Skip to content

AI Marketing for contractors

Local SEO for contractors — pressure washing, roof cleaning, gutters, decks — built on the playbook that put an exterior cleaning company on the first page in various Oregon cities.

Book a consultPriced by deliverable
A house washing and driveway cleaning advertisement designed for On Top Home Services, showing a before-and-after of a cleaned house exterior
01Sound familiar

The problem, before it has a name

Most people arrive describing symptoms rather than a project. These are the ones that lead here.

  • 01You rank for your own business name and nothing else
  • 02An agency reports impressions and traffic but never calls booked
  • 03Competitors with worse work outrank you in the towns you drive to
  • 04ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews do not mention you at all
02Approach

How I think about it

The local search playbook here is not theoretical. It was built on On Top Home Services — a home services company competing in 21 Oregon cities against national lead-generation brands with much larger budgets — and it works because it is structural rather than promotional.

That structure is hub-and-spoke: a real page for each service, a real page for each city, and dense internal linking between them so a search engine can see the shape of the business rather than guessing at it. Each page has to carry content that is genuinely specific to it. A stack of near-identical pages is the doorway pattern Google demotes, and it is the single most common way a local SEO build goes backwards.

The same structure is what makes a business legible to AI answer engines. ChatGPT search, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews corroborate across pages; an entity graph they can traverse is worth more than a keyword density they cannot.

02bAfter

What your Monday looks like

Deliverables describe what I hand over. This is what changes for you. You can make any relevant change you want to, easily, yourself.

  • The phone rings from towns you drive to, not only the one you live in.
  • You can see which city produced which job, and what it cost to get.
  • You stop paying for clicks from outside your service area.
  • Your Google profile, your website and your invoice all say the same thing.

For exterior cleaning companies

This one is already built

Pressure washing, roofs, gutters, windows, lights — the operating system, the website and the search structure already run an exterior cleaning company, so for that trade the work starts from something proven rather than invented. Scope and cost are set in a consultation.

03Process

How the work runs

  1. 01

    Baseline

    Search Console, Business Profile and current rankings recorded before anything changes.

  2. 02

    Structure

    Service hubs, city pages and the internal link graph that ties them together.

  3. 03

    Schema

    Structured data so both classic crawlers and answer engines can parse the business.

  4. 04

    Measure

    Analytics wired to booked work, not to impressions.

04Deliverables

What you receive

  • 01Local SEO build-out: hub-and-spoke city pages with real differentiated content
  • 02Google Business Profile optimisation and review generation
  • 03Structured data so search engines and AI answer engines can both parse you
  • 04Content pipeline your team can actually keep fed
  • 05Analytics wired to leads, not to vanity traffic
04bWorked example

A music artist campaign, run end to end

Kickin’ Devils is my own album, which makes it the one campaign I can show you every layer of — art, film, funnel and the commerce underneath. Nothing here is a case study I am describing second-hand.

Kickin’ Devils album artwork
  1. 01Identity. Cover art and a visual language that survives being cropped to a square, a story and a 9:16 cut.
  2. 02Film. A music video and a separate promotional edit — different jobs, same footage, cut for different slots.
  3. 03Funnel. A fan gate that trades an email for the line-dance sheet, then sells the track behind it.
  4. 04Commerce. Catalogue, entitlements and checkout on the artist’s own domain rather than a platform’s.
  5. 05Search. Album and track pages that self-canonicalise here, with the streaming listing declared as sameAs rather than as the album’s identity.

The reason this is on a marketing page rather than a music page: most artist “marketing” stops at posting. The part that pays is owning the list and the storefront, and that is an engineering problem wearing a creative hat.

05Who this is for

Contractors first. Commercial and government too.

I serve all industries.

Contractors & exterior cleaners

  • Quoting that does not wait on someone being at a laptop
  • Scheduling that offers the customer dates the crew is already driving past
  • One system holding the job, the documents and the money

Commercial

  • Integration across tools already under contract
  • Role-based access and a defensible audit trail
  • A rollout plan that survives a staffing change

Government

  • Documented decisions and traceable requirements
  • Procurement-legible scope, deliverables and acceptance criteria
  • Data residency and records-retention answered up front, in writing
07Questions

AI Marketing, answered

How long before this shows up in rankings?

Local pages on an established domain typically start moving in six to twelve weeks; a new domain takes longer. Anyone promising faster is describing paid placement, which is a different product with a different bill.

Is this just writing a lot of pages with AI?

No — and volume without differentiation actively hurts. Each city page has to carry content specific to that city, which is why the roster is a list of markets the work is genuinely offered in rather than every town with a name. Where a city is on the list but outside driving range, the page says so instead of implying a visit.

Do you manage ad spend?

Yes, as a defined campaign with a start, an end and a reported result — not as an open-ended monthly retainer against a percentage of your budget. A short campaign is deliberately small enough to prove or disprove a channel before anyone commits to it. The organic work — structured data, Business Profile, city pages — is what makes that spend cheaper, so it usually comes first.

How is this priced?

Plans for marketing, ads and business operating systems are built on best practices in the field, and they are priced against deliverables rather than by the hour. A short ad-spend campaign can be $500. Anything larger is scoped and quoted in a consultation, with a written scope before anything is built. Book one at patrickwroden.com/consulting/book.

08Also

The other three

AI Automation

Field service and job management software that replaces the repetitive back-office work — quoting, scheduling, invoicing, intake — for exterior cleaning, roof cleaning and contracting crews.

AI Automation

AI Consulting

Spec-first reviews and honest answers about where AI and automation are worth the money in a contracting or exterior cleaning operation — and where they plainly are not.

AI Consulting

Web Design & Development

Contractor websites and quoting software — fast, accessible, search-legible, and free of the plugin tax a template charges you forever.

Web Design & Development

Next step

Bring the process that wastes the most time.

One conversation is usually enough to tell whether ai marketing is the right answer for it — including when it is not.