If you’re a contractor relying on Google for leads, there’s one thing you need to understand:

Ranking your website is no longer enough.

In this episode, I sit down with Darren Shaw, founder of Whitespark, to break down what actually drives local search visibility for home service businesses today.

Darren has spent nearly two decades studying how Google ranks local businesses and publishes one of the most trusted reports in the industry on local ranking factors. In this conversation, we go beyond theory and discuss practical strategies contractors can use to generate more leads from Google Maps and local search.

One of the biggest shifts happening right now is that local SEO is becoming more important than traditional SEO, especially as Google pushes websites further down the page with ads, AI overviews, and map results.

We cover:

• How local SEO actually works for contractors
• Why Google Business Profile optimization is critical for lead generation
• The number one ranking factor most contractors get wrong: their primary category.
• Why choosing a broad category like “general contractor” can hurt your visibility
• How reviews impact rankings and why review recency matters more than review count.t
• The truth about fake reviews and the risks contractors take when buying them
• Why businesses with physical locations tend to rank better than service-area businesses
• How opening additional locations can help dominate a metro mark.et
• The real impact of Google’s Local Services Ads on contractor lead generation
• Why most contractor websites are too thin on content to compete in search
• How AI search and Google’s AI Overviews are starting to change local SEO
• Why short-form video content may become one of the most powerful SEO assets moving forward

Darren also shares several tactical strategies contractors can implement right away—from improving review quality to structuring their websites and service pages to perform better in search.

If you want more qualified leads from Google without constantly increasing your ad budget, this episode will help you understand where the real opportunities are in local search.