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Running ads on a broken local SEO foundation means paying for traffic that your site and Google Business Profile are not set up to convert. Before increasing your ad spend, work through this checklist. Most contractor businesses are missing at least half of these items — each one is a gap in your local search presence that ads cannot fix.
By J. DiMare, Founder — Seed Value Marketing
1. Primary category set to your specific trade — not 'General Contractor.' 2. Service area includes 8–20 specific cities, not a state or region. 3. Business name, address, and phone number match your website exactly. 4. Description is 750 characters and names your services, cities, and years in operation. 5. Profile has at least 20 photos, with new ones added in the last 30 days. 6. You have published at least 2 posts in the last 14 days.
7. You have a minimum of 20 Google reviews with a rating above 4.5. 8. You have received at least one new review in the last 30 days. 9. Every review — positive and negative — has a response from your business. Review velocity is one of the top three Map Pack ranking factors. Stalled review counts are one of the most common reasons a contractor loses Map Pack position to a competitor.
10. Your site scores above 70 on Google PageSpeed Insights for mobile. 11. Running 'site:yourdomain.com' in Google returns at least one result. 12. Your sitemap is submitted to Google Search Console and shows no errors. 13. Every page has a unique title tag and meta description — not duplicates or defaults left by your web developer.
14. You have a dedicated page for each core service — not a single 'Services' page listing everything. 15. Each service page names the specific cities and communities you serve for that service. 16. Each page has an H1 heading that includes your service type and primary location — not 'Welcome' or your business name.
17. Your homepage has LocalBusiness or a trade-specific schema type (RoofingContractor, HVACBusiness, etc.) with your name, address, phone, geo coordinates, and service area. 18. Your FAQ content has FAQPage schema applied so Google can read your questions and answers directly. You can check both at Google's Rich Results Test — enter your homepage URL and see what schema is detected.
19. Your business is listed on Yelp, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, and the BBB with the same name, address, and phone number you use everywhere else. 20. Your social profiles — Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn — all list the same business name and link back to your website. These citations form the data network that AI systems and voice assistants draw on when they answer local business queries. Inconsistency across these sources reduces your entity trust score.
GBP configuration and schema markup. A new business has no review history to compete on, so making sure Google can understand exactly who you are, what you do, and where you operate — through both a properly configured GBP and structured data on your website — is the highest-leverage starting point. These two items establish your entity footprint before you build the review and citation signals on top.
Fix items 10 through 16 before spending on ads. Site speed, indexed pages, and correct title tags directly affect your Quality Score in Google Ads, which determines how much you pay per click. Running ads to a slow, thin website costs more per click and converts at a lower rate than running the same ads to a properly structured site. Items 1 through 9 affect organic and Map Pack results more than ads, but a strong GBP lowers your ad CPCs for branded searches.
Go to Google's Rich Results Test (search 'Google Rich Results Test') and enter your homepage URL. If the tool shows no structured data detected, you have no schema. If it shows schema but with errors, those errors are preventing the markup from being used. Valid schema without errors means Google can read your structured data — though this does not guarantee rich results, which also depend on content quality and search type.
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The 15-phase audit checks all 20 of these and the 200 other technical and content signals beneath them — scored, prioritized, and delivered as a fix list you can execute in order.