This is the list we work through on every site we build for a contractor. It is the list behind C & E Construction and Marquez Concrete.

First, what it isn’t. It isn’t a promise of first place on Google. Nobody can honestly promise that. What the list does is make sure that when someone nearby searches for what you do, your site is a clear, correct answer: real pages about real work, labeled properly, with nothing on them that isn’t true.

Pages that earn local searches

A page for each service. The heading names the service and the towns (“Driveways in Noonday, Tyler and East Texas”). The description, the short summary search results show under the title, runs 140 to 160 characters and names the towns. The page says what’s included and how the job runs, answers two to four questions people actually ask, shows photos of that kind of job from your own work, links to your other services, and has an estimate button that ticks that service on the form for them.
A service area page with a real map. Towns placed by their real coordinates, not a clip-art circle. Every town gets its own row with its own link, and a link to the form with that town already filled in.
A job journal. One page per job: a title, a short description, the service, the town (if the owner is happy to say), the date, photos and tags. An archive for each service, newer and older links, and share buttons: the phone’s own share sheet, Facebook, a text, an email, copy the link.
A page for each kind of customer, when there are two. A concrete company that pours for homeowners and for builders needs a page for builders, like Marquez’s. The two want different proof.
The pages that make a business look real. An About page with only confirmed facts, and a privacy page. A thanks page after the form and a 404 page, both kept out of search results.

The tags on every page

Every page carries a few lines of code that visitors never see but search engines and apps read:

A title of about 65 characters or fewer, with the business name added when it fits, and a description of 120 to 160 characters.
A canonical tag with the page’s real address, on the live domain.
A robots tag saying whether the page should be in search results.
Share tags (Open Graph and the Twitter card): the title, the description, the address, and a share image 1200 by 630 pixels with a description of the image. This is what shows up when someone texts the link or posts it on Facebook.
Place tags for the region, the town and its coordinates.
A theme color, an app manifest, icons, and a link to the sitemap.

Structured data

Structured data is a block of code on each page that says plainly what the page is about. We write one connected block (JSON-LD) per page:

The business, with its type (a general contractor, say), name, address on the web, phone, email if confirmed, town and state (no street address unless the owner wants it shown), coordinates, the towns it serves, hours if confirmed, what it knows, what it offers, its profiles elsewhere and its logo.
The website, the page and its breadcrumb trail.
A service on each service page, with what’s included.
Questions and answers where a page has them, and never the same questions on two pages.
A post for each journal entry, with its dates, images, and the service it is about.
A list on each hub page, like the services page or the job journal.

No review stars or ratings in the code unless the reviews are on the page and confirmed.

The files

A sitemap listing every page except the editor, the thanks page and the 404, with each journal entry’s own date.
A robots.txt that points to the sitemap.
An llms.txt: a plain-text summary of the business, its services, its pages and its jobs, for AI search tools and anyone reading without a browser.
A share image for every page, so no link ever shows up blank.

After launch

Some of it only the owner can do, so it goes on a list for them:

A Google Business Profile with the same name, area, phone and hours as the site, linked from the site.
Search Console verified, and the sitemap submitted.
The real domain connected, and the site’s address changed once, in one place.
New jobs added through the site’s editor. Each one becomes a new page, with its own share image, in the sitemap.

What isn’t on the list

Nothing on it tricks anyone. There are no invented reviews or numbers, no pages for towns you don’t work in, and no promise of rank. It is careful, specific work, and a site built for it from the start does most of the job. Local SEO is the service if you’d like it done for yours.

The local SEO checklist we use for East Texas contractors