How long does the checklist take to work through?

The profile and category work is a few days. Citation correction takes weeks because directories update on their own schedule. Reviews and location content are ongoing.

Can our office manager run this?

Steps one through three and step five are realistic in-house work. Citation correction and location content usually stall without dedicated time.

What is the single highest-impact item?

Primary category accuracy, followed by review velocity. Both are free and both are commonly wrong.

The local SEO checklist for contractors

Work in this order: claim and complete the Google Business Profile, set primary and secondary categories against what actually ranks in your market, list every service and service area, correct name, address, and phone consistency across directories, start a post-job review request flow, then build one page per service area. The order matters more than the individual items.

Step 1: Claim and complete the profile

Claim the listing, verify it, and fill every field the interface offers. Description, opening date, attributes, service list, service areas, and photos are all fields, and blank fields are missed relevance.

Step 2: Set categories against your market

Primary category carries the most weight of any single field. Choose it by checking what the businesses currently holding the map pack for your target terms have set, not by picking the label that sounds most complete.

Step 3: List every service and service area

Enter services individually rather than as one bundled entry. Repair, installation, maintenance, and emergency dispatch are separate searches, and each listed service is a separate chance to match.

Step 4: Correct citations

Audit the major aggregators and the industry directories that rank for your terms, and make the name, address, and phone identical across all of them. Identical means character-for-character, including suite numbers and legal suffixes.

Step 5: Start the review engine

Automate the request at job completion, while the customer is standing next to finished work. One reminder, no gating, and a response to everything that arrives.

Step 6: Build location content

One page per service area, each with local proof, real job references, and LocalBusiness schema. Build in priority order, starting where you already have completed work to reference.

What this looks like by trade

HVAC: complete the profile and start reviews in the shoulder season, split repair from install from maintenance in the service list, and keep seasonal hours accurate.

What to skip

Mass citation submissions to hundreds of low-quality directories, keyword-stuffed business names, and review gating all fall somewhere between useless and policy-violating. The last two can cost you the profile entirely.