling in Frisco" in its title, its H1, and its first sentence.
- Schema markup telling Google you are a local business with a service area, hours, and reviews.
- Speed on a phone connection, because that is where local searches happen.
- Agreement with your Google Business Profile on name, number, services, and service area.
Thryv's contractor SEO guide walks the same ground in more depth. The checklist is public knowledge, not an agency secret; what varies is whether your site was built to it.
What SEO for contractors costs
Contractor SEO pricing splits by who does the work:
| Route | Typical cost | What you are paying for |
|---|---|---|
| Do it yourself | Free, plus your evenings | Profile upkeep, review asks, writing service and city pages |
| Built into the website | Part of the site bill ($75/mo here) | The structural checklist above, done at build time |
| Local SEO agency | Hundreds to thousands per month | Link building, content, reporting, campaign management |
Agency quotes vary wildly because they are priced on your market, not a rate card. The trade pages below carry real numbers: painter-focused agencies advertising from $499 a month, a plumber quoted $3,500 a month for local SEO. If you decide you need an agency, FirstPageSage's list of contractor SEO agencies is a reasonable place to start shopping; expect custom quotes everywhere.
Can you do contractor SEO yourself?
Yes, and for most contractors outside crowded metros the do-it-yourself half is the half that matters. Keep your Google Business Profile complete and current, ask for a review after every job and answer the ones you get, post photos of finished work, and make sure the website checklist above is true. What you cannot easily do yourself is the grind: earning links, publishing content against funded marketing departments, and tracking a competitive metro month over month. That is the part worth paying for, if and when your market demands it.
Contractor SEO by trade
The trade changes the searches, so we wrote the specifics per trade: plumbing SEO is shaped by emergency intent, landscaping SEO by seasons, painting contractor SEO by job types, and pest control SEO and HVAC website SEO by their own service patterns. If you are currently trying to hire a web designer and an SEO as two separate vendors, read SEO website design for small business first; it argues they were never two purchases.
What every site we build ships with
Every website we generate has the structural checklist done by default: service pages, city pages, matching titles and headings, schema, fast plain code, and lead capture, all generated from your Google Business Profile. That is SEO included at $75/mo, not a retainer. What a finished site looks like is on the contractor website design page.
Every contractor SEO proposal I have read spends half its line items rebuilding the website correctly and calls it optimization. Buy the building built right, then decide whether you need the marketing.
We will not promise you rankings, and you should walk away from anyone who does. Structure makes you eligible to rank; your reviews, your competitors, and your market decide the rest.
FAQ
What is an SEO contractor?
An SEO contractor is a freelancer you hire to do SEO work, which is the other meaning of this phrase. This page covers the reverse: SEO for contracting businesses, meaning what a general contractor, remodeler, or trade company needs on its website and Google Business Profile to show up in local search.
Can I do SEO by myself?
Yes. The on-page half is a checklist (service pages, city pages, correct titles, schema, speed, a complete Google Business Profile), and the highest-value ongoing habits (asking for reviews, replying to them, posting job photos) cost time, not money. Agencies earn their fee on the off-page fight in competitive markets, not on the basics.
What is the 80/20 rule of SEO?
The 80/20 rule of SEO is the observation that a small share of the work produces most of the result. For a contractor that share is specific: a complete Google Business Profile, one page per service and per city, and a steady stream of reviews. Do those before anything clever.