Home services
Your next customer is standing in a wet basement looking at three names.
Roofing, HVAC, plumbing, electrical, landscaping. For home services the map pack is not part of your marketing, it is the whole thing. Nobody scrolls when the water is rising.
Why this industry is different
Home services buying decisions happen in about ninety seconds.
Somebody has an emergency, they search on a phone, and they call one of the first three results. That compresses everything down to a handful of signals, and most contractors are losing on all of them without knowing it.
PROBLEM 01
You are invisible outside your own town
Local rankings fall off sharply with distance. If your address is in Altoona you may rank well there and be nowhere in Hollidaysburg, fifteen minutes away, even though you happily drive there.
PROBLEM 02
Your category is too broad
"Contractor" competes with everybody. "Roofing Contractor" competes with roofers. Most home services profiles are set to something generic and quietly lose to a smaller competitor who picked the specific one.
PROBLEM 03
Your review count stopped growing
You have 40 reviews from three years of good work and the competitor above you got 12 last month. Recent velocity matters more than lifetime total, and almost nobody in the trades asks systematically.
PROBLEM 04
The lead services are eating your margin
Paying per shared lead to bid against three others is not marketing, it is renting customers. Ranking organically means the call comes to you first and only you.
What people actually type
Nobody searches for your company name.
They search for the problem plus the town. Your profile either matches those words or it does not, and that match is largely a settings problem rather than a content problem.
Typical searches in your market
- emergency plumber near me
- roof leak repair altoona
- hvac repair open now
- ac not cooling hollidaysburg
- water heater replacement cost
- electrician near me open sunday
- gutter cleaning johnstown
- furnace repair 24 hour
- roof replacement estimate
- drain cleaning service
Notice how many include "near me", "now", "open" or "emergency". That intent is why home services convert from the map pack at a far higher rate than almost any other industry, and why placement there is worth more than a ranking on page one of the normal results.
The work
What the first ninety days look like for a contractor.
The sequence is the same as any Real Local client. The emphasis is different, because for the trades reviews and service area coverage carry more weight than anything else.
Category and service cleanup
Primary category set to the most specific match, secondary categories added, and every service you offer listed individually with its own description. This alone moves more profiles than any other single change.
Service area, properly set
Your real coverage defined so you can appear in the towns you actually drive to, not just the one your truck is registered in.
Review engine switched on
A direct link and a system for asking after every completed job. Existing reviews get responses, including the bad ones, which matters more than people expect.
Photos from real jobs
Before and after shots on a schedule. Profiles with recent job photos get significantly more calls and direction requests than ones with a logo and a stock image.
Citations and duplicate cleanup
Your name, address and phone made identical across the directories Google cross-checks, and duplicate listings from old addresses reported and removed.
Grid rank testing
Your position measured across a grid of your service area for five real search terms, so coverage gaps show up as a map rather than a guess.
Start here
See where you rank across your whole service area.
The free scan reads your live Google Business Profile and shows you what a homeowner sees before they call somebody else. No login, no access granted, about a minute.
Questions from this industry
The ones I get asked most.
I already pay for a lead service. Is this instead of that?
Eventually, ideally. Run both for a few months and compare cost per booked job. Most contractors find the lead services are a floor they can lower rather than a foundation they need, once organic placement improves. I would not tell you to cancel anything before you have data.
I work in five towns. Do I need five territories?
No. One territory covers your category in your primary market, and the service area work extends your reach outward from there. If you genuinely operate as separate branches in separate markets, the Authority tier covers up to three.
How fast will I see something?
Profile changes can show within days. Review velocity takes a few weeks to build. Grid position typically moves between day 45 and day 90. Anyone promising results in two weeks is describing a coincidence.
My competitor has 300 reviews. Can I catch up?
You do not have to. Recent velocity is weighted heavily, so a business adding eight reviews a month can outrank one sitting on 300 from 2019. Closing the gap matters, matching the total does not.
Do I need a new website first?
Usually not. For most home services businesses the Google profile drives more calls than the website does, and it is far cheaper to fix. If your site is genuinely broken or has no way to contact you, that gets fixed first, but it is not a prerequisite.