A local SEO checklist for home service businesses

This is the list we work through when we start on a home service site, in the order we check things. Most of the sites we work on are roofing, pool deck, lawn and shutter companies, and the list barely changes between them.

Google Business Profile

• Real business name, nothing added. Keywords stuffed into the name break Google's rules and can get the profile suspended.
• Correct primary category. It tells Google which searches the profile fits. Add secondary categories only for work you do. How to choose it.
• Street address removed if customers don't visit you. Service-area businesses are supposed to hide it. Service area businesses on Google explains how areas and ranking work.
• Service areas set by city or ZIP. You get up to 20, within about 2 hours' drive of your base.
• Hours that match when someone answers. A caller who reaches voicemail calls the next listing.
• Your own job photos, added as jobs finish. They show in the map results and in Google Maps.

Each setting is covered in Business Profile setup for roofers, and it applies to most trades.

Website basics

• Tap-to-call number in the header of every page. On a pain clinic site we work on, 678 of 854 search clicks in a year came from phones.
• Name, phone and towns served in the footer. It should match your profile.
• Indexing switched on. In WordPress, go to Settings > Reading and make sure "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" is unticked.
• Sitemap submitted in Search Console. Then the Pages report shows which pages Google indexed and which it left out.
• Schema on the homepage. Use your trade's schema.org type (RoofingContractor, Plumber, Electrician) with the same details as the Business Profile. For the rest of the technical side, a one-afternoon audit covers what to check yourself.

Service pages

• One page per job you want more of. roof repair and roof replacement are different searches from different homeowners.
• A title tag with the job and your main town. Across three Florida sites we work on, 307 searches ranked in the top ten in one 28-day window and got zero clicks. The snippet was a big part of why.
• A way to do what the searcher came for. On a roofing site, a search about booking an inspection ranked at 2.6, showed 143 times in four weeks and got no clicks. The page had no way to book online.
• Your own job photos, renamed and compressed. File names and alt text give Google words to match.
• The questions customers ask you on the phone. Answer them on the page, with Service markup if you can.

Town pages

• A real page for each town you want work in. On a Florida roofing site we work on, replacing one county page with a page per town was one of four changes made while average position went from 47.9 to 14.9.
• Something true about each town. Google's doorway abuse policy treats near-identical pages with the town name swapped as spam. Jobs you've done there and local housing details set each page apart.

One real page per town goes further into what each page needs.

Reviews

• Ask every customer the same way, soon after the job. Google prohibits review gating (asking only the customers you think are happy).
• No incentives. Google bans them, and the FTC's fake reviews rule, in effect since October 21, 2024, allows civil penalties up to $51,744 per violation.
• Reply to reviews, good and bad. Readers see the replies too.

The rules and the asking routine are in getting more Google reviews.

Citations and NAP

• One exact name, phone and address format, copied from your website. Your site is the reference copy for every listing.
• Search each old phone number in quotes. An old number on a live listing sends calls to a line nobody answers.
• Every login in the business's name. If a former marketing company owns the listings, get them moved.

The audit steps are in NAP and citations for contractors.

Tracking

• Phone taps as a GA4 key event. In Google Tag Manager, a Click - Just Links trigger where Click URL starts with tel: fires a GA4 Event tag.
• Form submissions as a key event. Fire it on the submission itself, because thank-you page visits also count bots and refreshes.
• Business Profile calls counted separately. They show in the profile's performance view.

Call tracking for contractors explains how to keep each source separate.

Speed

Big photos are a common cause of slow pages. On our own site, photos went from about 3 MB JPEGs to WebP files of 93 to 200 KB at 1200 pixels.

Monthly upkeep

1. Submit every form and confirm the email arrives. In July 2026 we found a client's form submissions had been dropping since March because of an email setting, and nobody noticed for four months, us included.
2. Tap the phone number on your own phone.
3. In the Search Console Performance report, compare the last 28 days with the 28 before. Look for queries in the top ten with no clicks.
4. Add new job photos and a post to the Business Profile.
5. Reply to new reviews.
6. Publish or refresh one page a few months ahead of your next busy season.

Next step

Fix the section with the fewest ticks first. If you'd like us to run the whole list on your site, the free audit on my pricing page covers it.