Guide · Local SEO · Trades

How a contractor
gets found on Google.

A homeowner with a dead furnace or a leaking roof searches, looks at a handful of businesses and calls one. Contractor SEO is everything that decides whether you are in that handful. Most of it is not technical, and a good part of it you can do yourself in a week.

Published 2026-11-09 · Formory Marketing Group

A search for a trade near you can lead to three places, and each runs on different rules.

• The map results, built from Google Business Profiles. Free to be in, and ranked by the local factors below.
• Local Services Ads, the pay-per-lead ads with Google's verification badge. Only some trades can use them.
• The ordinary results, where your website's service and area pages compete.

Every trade can work on the first and the third. The second is worth testing if your trade is eligible and someone actually answers the phone.

Google's help page on local ranking names three factors. Relevance is how well your profile matches what someone searched for. Distance is how far your business is from the person searching. Prominence is how well known the business is, and Google says it draws on things such as links to your website and your reviews.

You cannot move your shop closer to every customer, and Google is plain that there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking. That leaves relevance and prominence, and both come down to ordinary work:

• Pick the right category. Google asks for as few categories as possible and says not to use them as keywords. Our guide to choosing categories goes through it.
• Fill in everything. Services, hours, service area, phone, website. Google says businesses with complete and accurate information are more likely to show up in local results.
• Verify the profile. Google says a verified profile is more likely to show up in search results.
• Keep your real name. Google's guidelines do not allow extra information in the business name, such as a service or a town added to it.
• Hide the address if customers do not come to you. Google says service-area businesses should.

The full routine is in how to rank in the Google map pack.

Local Services Ads charge per lead, not per click. Google's getting-started page lists 16 categories, among them electricians, HVAC, plumbers, roofers, appliance repair and window repair. General renovation contractors are not on the list, and Google points you to an eligibility check for your own category and location.

The green Google Guaranteed badge many contractors remember is gone. Google has moved advertisers to a single Google Verified badge and is discontinuing the Money Back Guarantee that came with the old one. To advertise you need a public, verified Google Business Profile, then screening that can include background checks, licences where the trade requires them, and liability insurance. Google puts the average at 3 to 4 weeks after you send your documents.

Our guide to Local Services Ads in Canada covers how leads are billed and what decides who shows first. If you are also paying a directory, see whether HomeStars is worth it.

A single "Services" page listing furnace repair, air conditioning, duct cleaning and water heaters gives Google very little to match against any one of them. Each job you want more of needs its own page: what the job is, where you do it, what it costs or what the price depends on, how long it takes, photos of your own work, and a way to ask for a quote.

Name the city in the page title. In our survey of GTA business listings, 41% of the 4,882 trade home pages that opened had a page title naming no GTA city or region. Changing a title takes minutes.

The structure that works is in how to write a service page that ranks.

Contractors who cover Vaughan, Markham and Richmond Hill are often sold a page per town, each with the same text and a different name. Google's spam policies call this doorway abuse, and one of their examples is "multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page". Google says sites that break its spam policies may rank lower or not appear at all.

An area page earns its place when it says something true only of that area: jobs you have done there, with your own photos; the kind of houses you usually work on there and what that means for the job; how quickly you can usually get there. If you cannot write three paragraphs that would be wrong for the next town over, do not build the page. List the towns on your service pages instead.

More on this in service area pages without building doorways.

Google says more reviews and positive ratings can help a business's local ranking. In our survey of 7,221 GTA trade listings, the median trade business had 23 Google reviews. If you have eight, that is the gap to close first. Compare your own count with your trade and city in our Google reviews benchmark.

Ask after every finished job, while the customer is still pleased. Google allows you to send customers a review link or show them a QR code. It strictly prohibits offering anything in return, such as a discount or a free service call. Reply to reviews, the bad ones included: Google notes that a mix of positive and negative feedback often feels more trustworthy. Our guide to getting your first ten Google reviews has wording you can copy.

A careful customer checks a contractor before letting them into the house. Put your licence and registration numbers somewhere they cannot be missed: in the footer of every page, on the contact page, and on the service pages where they apply.

What each trade has to show, and where, differs, so we keep the rules in separate guides rather than repeating them here: TSSA registration for gas and HVAC contractors, ECRA/ESA licence numbers for electrical contractors, WSIB clearance certificates and, for Toronto plumbers, plumber licence requirements.

Google's own advice is that a small local business can probably do much of this work itself. The gaps are usually basic. Of the 4,882 GTA trade home pages we could open, 40% had no enquiry form on the home page, 46% had no Google Analytics or Tag Manager tag in the home page code, 30% had no structured data and 26% had no meta description.

1. Claim and verify your Google Business Profile, then fill in the category, services, hours and service area.
2. Send a review link to your last ten customers.
3. Rewrite your home page title to say what you do and where.
4. Put your licence and registration numbers in the site footer.
5. Run your site through our free site check and fix what it flags.

What is worth paying for is the part that takes steady hours: a site with a real page for each job, and someone who keeps working on it. Our sites are $990 for up to six pages and $1,900 for up to fifteen, area pages included, paid after delivery; details are on our page on website design for contractors. Our local SEO plan is $350 a month: new pages, your Google Business Profile, review requests, local listings and a monthly report. It is optional and you can cancel any month.

• Google Business Profile Help — Tips to improve your local ranking on Google
• Google Business Profile Help — Guidelines for representing your business on Google
• Google Business Profile Help — Tips to get more reviews
• Google Search Central — Spam policies for Google web search (doorway abuse)
• Google Search Central — Do you need an SEO?
• Google Local Services Help — Getting started with Local Services Ads, Canada
• Google Local Services Help — Business screening and verification requirements, Canada
• Google Local Services Help — About the Google Verified badge
• Formory GTA small business website report (our survey of 49,994 listings)

Or call (416) 989-3208. One of us answers; there is no sales team.

How to Rank in the Google Map Pack · Service-Area Pages Without Building Doorways · Google Local Services Ads in Canada: How They Work in 2026

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