Question 1

How much does a website cost for a contractor in Central Florida?

Accepted Answer

In Central Florida, a properly built contractor website typically runs $2,000 to $8,000 as a one-time project from an independent studio or freelancer, $10,000 and up from a larger agency, and $20 to $80 a month if you build it yourself on Wix or Squarespace. The sticker price is the wrong thing to compare, though. What matters is whether the site is built to rank locally, whether it converts visitors into calls, and whether you own it outright when it's done, because a cheap site you rent forever costs more than an expensive one you own.

Question 2

Do I need a website if I already have a Google Business Profile?

Accepted Answer

Yes, but not because a Google Business Profile is useless without one. A well-tended profile can win map-pack calls on its own, especially in less competitive trades. The problem is the ceiling: Google cross-references your profile against your website to decide how much to trust you, so profiles with no site (or a thin one) consistently lose pack positions to competitors whose sites confirm their services and service area. And AI assistants like ChatGPT have almost nothing to quote about a business with no site. A profile alone gets you found sometimes; a profile plus a real site is what holds the position.

Question 3

Why does my competitor show up in ChatGPT and I don't?

Accepted Answer

Because the AI can read their business and can't read yours. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews don't maintain a directory of good contractors; they assemble answers from what's publicly crawlable: the text on your website, your structured data, your reviews, and mentions of you on other sites. A competitor with a fast, crawlable site, clear service and city pages, and machine-readable structured data is quotable, so they get quoted. A business whose site is a slow page-builder shell with three sentences of text gives the AI nothing to work with, so it recommends someone else.

Question 4

How long does local SEO take to work?

Accepted Answer

For most local businesses: visible movement in 60 to 90 days, meaningful lead flow in 4 to 6 months, and a compounding advantage after a year. Google Business Profile improvements often move faster, sometimes within weeks, while competitive organic rankings are the slow end. Anyone promising page one in 30 days is either targeting phrases nobody searches or planning to be gone before you notice. Local SEO is a flywheel, not a switch: slow to start turning, and very hard for competitors to stop once it's moving.

Question 5

Wix, Squarespace, or a custom site: which should a local contractor use?

Accepted Answer

If you're just starting out and need something online this week, Wix or Squarespace is genuinely fine: a clean builder site beats no site, and it beats an expensive site you can't afford yet. But for an established contractor whose jobs are worth thousands of dollars, the builder becomes a ceiling: the sites are heavier and slower than hand-built pages, you can't fully control the technical structure Google and AI assistants read, and you're renting your presence on a platform you can never leave with your site intact. Builders aren't bad. They're a ceiling, and the trades hit it earlier than most businesses because local rankings are won on exactly the things builders limit.

Question 6

How do I show up in the Google Map Pack in Lake Mary and Seminole County?

Accepted Answer

Google decides the map pack on three inputs: relevance (how clearly your profile and website match the search), distance (where the searcher is standing), and prominence (reviews, links, and how established your business looks across the web). You can't control where searchers stand, so the fight is won on the other two: a completely built-out Google Business Profile in the right categories, a fast website with a page for each service and each town you serve, and a steady stream of reviews. In Seminole County that bar is lower than it should be: most trades here are coasting on incomplete profiles and stale sites, which is exactly why the pack is winnable.

Question 7

Is SEO worth it for a pool builder, cabinet shop, or HVAC company?

Accepted Answer

Almost always yes: high-ticket trades are the single best case for local SEO that exists. When one pool build, custom kitchen, or system replacement is worth five to six figures, the channel only needs to deliver a handful of jobs a year to outperform anything else you could spend the money on, and unlike ads, the asset keeps working after you stop paying to build it. Two honest caveats: it takes months to mature, not weeks, so it can't rescue a slow quarter that's already here. And if you're booked out and turning work away, fix capacity before visibility.

Question 8

What's the difference between web design and local SEO, and do I need both?

Accepted Answer

Web design is what your site is: the pages, the words, the speed, what happens when someone lands on it. Local SEO is whether anyone finds it: rankings, the map pack, your Google Business Profile, reviews, and content matched to what people search. They're different disciplines that only produce revenue together: a beautiful site nobody finds earns nothing, and traffic sent to a site that doesn't convert is wasted. Whether you need both right now depends on what you already have, but you will eventually need both, and they work far better designed as one system than bolted together from two vendors.

Question 9

How do I get more Google reviews for my contracting business?

Accepted Answer

Ask every customer, at the moment the job wraps up, with a direct link. That one habit outperforms every review tool and reputation service sold to contractors. Text the link while the customer is still admiring the finished work and most happy customers will do it; wait until tomorrow and most won't, not out of malice but because life moves on. Steady beats bulk: a review or two every month for a year builds more ranking power than fifty in a burst, which Google's filters treat with suspicion anyway. And never buy reviews or offer incentives for them: both violate Google policy and FTC rules, and both can get a profile suspended.

Question 10

Why is my website slow, and how fast should it load?

Accepted Answer

A local business site should show its main content in under 2.5 seconds on a phone. That's the threshold Google's own Core Web Vitals treats as 'good,' and it's roughly where visitors stop giving up before the page appears. Most slow contractor sites share the same three problems: enormous unoptimized photos (a single uncompressed job photo can outweigh an entire well-built page), bloated page-builder code hauling a whole toolkit to every visitor, and cheap hosting. This isn't theoretical for us: we rebuilt a client site that took about 25 seconds to load on mobile and weighed 6 MB, and got it under 2.5 seconds at roughly 600 KB: same brand, same content, one-tenth the weight.

Question 11

Who owns my website when I pay an agency to build it?

Accepted Answer

Read your contract, because the honest answer is: often not you. Plenty of agencies and 'free website' programs keep ownership of the domain, the site itself, or both, which means the day you stop paying, your website, its content, and every ranking it earned can vanish. At minimum you should own four things outright: your domain registration (in your own registrar account, not the agency's), your website files and content, your Google Business Profile, and your analytics and tracking accounts. A vendor who won't put that in writing isn't building for you. They're renting to you.

The questions owners actually ask.