SEO is worth wildly different amounts to different construction companies. Most agencies sell the same package to a $200M industrial GC and a two-truck roofing outfit. That is how contractors end up burned.
Start here
Which one are you?
The answer changes what we do, what it costs, and whether we recommend doing it at all.
Residential & trades
Local search is the whole ballgame.
Roofers, renovators, concrete crews, landscapers. Your buyers search, compare three companies
in the map pack, and call one. Ranking is not a vanity metric here — it is your primary lead
source, and the gap between position two and position six is most of your pipeline.
Google Business Profile built out properly, then actually maintained
A real page per service area, with content that differs between cities
Review generation as a system, not an occasional ask
Quote forms with qualifying fields and drawing upload
Tracking that ties a call back to the search that produced it
We pitch this hard
Commercial & industrial
You will not win projects from organic search.
Nobody procures a $40M institutional build by googling "commercial contractor". Any agency
promising you project leads from search is selling you something. What SEO genuinely does for
you is narrower, cheaper, and still worth buying:
Recruitment. Trades searching [trade] jobs [city] is real volume, and it is far cheaper than a recruiter.
Referral validation. You get referred, then googled. What ranks for your company name decides whether the referral survives.
Capability terms.tilt-up [city], design-build contractor [city] — low volume, high intent, often a project manager cross-checking a name.
Brand defence. Your company name plus "reviews", "lawsuit" or "safety". You want to own that page, not discover it during a prequalification.
We will talk you out of the rest
What we actually do
The work, itemised.
Technical audit
Crawl, index coverage, speed budget, schema, internal link graph. Fix what is broken before adding anything new.
Silo architecture
Services, sectors and locations organised so pages stop competing with each other. Cannibalisation is the most common cause of a plateau.
Google Business Profile
Categories, services, service areas, photos, posts, Q&A. For trades this is often worth more than the website itself.
Service-area pages
One per city you genuinely work in, each with distinct content. Thin duplicated location pages are worse than having none.
Citation cleanup
Name, address and phone consistent across the directories that still matter, plus the construction-specific ones most agencies miss.
Review generation
A repeatable process tied to project completion, so review velocity does not depend on someone remembering.
Content production
Articles that answer what your buyers and applicants actually search, mapped to the silo so each one strengthens a money page.
Reporting
Rankings, traffic, calls, forms and applications — with the honest caveat that for commercial contractors, form volume is the wrong success metric.
Recruitment SEO
Careers pages and trade-specific job content built to rank. Underserved, and the thing most contractors need most right now.
Timeline
Three months of structure. Six months of movement. Twelve months of compounding.
Months 1–3
Structure
Audit, architecture, technical fixes, Google Business Profile, baseline tracking. You will see very little ranking movement in this window, and anyone telling you otherwise is managing your feelings rather than your site.
Months 4–6
Movement
Service-area and capability pages start ranking. Branded search cleans up. First recruitment traffic appears, usually before any commercial enquiry does.
Months 7–12
Compounding
Content depth starts to pay. Rankings stabilise rather than bounce. This is the point where the retainer either clearly justifies itself or clearly does not, and we will say which.
We do not guarantee rankings. Nobody can, and a guarantee is the clearest signal
you are being sold to. What we will commit to is the work, the reporting, and telling you plainly
when the spend has stopped earning its place.
Retainers start at CAD $1,500 a month for a single-market trade contractor and rise with the number of service lines, locations and the amount of content production involved. We will tell you if a retainer is not worth it for your situation.
Can you guarantee first-page rankings?
No, and you should walk away from anyone who does. Search results are not ours to promise. We commit to the work and the reporting, and to being straight with you about whether it is paying off.
We are a commercial contractor. Is SEO worth it at all?
Often yes, but for recruitment and referral validation rather than project leads. If your main problem is finding journeymen, careers-focused SEO is usually the cheapest hire you will make. If you already have more trades than you need, it may genuinely not be worth it.
Do we need to blog?
You need content that answers what your buyers and applicants search. Sometimes that is articles; often it is better project pages, a proper capability profile, and careers content. "Blogging" as an activity in itself is rarely the answer.
What if we already have an SEO agency?
Ask them what percentage of your enquiries come from organic search, and what they would do differently if the answer is near zero. If the response is a rankings report rather than an answer, that tells you something.
The free audit includes a straight read on whether search is a real channel for your company or a distraction from the thing that actually wins you work.
