Local SEO Strategies for Home Service Businesses

Wyatt Bonicelli is the founder of Evolve Agency in Edmond, Oklahoma. An engineer turned marketer, Wyatt specializes in web development and SEO for home service contractors, helping businesses transition from word-of-mouth marketing to generating leads through a strong online presence. This interview was conducted by Jeremy Rivera on the Unscripted SEO Podcast by Be Sharp Digital Marketing.

From Engineering to Marketing: Finding a Niche

Jeremy Rivera: I also have a soft spot for home service providers. I’ve worked with roofers, plumbers, sunroom companies. What is it about that particular niche that speaks to you and your agency? What is it about that model that you find success with?

Wyatt Bonicelli: It really started out with a couple of guys in the church that were already in that realm of things. I was looking into the rank and rent model and thought, well, maybe I could just benefit them. So I started up websites for them, helped them grow in that way, and saw that it was effective.

I have a pretty good understanding of the industry. We’ve owned a few homes now and renovated both of them. I’ve had to deal with various contractors. Working with people-if you get recommended to somebody and they don’t have any web presence at all, no online reviews or a website talking about what they do and where-it’s a little harder to trust them with a big check.

Those guys are not typically able to invest a lot in their marketing presence. I see a lot of people charging $3,000 plus for a website. So that was my introduction offer to people: “Let’s get you online. I’m not going to charge you a ton. We’ll help you grow in that way.” The lead magnet is a lower ticket price website with the upsell of SEO and then Meta ads, YouTube ads to help fuel in the fire.

Google My Business: Building Local Trust Signals

Jeremy Rivera: What’s been your experience looking at Google My Business, trying to create signals that this business really is in this locality? What are some of your go-to tactics when it comes to building that reputation?

Wyatt Bonicelli: For most of the guys, if they don’t have a physical address to lock in, unfortunately, they’re pretty hampered by Google Business Profiles. I’ve seen one company in particular-their average map ranking on Google Maps was actually 99. So they weren’t showing up anywhere at all. Unfortunately, that’s tied to whether you have a physical address or not.

I always pitch to guys: “Once you’re doing really well and you’re able to take on a small rental place somewhere, we can grow your leads with that as well.” But then just having a service area Google Business Profile-somewhere they can gather reviews-I push them towards that even if they’re not able to get an address verified. And of course you can embed that on their website and get the various Google properties talking to each other. It helps establish that they are where they say they are.

Location Pages: How Many Is Too Many?

Jeremy Rivera: My friend Michael McDougald of Right Thing Agency asked me this question. If you have a client doing precast concrete walls in multiple different states-technically they can deliver anywhere in the United States, but they have a few markets they want to target as far as states, then specific cities with location pages. How many location pages are too many?

I don’t know if this was in your era or not, but in 2012 they literally called them doorway pages and they would smack your site down if you had too many. Somewhere around 2020-ish we rediscovered location pages. It became part of their best advice-tailor it down, build a city-specific page. But too much of a good thing sometimes is too much. You can’t obviously create a site that has every 3,552 different American cities.

Wyatt Bonicelli: That’s a great question. I was going to bring up those doorway pages. In my experience with my clients, I haven’t seen any manual actions, no penalties or anything from creating location pages.

In a multiple state situation, I would say first try to get those GMBs verified at certain addresses. Then you can link each of those GMBs to their city or state-specific page. That would be the best way to do it.

As far as how many is too many-start slow. It’s kind of like topical authority. You don’t want to go out there and publish 3,000 blog posts because obviously that looks like spam. But if you start with probably one page per state or city and see how your Google Search Console responds, if it’s doing well and your impressions are trending up, you can probably drip in some more.

I would kind of map out the high-end clientele cities first. In Oklahoma, I would target Nichols Hills-a high-end neighborhood-before I would target Dell City or just greater Oklahoma City, just to really try to take advantage of a smaller market that would be a good market with your ideal clients.

Jeremy Rivera: I think I would make a state level, target your three major metros that are going to bring the most value, then two or three of the top cities under that. Sometimes the metro area is defined by the city name-like Nashville-so I’d target Franklin and Cool Springs. If it’s more of a region like Upper Cumberland where I live, I’d target Cookeville and Crossville. I won’t try to hit all of them. I just hit region plus one or two and then make sure they interlink kind of into these hubs and then link between the two regions to support each other.

Wyatt Bonicelli: Absolutely. Hub pages, good interlinking-just showing Google. Any page on your website that doesn’t have a link internally, externally, it’s probably not going to get indexed. So for anybody out there that DIY’d their own website, go back and look, see if you can navigate to all of your pages within your site-ideally two clicks from the home page.

Creative Link Building for Local Service Businesses

Jeremy Rivera: What’s been some of the surprising sources or maybe the slap-your-forehead dumb moments of getting clients links and authority? What have been some of your methods for the link building side for service businesses?

Wyatt Bonicelli: Fortunately, it’s pretty easy. There are a lot of good ways to do it. One of my clients is an indoor golf simulator facility. Anything niche-specific is always great-like for tree trimmers, you’d want to get listed on tree trimming directories.

Another thing to get super local links would be to talk to ChatGPT: “Help me develop an advanced Google query where I can find sponsorships, business partnerships in my state, ideally in my city.” Then you reach out to those, see what their pricing is, and a lot of times they’ll have corporate stuff up to $10 grand or more.

If you’re a smaller company, you’re probably just going to want a link from their homepage if that’s offered, or even a link from their event page. If you do that, you want to make sure those pages are going to be indexable. If not, then you won’t get that link benefit.

Really, it’s kind of searching by allintext-like “sponsor” or “business partnership,” “business sponsors,” “corporate sponsors.” You’re looking for that kind of verbiage on websites and then include plus city or state.

Jeremy Rivera: There’s a good resource tool for that-Local Sponsor Finder by Zip Sprout. They have a free tool that lets you do that type of query and search. They have a database that they maintain and do Google crawls, and it’ll send you to sponsor pages.

Local trash cleanup is also something you can do. Set up a local trash cleanup, have your client come out and clean it up. There’s event aggregator sites, Eventbrite. Every city usually has two to three homegrown ones-nice way to get some mix of follow and no-follow, participation for Facebook pages, Reddit pages.

Wyatt Bonicelli: Sounds like good stuff for press releases as well.

Jeremy Rivera: Yeah, because then you can double down on it. You can release “Top Three Green Companies Cleaning Up X Community” and just include the other two companies that have recently done trash cleanups. Yours is at the top and then you’ve got a third-party press release not coming from your client but listing them. That can get you cited in local newspapers.

Not to mention Copilot, Gemini, and GPT-they all are very fast at checking if you ask for what events are coming up. I’ve put up events and been able to ask within 15 minutes of that Eventbrite being posted, and they’re able to find it and reference it and remember it. Nice little extra way to get some AI agent visibility and additional citations.

The Noindex Mistake: A Cautionary Tale

Wyatt Bonicelli: I took on a client who had built his own website. It looked good-had a hero section with a video playing of him squeegeeing windows. He brought me on to do some SEO, so I look and he’s actually got the noindex tag on. He’s had this website for years. I looked at the keyword search volume-people were already looking for his brand. He had branded searches, but he had no way to convert them because he had accidentally left that tag on.

I gave him a hard time about that one, but of course, he’s a window cleaner, not deep diving into SEO. We got that fixed for him and his website improved quickly.

Jeremy Rivera: Just to let you know, I worked with a very large website that was cited by NASA. You could access telescopes across the country through their online portal-huge program mentioned in New York Times, LA Times, hundreds of links. The director of programming had no-followed everything except for the home page. I asked “Why did you do that?” He said “I thought it was a good idea” and was unable to substantiate exactly why. So applying a no-follow to one site isn’t a sin limited just to the little guy.

The Gift Card Strategy: Built-In Affiliate Marketing

Wyatt Bonicelli: Another thing that works really well for spreading out your leads-Steve Hunziker on YouTube has this program where he gives out gift cards to each completed client. So let’s say you’re a window cleaner and you give out three gift cards to each of your clients. On the back it says “gifted by” and you just Sharpie in the client’s name.

Depending on the service value-for window cleaning, $300 plus for a service fee-let’s say $50 off gift cards. You get three of those to the client. They’ve got their name on the back, they disperse those to other people-friends, family, person at the grocery store. “Hey, just got this gift card, you can have it.”

That brings you more leads. The person giving them away looks awesome because they just gave someone a gift card. It’s also a good stocking stuffer, birthday gift. Then you also come back to the person who was the initial service customer and give them like a Chick-fil-A gift card anytime that a card with their name gets redeemed.

It’s kind of like a built-in affiliate program where all parties get a benefit. You can basically set that gift card amount to whatever your normal cost per client comes out to. If it’s $100, they’re going to go get those cards out pretty quick.

LLMs and Local SEO: What’s the Real Impact?

Jeremy Rivera: What do you think is the future when it comes to the interplay of these new ChatGPT agents? Will we continue to see LLM-based technology spread further into the consumer space? Do you think it’ll have a huge impact on consumer behavior?

Wyatt Bonicelli: There’s a lot of money to be made in that realm right now. With my focus largely on local clients, it doesn’t seem to me that LLMs are taking over that space. You’ve got all of the Google Business Profile data owned by Google-they’ve kind of got a leg up there. So anytime you can get your physical address validated, that goes a long way.

For e-commerce or something like that, absolutely, you’re going to need to be pushing LLM SEO, AI SEO, GEO, whatever you want to define it as. But for me and my clients, the local stuff seems to still be pretty heavy on Google Maps.

I do think it’s important to take a step back and look at how the average Joe-or even the generation one or two steps older than us-is using information. Are they logging into Gemini and Perplexity? No. Most people are not even aware of Cursor AI or Claude Code. We’re kind of in a bubble a lot of times and think that everybody else is using the tools the same way that we are.

For home servicesright now, the LLMs are not a huge player, but something I imagine will continue to creep in closer.

Meta Ads and SEO: Building Brand on Both Fronts

Jeremy Rivera: Is it mandatory for a local service business to consider leveraging Meta ads to get market capture or just to solidify to Google that there are local people genuinely searching for this? Almost paying for the ads just to bolster SEO?

Wyatt Bonicelli: SEO is kind of the bread and butter that I do. But at the same time, I like to set expectations clearly from the jump. Depending on the client and their existing website-if they’ve had it for five years with some branded search, SEO is going to be pretty quick. If not, it’s going to take a little longer.

I’m working to package Meta ads in with my current offering to help them get some leads right away and get some return on investment from the jump. So I’m pushing both angles: we’re going to grow quickly with the paid ads, we’re going to grow long term with the SEO.

With Meta ads in particular, you’re actually building brand at the same time-especially if you’re doing those owner intro ads where the owner is doing a talking head video in front of a city landmark. That establishes trust really quick. If you’re in the branded polo, got the hat on, you’re building brand, getting your stuff in front of the right eyeballs.

You can really dial it in. On Meta, you can drop that pin on the downtown area where people are working with a one-mile radius. You can also do that around your ideal neighborhoods.

One of my clients started doing this recently. We set him up with some owner intro ads and hit the main neighborhoods around his area with affluent homes. He went out and did some door knocking a few days later and people were answering the door like, “Hey, I saw your ad already.” They signed up right away because they already trusted him. That was just from a $10 a day Meta ad.

The Lead Follow-Up Problem

Jeremy Rivera: There was a shocking study a few years ago that showed out of home service calls that were done to about 200 businesses, 90% of those calls were never returned at all by the business. Only 4% actually made it to a live agent. Have you tried using any software with AI call return agents or work to set up your clients with a call center?

Wyatt Bonicelli: That’s huge. That’s a huge thorn in the side. After running my first few Meta ad campaigns, I’ve now told people from the jump: “Don’t even consider this if you’re not okay double texting, triple texting, double calling people.”

The Meta ads-you’re interrupting them. They’re just looking at cat videos on their phone. You interrupt them, they say okay sure, type in their name, and then they’ve already forgotten about you. If you don’t call them back within a minute or two… There’s a Harvard study on that. You’re 400% more likely to convert if you call within the first five minutes.

I tell people, don’t feel like you’re bothering them. They raised their hand. They contacted you. They said yes, please reach out to me. Some of those people don’t convert on the fourth, fifth touch point. You got to just keep at it.

Most of my clients are either single owner-operator or they’ve got just a few people below them. Most of them have their wives helping them manage calls-they’ve got a built-in backup there. I’m just building automations where if a call was missed, it’ll email or text the wife or whatever business line. If they’re not going to answer the phone or get back to those people quickly, you’re paying for leads and it’s going right down the toilet.

Quick Wins: Low-Hanging Fruit for Local Service Businesses

Jeremy Rivera: If you had to give low-hanging fruit advice-you’re a local service business owner, what is the easiest thing within the next 24 hours, maybe the next hour, that’s going to benefit you from an SEO or marketing perspective?

Wyatt Bonicelli: Non-SEO would be some print marketing. You’re driving your vehicle around all day. If it’s not wrapped or at least has a magnet on it that says who you are, what you do with a QR code or a phone number-you’re missing out on a driving billboard. That’s something you can do for as little as $50-60 on Amazon. Get a 2x3 car magnet, put one on each side and the back of your vehicle.

In a similar vein, you can get one of those A-frame sandwich boards. Get your branding on there-your name, what you do, QR code-put that out in the street while you’re servicing the job. People drive by. It happens almost weekly now. I’ll get a text: “Hey, just got a lead from A-frame.” That’s like $250-300 one-time deal. Pay for itself on your first lead.

Door hangers-you can leave a door hanger on the nearest 10-15 homes. You can even write the person’s name: “Hey, just serviced your neighbor John, use his name for a $75 discount.” Let’s turn one lead into more. Let’s try to get three or four out of every one. And that pyramid will just continue to grow.

The Chamber of Commerce Boost

Wyatt Bonicelli: As far as SEO, you get a pretty nice bump whenever you join the Chamber of Commerce-that’s always a good trust signal. In the states that I have clients in, I’ve got sheets that compare basically the biggest chambers in their state. Typically, the closest city chamber won’t be the best for you as far as SEO goes. They might be smaller, newer. So it’s worth taking the time to evaluate the cities around you to see what your best option is.

The Google Maps Driving Directions Hack

Wyatt Bonicelli: One more tip: If you have a Google Business Profile and you are regularly driving to that location-so not a service area, but a location-take your phone before you drive into work. Tell your staff to do it as well. Hit airplane mode, wait 15 seconds, turn airplane mode off, turn off Wi-Fi, go to Google Maps, search your primary keyword, click on your business, scroll if you have to-hopefully after a while you won’t have to scroll. Then take the driving directions, turn that on, drive to work. When you get there, turn it off.

That’s one of those trust signals that goes a long way. It’s pretty hard to fake that. There are people getting like 100 phones and SIM cards doing that, but if you have yourself and three other employees doing that every day, you’ve got a lot of trust signals. The airplane mode on/off resets your IP address, so there’ll be a fresh user in their eyes each time.

Frequently Asked Questions