Local SEO for contractors: what 923 homepages get wrong

Seven in ten homepages were missing at least one of the four, and 12% had none of them. A missing meta description was less common: 12% had none, 22% among electricians.

1. 1.A place in the page title. The title is the blue link in search results. 'Smith Plumbing | Plumber in Mesa, AZ' tells Google and the searcher where you work; 'Home' or the business name alone does not. 27% of titles named no town, county, region or state at all.
2. 2.Local business schema. A block of structured data giving your name, address, phone, hours and business type (Plumber, HVACBusiness, Electrician, RoofingContractor). 43% had none. Of those that had it, 89% included an address and phone number.
3. 3.A link to your Google Maps listing. Linking the homepage to your Google Business Profile ties the site and the listing together for the visitor and for Google. 38% had no such link on the homepage.
4. 4.Service-area pages. A page for each town or area you cover, linked from the homepage. 43% had no service-area or locations link. Each page should say what you do in that town, not repeat the homepage with the name swapped.

Of 331 HVAC homepages, 27% named no place in the title, 43% had no local business schema, 37% had no Maps link and 41% had no service-area link. 33% had all four. HVAC searches are seasonal and urgent ('ac repair near me' in the first heat wave), so the service-area pages and the after-hours number matter most. More on what an HVAC site needs on our HVAC page.

Plumbing homepages did best on the title: only 24% of 224 named no place. 41% had no local business schema, 37% no Maps link and 37% no service-area link; 35% had all four, the highest of the four trades. Emergency searches ('burst pipe', 'water heater leaking') are town-specific, so a page per area served is where most plumbers have room to gain. See our plumber page.

Electrical contractors trailed on every measure. Of 117 homepages, 36% named no place in the title, 63% had no local business schema, 54% had no Maps link and 69% had no service-area link. Only 9% had all four, and 24% had none. An electrician who fixes the basics is ahead of most of the competition by default. See our electrician page.

Roofing homepages were the most likely to have local business schema (66% of 251) and a Maps link (67%). 25% named no place in the title and 39% had no service-area link; 32% had all four and 7% had none. Storm work is searched by town after the storm, so service-area pages are the gap worth closing first. See our roofing page.

Florida contractors were ahead on every item; California contractors were behind on every item.

We took every HVAC, plumbing, electrical and roofing business listed with a website in OpenStreetMap in 18 states and DC (Alabama to Massachusetts alphabetically; the map server timed out before the rest). We loaded each homepage in a desktop Chrome browser on October 30, 2026 and dropped pages that did not load or were not the business's working site (security checks, parked or for-sale domains, error pages, spam, and domains that redirected to a different business), leaving 923. We checked samples of every measure by hand before counting it.

• Place in title: the page title contains the business's town, any town in the sample, a county, a region (such as South Florida or Bay Area) or a state name or abbreviation. Matching only the exact town undercounted, so we used this broader test.
• Local business schema: JSON-LD of type LocalBusiness or a subtype (HVACBusiness, Plumber, Electrician, RoofingContractor, HomeAndConstructionBusiness, GeneralContractor, ProfessionalService).
• Maps link: a link to google.com/maps, maps.google, goo.gl/maps, maps.app.goo.gl, g.page, a Google review link or a Google listing ID. Map embeds without a link are not counted; a hand check found the test missed about 1 in 10, so this figure is a slight overcount of sites without one.
• Service-area link: a link whose address or text names service areas, areas we serve, cities or communities served, or locations.

Local SEO is $597 a month with no setup fee: service-area pages for the towns you work in, on-page work such as titles, citations, and Google Business Profile upkeep, every month. Google Business Profile management alone is $149 a month. For what agencies charge, see how much local SEO costs.