For fifteen years SEO for contractors meant one thing: rank on Google for your city plus your service. That still matters, but it is now only part of the job. A growing number of homeowners open ChatGPT or Gemini and ask which company they should call, and Google answers many searches with an AI overview before a single blue link is clicked.
Josh Nelson calls the new version of this work search everywhere optimization. The mechanics are different from classic SEO in one important way: generative engines are looking for information they can cite and trust, and most contractor websites do not give them any.
What Is In This Article
What Actually Changed
Run a search right now for your city plus your service. You will typically see Local Services Ads at the top, then paid search ads, then the map pack, then organic results, and increasingly an AI overview summarizing the answer above all of it. Every one of those is a place a customer can pick a company, and only two of them are things you buy.
Generative engines build their recommendations by pinging sources: your website, your Google Business Profile, your reviews across platforms, directories and third party lists. When someone asks for the best plumber in a city, the model is looking for citations, trust factors and specifics. If your site is five service pages and a contact form, there is nothing to cite. Our breakdown of the AI ranking formula goes deeper on the mechanics, and the new SEO formula for home service contractors covers the underlying structure.
Three page types do the heavy lifting. Two of them make contractors uncomfortable, which is exactly why they work.
The Pricing Page
Customers ask three questions before they call: how much will this cost, do you warranty the work, and will you show up when you said you would. Only one of those is genuinely hard to answer on a website, so almost nobody answers it.
You do not need to publish a flat price for a tankless water heater install. You need a page that explains the variables that drive the cost: unit type, venting, permits, existing plumbing condition, labor time. Better still, build a pricing estimator that asks the same qualifying questions your CSR asks and returns a range.
A pricing page does two jobs at once. It gives generative engines the specific content they need to cite you, and it filters out the callers who were never going to buy.
This is the single page most likely to get you named in an AI answer, because it is the one topic where most of your competitors publish nothing at all.
The Top Companies Page
This is the controversial one. Write an honest list of the best companies in your market, publish it on your own website, and include your criteria: review count and sentiment, years in business, number of technicians, licensing, response times, service coverage.
Yes, that means naming competitors on your own site. It works because generative engines look for exactly this kind of comparative, criteria-based content when someone asks who they should hire, and there is usually no independent local source providing it. If you provide it, you become the reference, and assuming your own credentials genuinely stack up, you appear in your own list.
Two rules. It has to be honest, and the criteria have to be stated. A list that ranks you first with no reasoning will not get cited and will not survive a customer reading it.
The Review Rollup Page
All other things being equal, homeowners hire the company with the strongest review profile. Your reviews are probably spread across Google, Angi, Yelp, Facebook and the Local Services Ads profile, which means no single source shows the full picture, and a language model has to piece it together.
Pull them onto one page at yourcompany.com/reviews with proper review schema, showing counts and recent reviews from each platform. Now you are feeding Google and every generative engine a complete reputation profile from a source you control. If your review volume is thin, fix that first with a systematic approach to getting more five star reviews, because a rollup page that shows 14 reviews is not the asset you want.
| Page | Primary job | Difficulty |
|---|---|---|
| Pricing and cost factors | Answers the top pre-call question, earns AI citations | Medium, requires internal agreement on ranges |
| Top companies in your market | Positions you as the independent source | Medium, requires willingness to name competitors |
| Review rollup with schema | Consolidates your reputation into one crawlable source | Low, mostly technical |
The Foundation Still Has to Be There
None of these pages rescue a site with no service pages, no city pages and no authority. The classic work still applies: a page for every service you offer, a page for every city and town you serve, clean on-page structure, and real links and citations pointing at the site. The map pack is still where a large share of calls originate, so your Google Business Profile work matters just as much, which is what our Google Maps playbook is built around. Search everywhere optimization is an addition to that foundation, not a replacement for it.
A 20 Minute Self Audit
Open a private browser window and do this today.
- Search your city plus your top three services on Google. Note whether you appear in the map pack and in the organic results.
- Ask ChatGPT and Gemini for the best company in your city for each of those services. Note whether you are named at all.
- Check whether your site has a pricing page, a comparison or top companies page and a review rollup page. Most contractors will have zero of the three.
- Rate yourself green, yellow or red. Red on the AI questions and zero of three pages means you have a clear, buildable 90 day project.
These are not exotic tactics. They are three pages and a review process, and right now most of your competitors are not doing them.
Get the Book and the Full Growth Training Library, Free
Josh Nelson's book, How to Triple Your Sales by Getting Your Digital Marketing Right, plus the complete Growth Training Library: 10 workshops covering local search, paid ads, website conversion and tracking, built specifically for plumbing, HVAC and electrical contractors. Read it, watch it, and put it to work in your own company.
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