The Contractor's Local SEO Checklist

This is in priority order. If you only get through the first section, you'll still be ahead of most of your competition.

Do these first

• Claim and fully verify your Google Business Profile
• Set the most specific primary category available for your trade
• Add every service with a real two-to-three sentence description
• Set service areas to the towns you genuinely serve
• Upload at least twenty real photos of your work
• Start asking every customer for a review, in person, at job completion
• Make your phone number tappable on every page of your website

Website foundation

• One dedicated page per service you sell
• A location page for each significant town in your service area
• Unique title and meta description on every page
• One H1 per page containing the service and the location
• Load time under two seconds on mobile
• Business name, address, and phone in the footer of every page
• LocalBusiness schema markup
• An SSL certificate — no browser warnings, ever

Citations and consistency

• Identical name, address, and phone everywhere — down to 'Street' versus 'St.'
• Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, Yelp, and Facebook claimed
• Trade-specific directories relevant to your work
• Chamber of commerce and local business associations
• Clean up any duplicate or outdated listings you find

Ongoing, every month

• One Google Post per week
• Two or three new photos
• Respond to every review within a couple of days
• One piece of content answering a real customer question
• Check that hours, services, and contact details are still accurate

Track these

• Google Business Profile views, calls, and direction requests
• Keyword positions for your top five service-plus-town phrases
• Website visitors and where they came from
• Form submissions and phone calls from the site

Nothing on this list is complicated. All of it takes consistency, which is the actual scarce resource.