Get found for the projects you want to build, and pass the check after a referral

What is SEO for a general contractor?

It is the work of getting your website in front of people searching for the type of project you build, in the towns you build in, and making the page they land on good enough that they ask for an estimate. For a plumber that means ranking for an emergency. For a general contractor it means something slower: an addition, an ADU, a whole-home renovation or a custom home is planned over months, and the owner reads a lot before they call anyone.

That changes what the work is. You do not need hundreds of calls. You need a small number of the right projects, at the size and in the area where your crews and subs make money. So the research starts with your own job history: which project types you want more of, which you want to stop bidding, and where.

How do general contractors actually get jobs, and where does the website fit?

Jobs reach a general contractor by several routes, and the website does a different job on each one. Search does a lot for some of these routes and almost nothing for others.

Homeowners are told to compare you. California's contractor board, for example, tells consumers to get at least three bids and check references and to verify the license online. Whoever referred you, your website is being read next to two others.

Which searches carry money for a general contractor?

The searches that turn into signed contracts name a project type and usually a place. "General contractor" on its own is vague: the searcher could want a deck repair or a medical office build-out. The money is in searches like these:

• Additions: home addition contractor, second-story addition, in-law suite, garage conversion.
• ADUs and detached structures: ADU builder, backyard cottage, detached garage with apartment.
• Whole-home work: whole-house renovation, gut renovation, historic home restoration.
• New homes: custom home builder, build on your lot, the name of a town or lake plus "builder".
• Commercial: commercial general contractor, tenant improvement contractor, restaurant or medical office build-out.

Each of those deserves its own page, written from the jobs you have actually done. A single "Services" page that lists all of them in one paragraph is a common reason a contractor's site ranks for its own name and nothing else.

The table below is a different kind of search: what contractors themselves type into Google when they look for marketing help. It is from Google Keyword Planner. "Google business profile for contractors" draws as many US searches as "seo for contractors", which tells you how many owners are working on the map pack by hand.

Should residential and commercial work share one website?

They can share a domain, but they need separate sections, because the buyer and the questions are different. A homeowner planning an addition worries about cost overruns, how long the kitchen will be out of use, who pulls the permit and whether the same lead carpenter will be on site every day. A property manager planning a tenant improvement cares about schedule, working in an occupied building, and whether you have delivered that building type before.

Split them at the top of the site, and give each side its own project pages and its own way to get in touch: "request an estimate" for homeowners, "request our qualifications" or "invite us to bid" for commercial.

Why doesn't a project gallery bring in estimate requests?

Because a grid of unlabeled photos gives Google nothing to read and gives the owner nothing to compare against their own project. Google's image guidance is plain about what it uses: descriptive filenames, useful alt text, and images placed near relevant text. A slider of files named IMG_4471 has none of that.

The fix is to turn your best jobs into project pages. Each one states the town, the project type, the scope, the size, how long it took, what the permit and inspection process involved, and what was difficult about it. That is the "original information" and first-hand experience Google asks site owners to check their content for, and it is the page an architect forwards to a client.

How does a long sales cycle change the work?

It means a visit today may become a signed contract next season, so traffic counts tell you very little and estimate requests by page tell you a lot. Design, engineering, financing and permits all sit between the first search and the first day on site.

So the site needs pages that answer those questions directly: what a project like this costs in your area and what moves the number, how your preconstruction process works, who handles permits and inspections with the local building department, and how change orders are priced. We set up tracking so each form and call is tied to the page it came from. If you already get visitors and few enquiries, start with these checks.

What about Google Business Profile and the map pack?

Your Business Profile decides whether you appear in the map pack, and Google says local results rest mainly on relevance, distance and prominence, with no way to pay for a better position. Prominence draws on reviews and on how many websites link to your business, which is where the website and the profile meet.

Most contractors work at the customer's property, not their own. Google's rule for that is to remove the address from the profile and set service areas, kept within about two hours' drive of your base. We do not manage Business Profiles. We make sure the website your profile points to backs it up.

One warning on town pages. Google's spam policy names pages targeted at specific cities that funnel users to one page as doorway abuse. A page for a town earns its place when you have built there and can show the projects, the local permit process and the neighborhoods. Copies with the town name swapped do not.

What we do for general contractors and home builders

• Research: which project types and towns have search demand, matched against the jobs you want.
• Project-type pages: one for each kind of work you want more of, residential and commercial kept apart.
• Project write-ups: your finished jobs rebuilt as pages people and search engines can read.
• Technical fixes: heavy photo galleries, slow mobile pages and pages Google has not indexed, through our technical SEO work.
• Rebuilds: if you are replacing the site, an SEO migration that keeps the rankings the old one earned.
• AI search: checking what ChatGPT and Google's AI answers say when someone asks for a builder in your area, through AI-search optimization.
• Measurement: estimate requests and calls, by page, so you can see which project types the site is bringing in.

We do not run Google Ads, Local Services Ads or lead-buying accounts. If you are weighing those against website work, our guide on how much contractors should spend on marketing shows how to work out what a lead is worth to you first.

The fastest way to see where your site stands is our free site check. You get one useful finding about your own website within two business days, with no call required.