Contractor SEO Audit: Find Out Why Nobody Finds You
Google puts you in the pack on some streets and drops you off it on others, and almost nobody can tell you which is which. And that's the trouble with the way contractors usually get told to think about search. You get a rank number, or a traffic chart, or a report saying your visibility is up eleven percent. But none of it tells you that a homeowner three neighbourhoods east can't find you at four in the afternoon while your competitor sits in the top three all day. The SEO Audit maps every one of them, works out why, and hands you the order to fix them in.
Google puts you in the pack on some streets and drops you off it on others. This maps every one of them and hands you the order to fix them in. $497.
Google ranks you differently on every street
When a homeowner searches for your trade, Google doesn't serve one result list to the whole city. It serves a different one to every street corner, weighted heavily by how far that person is standing from your shop. So you can sit at number two from your own office parking lot and be nowhere by the time somebody's eight kilometres out. Same business, same reviews, same everything. Different corner.
And it moves through the day. Your listing can hold the top three at ten in the morning and slide out of the pack by seven in the evening, because your hours say you're closed and the ones still showing say they're open. Owners rarely see that happen. Which makes sense, honestly, because they check their ranking the way anybody would, by searching from the office, and the office is the one place they were always going to look fine.
So the money leaks quietly, as a phone that rings a little less than a business with your reviews and your years should make it ring. You can go a whole year without ever naming a gap like that. You do good work. Your customers say so in public. But somewhere three suburbs over, a company with fewer reviews and less experience is taking the call, because their profile is set up to be found there and yours isn't.
Two different questions about the same website
A contractor's website underperforms in two different ways, and they need different answers. The Site Inspection covers the first one, which is what stops the people who already found you from picking up the phone. Being found at all is the other half, and that's this page. A site can convert beautifully for the six people who reach it, and the problem is still the six.
So this one points entirely at discovery. Where you show up across your real service area rather than from your desk, which settings your competitors have on their profiles that you don't, whether the people outranking you got there with reviews that look bought, what's broken on the site itself, and what the homeowners in your neighbourhoods are actually typing before they call anyone. Five passes, one ranked list at the end.
And you'll see this called the Local SEO Diagnostic in places. Same report, same price. It used to carry the word Inspection in its name, which was a mistake on our part, because contractors kept reading it as a version of the free Site Inspection. There's no free tier sitting underneath this one, so what's on this page is the whole product.
What you get
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Where you rank, street by street
Your position in the Map Pack measured from dozens of points across your whole service area, not from your shop. You'll see where you win, where you drop off entirely, how far out that cliff sits, and how your position changes between the middle of the workday and the evening.
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The competitor settings you're missing
The secondary categories your top-ranking competitors have set on their Google Business Profile that you don't. And it's usually the single cheapest fix in the whole report, and it's the reason a smaller company outranks you for a service you both offer.
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A fake-review check on whoever is beating you
We look at the review patterns on the profiles outranking you. Where the evidence is there, you get a complaint package written up and ready to file with Google. Where it isn't, we say so. We're not going to accuse a competitor of something we can't show.
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Every broken thing on your site, ranked by cost
Dead links, missing page headings, pages that return an error, pages that load slowly on a phone. Ranked by what each one's costing you rather than by severity, because a broken link on a four-year-old blog post isn't the same as a dead page where your best service used to live.
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The local sites already linking to your competitors
A list of the local and trade websites pointing at the companies beating you, filtered down to the ones you could realistically get on. Chambers, suppliers, associations, local media. No national junk padding the count.
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Question maps for every neighbourhood page
The actual questions homeowners in your areas are typing into Google before they hire, mapped to the page each one belongs on. Six to eight per page, ordered by how close the question sits to somebody picking up the phone.
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Your tracking set up so it tells you something
Google Search Console and Google Analytics configured so map traffic is separated from general search traffic. So when the phone starts ringing more, you can tell which one did it instead of guessing.
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One ranked plan of action
Everything above lands as a single ordered list. What to fix first, what it should move, and roughly how much work it is. Written so you can hand it to whoever maintains your site without translating it first.
How it runs in about three days
- Day 1
You send a short intake. Your service area including the outlying towns you actually drive to, your three biggest competitors by name, and your five highest-margin services ranked. And then you grant read access to your business profile and your search accounts. It takes about ten minutes, and it's the only thing we need from you.
- Days 1 to 2
We run the visibility mapping and the competitor work in parallel with a page-by-page sweep of your site. This is the long part, and none of it lands on your desk. You won't get a status email asking you to review something.
- Day 3
You get the report. Ranked plan of action on the first page, the evidence behind every finding after it, and your tracking already configured. And if we couldn't finish a section because access never came through, the report says so in plain language instead of quietly skipping it.
One price, paid once, no retainer attached to it. And the math is about as simple as it gets. If your average job is worth $1,200 and the report surfaces one profile setting that puts you in the pack for a service you already offer, one extra booked job covers it twice over. Plenty of the contractors we look at are missing more than one.
And the reason this one costs money is coverage, not attitude. It measures your position across the whole service area rather than from your desk, at two times of day, then goes and works out why: which competitor settings you're missing, whether the reviews above you look bought, what's broken on the site, and what homeowners in those neighbourhoods are typing. One booking a month lost to a competitor whose profile is set up better than yours costs you more than this report does, and it costs it again every month until somebody looks.
It's the right fit if you've got a Google Business Profile and a website, you already know people aren't finding you, and you want the whole picture rather than a guess. It's the wrong fit if you have no business profile at all, in which case The Local Pick is where to start instead, or if your site gets found fine but visitors leave without calling, where the free Site Inspection answers the real question.
Why this reads differently to the last audit you were sent
Most contractors have been handed an SEO audit before. Usually automated, usually forty pages, usually forgotten inside a week. So here's the difference, put as plainly as we can put it.
- Points an automated tool at your site and prints every warning it finds, sorted by a severity score nobody set.
- Checks your ranking from one point, usually your own address, which is the one place you were always going to look fine.
- Lists your competitors by name without saying what they have configured that you do not.
- Ends with a proposal, because the findings were picked to justify one.
- Uses words like crawl budget and canonicalization without ever saying what they cost you.
- Ranks findings by what each one is costing you in booked work, so the order is the plan.
- Measures your position from across the whole service area, at two times of day, so you see the map instead of a number.
- Names the exact profile settings your competitors have and you do not, which is usually the fastest win in the file.
- Ends with a list you keep, and says plainly when the right answer is a fix you can do yourself.
- Written for somebody who runs a crew, not somebody who runs a search team.
Questions contractors ask first
How is this different from the Site Inspection?
Different failure. The Site Inspection scores what happens after somebody lands on your site, meaning whether the page gets them to call. This one is about whether they land at all. So if your traffic is fine and your phone is quiet, take the Site Inspection, and it costs you nothing to find out. If almost nobody is reaching you in the first place, the search side is your problem, and that's what this report answers.
What do you need from me?
Your service area, three competitor names, your five best services ranked, and read-only access to your Google Business Profile and your search accounts. About ten minutes of your time on day one. And we don't need a call, so we're not going to ask you to sit through one.
What if I don't have those accounts set up?
Most of the work runs off public data, so the visibility map, the competitor comparison, the sweep of your site and the question maps all still get done. Setting up the tracking is the part that needs access. But if it never comes through, you get the setup written out as instructions instead, and the report tells you that's what happened.
Do you fix the things you find?
Not as part of this. It's a diagnostic, and the price reflects that. Plenty of what turns up you or your existing web person can handle in an afternoon, which is a real outcome, and we'll tell you when it applies. But if you want us doing the work, that's a separate conversation and a separate number.
Will this tell me how to rank number one?
It tells you where you rank now, who's ahead of you, and what they've got that you don't. Anybody promising you the top spot for a price is selling you something they can't control. But the gap and the order to close it in, that we can show you.
Does anything recur after I pay?
No. You pay once, at checkout, and that's the end of it. There's no retainer hiding behind the report and no subscription that starts quietly in month two.
Is this the same thing as the Local SEO Diagnostic?
Yes. One product with two names, at the same $497 and the same three business days. It answers to both. We dropped the older name, Local SEO Inspection, because the word Inspection belongs to the free one and having both was confusing people into thinking this was free. If you saw it advertised that way, that was our mistake and it's gone.
How often should I run one?
Once, then act on it. Running the same audit every quarter is mostly a way to keep paying for a picture of a problem you already have the list for. And if you want ongoing work, that's Performance Partner, and it is a different product for a reason.
The SEO Audit
Find out which streets you're losing
Send us your service area and your three biggest competitors. And you'll get the map, the gaps, the broken pieces, and one ranked list telling you what to fix first. $497, once, in about three business days. But if the phone is quiet while the traffic is fine, the free Site Inspection is the one that answers your question.