SEO for Home Service Businesses

Your SEO person sends over the monthly report. Traffic is up 40%. Rankings improved for six keywords.

You look at the schedule and booked jobs are flat. Sound familiar?

That disconnect is common across home services, and it has two causes. Sometimes your SEO strategy is too generic to attract the right searches. Sometimes the traffic is real but your site fails to convert visitors into calls and bookings. Both problems have fixes.

What local SEO actually means for contractors

46% of all Google searches have local intent, according to GoGulf and Moz data. When a homeowner types “AC repair near me” or “plumber in [city name],” Google serves results from a very specific pool of local businesses.

Local SEO for contractors comes down to three things: your Google Business Profile, your service pages, and your city-specific landing pages. Each one serves a different function in how Google decides to show your business.

Your Google Business Profile determines whether you appear on the map. Your service pages tell Google (and homeowners) exactly what you do. Your city pages tell Google where you do it.

Skip any one of those three and you leave gaps that competitors fill.

The local 3-pack and why it matters

When someone searches for a home service in their area, Google shows a map with three businesses at the top. That’s the local 3-pack, and it dominates the page.

Contractors ranking in the local 3-pack get 44% of all clicks for that search, according to Moz CTR studies. Everyone below the fold splits the remaining scraps.

76% of people who search “near me” visit a business within 24 hours, and 28% of those searches result in a purchase, per Google and Think with Google data. These are buyers with a problem right now, and they’re choosing from whichever three businesses Google puts in front of them.

According to Whitespark’s 2023 Local Search Ranking Factors survey, Google Business Profile signals account for roughly 32% of local pack ranking weight. That makes your GBP the single biggest ranking factor you directly control.

BrightLocal reports that complete GBP profiles get 42% more direction requests and 35% more website clicks than incomplete ones. The pattern that SEO professionals consistently document: contractors who commit to weekly GBP posts, regular photo uploads, and responding to every review within 24 hours typically see measurable local pack movement within 60-90 days.

Podium data shows that 24-hour review response times correlate with 35% higher conversion rates. No new backlinks, no website redesign. Just consistent GBP work produces real movement.

The local SEO checklist that actually moves the needle

You can read about SEO theory forever. What follows are the five steps that produce measurable results for contractors, roughly in order of impact.

Step 1: Lock down your Google Business Profile

Your GBP is the foundation. Complete every single field. Add your service categories (primary and secondary).

Upload job photos weekly, not stock images. Respond to every review, positive and negative, within 24 hours.

Businesses with 40+ reviews earn 45% more clicks from local search, according to BrightLocal data. Review count and recency are both ranking signals and trust signals. A profile with 200 reviews and a 4.7 rating will outperform a profile with 12 reviews and a 5.0 rating every time.

Post Google Business updates at least once a week. These posts signal to Google that your business is active, and they give homeowners more reasons to click. Show before-and-after photos, highlight seasonal services, or share a completed project.

For a deeper breakdown, read our full Google Business Profile optimization guide.

Step 2: Build service + city landing pages

A single “/services” page does almost nothing for local search. Google ranks specific pages for specific queries.

If you serve six cities and offer four core services, you need pages like “Furnace Repair in Naperville” and “Drain Cleaning in Aurora,” not a generic list of everything you do. Each page should include the service name, the city name, a description of what you do in that area, and a clear way to contact you.

SEO agencies working with contractors consistently report that building dedicated city/service landing pages is one of the highest-ROI local SEO tactics. The common pattern: contractors with just a single “service areas” page start ranking for their primary city only, but contractors who build 10-20 unique pages targeting specific city+service combinations see their organic traffic increase significantly within 3-6 months.

The Reddit SEO community consensus (from r/SEO and r/localseo) is clear: “Definitely recommend creating location pages for each town/city you serve. You will not rank in all areas with 1 page.”

You don’t need to build all of them at once. Start with your highest-revenue service in your top three cities. Add more pages as you see results. Make sure every page has unique content, not just the city name swapped out in a template. Google treats cloned templates with just the city name swapped as doorway pages, which can hurt your rankings.

Step 3: Get reviews consistently

Reviews affect both your local pack ranking and your click-through rate once you show up. Businesses with 40+ Google reviews earn 45% more clicks than those with fewer, per BrightLocal.

The key word is consistently. Google’s algorithm weighs review velocity, meaning how frequently new reviews come in. A burst of 20 reviews followed by silence looks suspicious. A steady stream of 3-5 per week looks like a thriving business.

Automate your review requests so they go out after every completed job. For a full breakdown of how to set that up and what kind of results to expect, read our piece on review automation ROI.

Step 4: Build local citations with consistent NAP

NAP stands for Name, Address, Phone number. Every directory listing, social profile, and industry site that mentions your business needs to show the exact same information. If your website says “Johnson Plumbing LLC” but Yelp says “Johnson’s Plumbing” and your BBB listing has an old phone number, you’re sending conflicting signals to Google.

Start with the big directories: Google Business Profile, Yelp, BBB, Angi, HomeAdvisor, Facebook, and your state contractor licensing board. Use a spreadsheet to track every listing and audit them quarterly.

Step 5: Track what matters, not vanity metrics

Rankings and traffic are leading indicators, not outcomes. The metrics that matter are organic leads generated and booked jobs from organic traffic.

Set up Google Analytics to track form submissions and calls from organic visitors separately from paid traffic. Use call tracking with a dedicated number for your website so you can see exactly how many phone calls your SEO is producing.

If you’re getting 500 organic visits per month and booking 5 jobs, you know your conversion rate and can start improving it. Without that data, you’re guessing.

When more traffic still means flat revenue

Even good SEO can underperform if the traffic arrives and has nowhere to go.

The average home service website converts only 3-5% of organic visitors into leads, according to WordStream benchmarks. That means 95-97% of the people who find you through search leave without calling, filling out a form, or booking anything.

Some of those visitors were just browsing. But many had real intent and simply didn’t act. Maybe they visited at 9pm and planned to call tomorrow. Maybe they compared three contractors and went with the one who had a click-to-call button above the fold.

We cover this in detail in why more leads don’t always mean more jobs and how high-intent demand gets lost after visitors arrive. Fixing your capture systems often produces faster revenue gains than chasing higher rankings.

How to measure SEO ROI honestly

Stop evaluating SEO by keyword positions alone. Measure the full path from search to booked job.

Organic sessions: How many people found you through Google? Track this monthly and by landing page. If your “AC Repair in [City]” page gets 120 visits per month, that page is working.

Leads from organic: How many of those visitors called, submitted a form, or booked online? Separate organic leads from paid leads in your tracking. If you can’t tell the difference, your measurement setup needs work.

Cost per organic lead: Add up what you pay for SEO (agency fees, content, tools) and divide by organic leads generated. For most contractors, organic cost-per-lead lands well below paid channels once rankings stabilize.

Booked jobs from organic: This is the number that pays your crew. If you generated 30 organic leads last month and booked 12 jobs, your organic close rate is 40%. Now you can compare that to your paid channels and allocate budget accordingly.

Pipeline’s methodology for measuring intent and lead capture breaks down how to track these numbers without guessing.

The compound effect

SEO takes time. Most contractors see meaningful results in 4-6 months of consistent work. That timeline frustrates people used to the instant gratification of turning on Google Ads.

But once your pages rank, they keep working without a per-click cost. A city-and-service page that ranks on page one sends you traffic every day, month after month, for the cost of the initial work to create it. Google Ads stops the moment you stop paying.

A contractor who builds 10-20 city/service landing pages and invests in consistent GBP optimization creates a compounding asset. Each page that ranks on page one sends traffic every day. Over a year, the compounding effect of multiple pages ranking makes organic search one of the lowest-cost lead sources available to contractors.

Do the SEO work. Build the pages. Optimize your GBP.

Get the reviews. And make sure the traffic you earn has somewhere to go when it arrives.