Forty items, in the right order
Written so a contractor with a Sunday afternoon can work through it without hiring anyone. The first twenty five are configuration and writing. The last fifteen are slower, and they are where the durable advantage is.
Read this part or the list will waste your time
This is ordered. The sequence matters more than the individual items, because the early ones are fast and cheap and the late ones are slow and expensive, and doing the slow expensive ones on a broken foundation is how contractors conclude that SEO does not work.
Nothing here requires a specialist for the first twenty five items. It requires an afternoon, a laptop, your Google account and a phone to test on. If you get through the first three groups and stop, you will still have done more than most of your competitors.
Do not start with content. Everyone wants to start with content because it feels like progress. Content published onto a misconfigured profile and a slow site is the most expensive way to achieve nothing available in this trade.
What you can do yourself this weekend
Configuration and writing. No developer, no agency, no tools you have to pay for.
Google Business Profile
- Claim the listing if you have not, and check nobody else has a duplicate of it
- Convert to a service area business if customers do not come to your premises, and hide the street address
- List the towns you actually serve and that your license actually covers, not the whole metro
- Set the primary category to Electrician and add accurate secondary categories only
- List every service individually rather than as one line, including panel upgrades, generators and EV chargers
- Set hours truthfully, including any after hours rotation, and mark holiday hours when they change
- Add at least ten photographs of finished work, taken on a phone, in real houses
- Write the business description in plain language with the towns and the main services named
- Turn on messaging only if somebody will actually answer it
- Check the listing monthly, because Google edits categories and customers suggest wrong hours
The phone, and the phone test
- Put a tappable phone number in the header of every page, as text and not as an image
- Open your own site on your own phone on mobile data and time how long until you can tap that number
- If it is over three seconds, fix that before anything else on this list
- Add a fixed call bar on mobile that does not cover the content underneath it
- Make sure the number on the site, the profile and every directory is identical, including formatting
The pages you already have
- Split any services page that lists more than three things into one page per service
- Title each page the way a customer would search for it, not the way an invoice would describe it
- Put your license number somewhere a cautious homeowner will find it
- State your service area in plain text rather than only inside a map widget
- Write a real page title and description for every page, each one different from every other
- Add one honest cost page for your highest ticket service, with real ranges
- Link from your homepage to the service pages that make you money, not just to the about page
- Delete or merge any page that duplicates another, because two pages competing for one term beats neither
- Search your own site for leftover dummy text and unfinished notes from whoever built it, and remove every one
- Check every page loads over https and that the http version redirects to it
Slower, and where most people stop
These take months rather than an afternoon. They are also where the durable advantage is, which is exactly why so few contractors get to them.
Reviews
- Ask every customer at job completion rather than a week later
- Ask them to mention the specific job, because a review naming a panel upgrade helps you rank for panel upgrades
- Respond to every review, including and especially the bad ones
- Write bad review responses for the next reader rather than for the person complaining
- Never incentivize, filter or buy reviews, all of which eventually costs the listing
Content, once the foundation is right
- Write the cost and scope pages first, because that searcher is closest to booking
- Write the repair against replace pages second, which catches them one step earlier
- Publish seasonal pieces two to three months before the season, never during it
- Keep a schedule you can actually sustain, because four a month for a year beats twelve in one week
- Update your best performing pages rather than always writing new ones
Links and citations
- Get listed accurately in the trade directories and local business associations that apply to you
- Ask suppliers and manufacturers whose products you install whether they have a contractor listing
- Sponsor something local that publishes a supporter page, which is a real link and a real community relationship
- Never buy links from a network, because those get devalued and take your rankings with them
- Record every link you or anyone else builds, with its URL, so you can check it is still live in six months
When to stop doing this yourself
We sell this work, so treat what follows with appropriate suspicion. It is still true.
- If you have done items one to twenty five and the phone has not changed in three months, the problem is competitive rather than technical and it needs sustained work
- If your market has a large multi trade operation advertising heavily, you will not out-publish them on weekends
- If you cannot sustain a monthly publishing rhythm, do not start one, because a blog abandoned after four posts is worse than no blog
- If your average ticket is low and your market is small, the arithmetic may not support a program at all, and the calculator on this site will show you that
- If you get through this entire list on your own, you do not need us, and we would rather say so than sell you something
Questions about the checklist
Can I really do this myself? 01
The first twenty five items, yes, in a weekend or two. They are configuration and writing rather than technical work, and they are also the items that move the needle most on a neglected site. The last fifteen get progressively more specialized, and the link building at the end is genuinely slow work that most contractors will not sustain.
What order should I do them in? 02
The order they are listed. It is deliberate. Profile configuration comes first because it moves fastest, the phone number and mobile checks come next because they are what everything else feeds into, and content and links come last because they take months to pay and are wasted if the foundation is wrong.
How long before any of this shows results? 03
Profile work can move local visibility within weeks if the listing was misconfigured. On-site work generally takes a month or two to be reflected. Content and links take three to six months, and longer in competitive metros. Nothing here produces a result in a week, and anything that promises to is not on this list.
The other three
Do it yourself, or find out what it is worth
Everything above is free and there is no form in the way of it. If you would rather know what the work is worth before spending a weekend on it, the calculator answers that in about a minute.