On this page: What's broken
  1. What's broken
  2. What we install
  3. The case study
  4. Free answers
  5. Straight answers
  6. Book the diagnosis
SEO & AEO for the trades

Contractor SEO in Staten Island & New Jersey:
off the shared-lead treadmill.

Angi sells the same homeowner to five contractors and calls it a lead. We build the machine that makes your phone ring directly — town pages that rank across Staten Island and New Jersey, reviews that convert, AI answers that name you, and wiring that gets you there first. GCs, HVAC, plumbing, electrical, landscaping.

Get your free diagnosis See what we fix
The receipts
Built by operators $227 first commission → $1.3M/yr renewal book two people 4.9★ across 519 FreedInsure reviews
What's actually broken

Why good contractors stay stuck buying leads

The work is good. The referrals are good. The pipeline still runs through middlemen. Six leaks, all fixable.

Leak 01

The shared-lead treadmill

Angi and HomeAdvisor sell the same homeowner to five contractors, then charge each of you for the privilege. You're not buying leads. You're funding your competitors' pipeline too — and racing them to the same phone.

Leak 02

Aggregators outranking actual contractors

Search your trade plus your town and count the directory pages above the first real company. Those sites don't hold a license or a wrench. They rank because contractors let them — then rent the clicks back to the trade.

Leak 03

Service-area pages that don't exist

You work fifteen towns. Your website mentions one. Ranking follows the towns you've built pages for, not the towns you wish would call. No page, no ranking, no phone call — that's the whole rule.

Leak 04

Jobs won by whoever calls back first

The homeowner with no heat calls three companies and hires the one that picks up. Your rankings can be perfect and still lose to faster wiring. Speed is a system, not a personality trait.

Leak 05

AI answers you're absent from

"Good plumber near me" now gets fielded by AI assistants before anyone sees ten blue links. Those answers pull from structured pages and reviews — and most contractors have neither in order. So the machine names someone else.

Leak 06

No math on cost per booked job

Angi money, postcard money, truck-wrap money, referrals — one bucket, nothing measured. If you can't say what a booked job costs from each channel, you can't say which channel to kill. Most contractors are guessing.

What we install

The machine that replaces bought leads

Not slides. Not frameworks. Four pieces, built once, that turn searches in your service area into booked jobs no middleman touched.

  • Town-by-town service-area architectureA real page for every town and every service you actually work — built to rank, not to decorate. The towns come first; the rankings follow them.
  • A review engine — the trades' trust currencyHomeowners hire the contractor with the receipts. The ask goes out at the happy moment, every job, automatically — no hoping, no chasing.
  • AEO: structured answers AI can citeYour pages rewritten so answer engines can lift them — services, areas, and questions answered plainly. When AI fields "good HVAC company near me," you're the name it gives.
  • Speed-to-lead wiringThe homeowner with a burst pipe doesn't leave voicemails. Calls answered or texted back in minutes, forms routed instantly, every lead worked on a written cadence.
FoundTown pages, map pack, and AI answers for every service area
ClickedA site that loads fast on a phone in a driveway
CalledAnswered or texted back in minutes — first, not third
BookedA written follow-up cadence, not a sticky note on the dash
CountedCost per booked job, by channel, in writing every month
Simulation — how the machine treats a lead
20:04:11Lead arrives — quote request submitted
+0:00:08Auto-text sent — consent on file
+0:01:42Dialed — lead connected
+0:02:59Next touch scheduled on the cadence

We bought leads for our own floor for years

The founders didn't read about lead generation — they run it. FreedInsure's lead engine was built by Tino Lardi and Mike Catoggio themselves: they generated and bought leads for their own sales floor, year after year. They know exactly what a shared lead is worth, what it costs to race four competitors to a phone, and what changes when the pipeline is yours. That machine took a $227 first month of commission in February 2023 — two people, zero startup capital — to $1.3M a year with roughly three-quarters of the book renewing and clients leaving the receipts in public: 4.9 stars across 519 Google reviews.

The same machine — visibility, capture, speed, follow-up — is what we install for contractors. And the leverage is arithmetic, not projection: take a 20% close rate to 30% and that's a 50% revenue increase on the same lead flow. See the full trades playbook on the contractors industry page.

Free answers first

Read what we'd tell you anyway

The playbook isn't a secret. Start with these — they're free, and they're most of what a first consult would tell you.

Trades

Contractor marketing: booked solid without buying junk leads

The full system for GCs, roofers, and remodelers — how owned visibility beats the shared-lead treadmill.

Read the guide → Lead economics

Buying leads vs. building your own pipeline: the real math

What a shared lead actually costs by the time it closes — from operators who bought them for years.

Read the breakdown → Home services

Home services marketing: own your zip codes

HVAC, electric, landscaping — how local operators win the "near me" search war town by town.

Read the playbook → Pest control

Pest control SEO: the same wiring, tuned for seasons and plans

A page for every pest in every town you route — and the quarterly plan conversation almost nobody scripts.

See the trade build →
Straight answers

Questions contractors ask us

Contractor SEO is the work of making a contracting business the one homeowners find and call directly — instead of finding a directory that resells the call to five companies. In practice it includes four things: a page for every town and service you actually work, built to rank; a review engine that asks every customer at the right moment; structured pages that AI answer engines can cite when someone asks for a good contractor nearby; and speed-to-lead wiring so the call your rankings earned gets answered in minutes. Rankings, reviews, answers, and speed — that's the whole machine.
There is no honest flat answer, because the work depends on your trade, your towns, and your competition — a one-town plumber and a three-county general contractor are different jobs. We don't quote packages before seeing your market. The free revenue diagnosis reads your current visibility, your competitors, and your lead handling first; then the engagement is scoped to what actually needs fixing, and you see the price and the expected math before a dollar changes hands. The benchmark we hold ourselves to: if the math doesn't beat what your shared-lead invoices add up to, we'll tell you not to hire us.
They are different purchases. A shared lead is rented demand: you pay per name, the same name goes to several contractors, and the day you stop paying, the phone stops. Owned visibility compounds: a town page that ranks keeps producing calls month after month, and every review makes the next job easier to win. Buying leads isn't stupid — it's fast, and sometimes fast matters. But renting forever while your competitors build is how you end up funding their pipeline and yours. The free diagnosis runs your actual numbers on both, so the answer comes from your cost per booked job, not our opinion. The math side is laid out in buying leads vs. building your own pipeline.
Months, not days — anyone promising page one in weeks is selling you something. The build order matters: service-area pages and site fixes land first, the review engine starts producing immediately with every completed job, and rankings compound from there as the new pages earn trust. Speed-to-lead wiring pays back fastest, because it converts calls you're already getting. We put the expected timeline in writing during the diagnosis, and we report what moved, in plain numbers, every month.
Yes — and general contractors, landscapers, roofers, and the rest of the trades. The machine is the same in every trade: HVAC SEO, plumber SEO, and electrician SEO are one playbook with different keywords. "Furnace repair" and "emergency plumber" are different searches, but the homeowner behaves the same way — searches, reads reviews, calls, and hires whoever answers. If your customer searches your trade plus a town or "near me," the playbook applies. See the contractors industry page for the trade-by-trade breakdown.

Get the free contractor revenue diagnosis

Your visibility, your towns, your cost per booked job — pulled apart for free by operators who bought leads for their own floor. Straight verdict, no pitch deck.

Get your free diagnosis
The diagnosis is free. The shared-lead invoices aren't.
Get your free diagnosis