Somebody decided to add a bedroom or fit out a leased unit, so they asked around, typed general contractors near me into their phone, and got three companies out to quote. Whoever turned up on time with a proper number won the job.
That search still runs 20,000 times a month in the United States. It is still one of the ways a client finds you.
The second route is the one that changed. A client now opens ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Perplexity, or reads the AI summary sitting above Google's results, and describes the project the way they would say it out loud: we want to add a bedroom and a bathroom and do not know who to call, or who handles tenant improvement work in this city. They get back one answer with three or four companies named in it, and those are the three that get asked to quote.
Both routes are live and both end in a signed contract. On the second one, being on page one does not get you very far on its own, because the answer names only a few companies and most clients never scroll past it.
Both routes read the same pages. Google's crawler and the AI crawlers fetch the same website and look at the same headings, the same answers and the same evidence that you can run a job properly.
The page that earns you the ranking is usually the page that earns you the recommendation inside AI answers. A clear page on home additions that explains the permitting, the timeline and the real cost range is what puts you at position four on Google, and it is the same page an assistant reads before it puts you on a client's shortlist.
Keep focusing on SEO only and you pick up the rankings while missing the questions where an assistant recommends someone else. Run the two together and every page you publish does both jobs at once.
Done properly this gets you three things: rankings on the Google searches that bring enquiries, recommendations in AI answers across every major assistant, and signed projects from both.
Key takeaway: Clients now find construction companies through two routes, Google results and AI answers, and if you follow this guide the same set of pages will win you both.
All Seasons Construction is a family-owned company in Wichita, Kansas, trading since 1991. No franchise behind them, no private equity owner, no national advertising. They did the work properly instead, and their results in SEO and AI search now match companies operating in every state.
Their Domain Rating is 6. That is about as low as a real business gets, and most agencies would tell you it rules out competitive terms altogether. They sit fifth for remodeling contractor, a search of 14,000 a month that our data scores at difficulty 56.
Those searches matter because of who runs them. Somebody typing general contractors near me is about to ask three companies to quote, and the shortlist is being written before you ever hear from them.
| Search | Position and detail |
|---|---|
| contractors near me | #10 of 52,000 monthly searches, difficulty 34 |
| bathroom remodeling near me | #7 of 43,000 monthly searches, difficulty 30, and the highest-value term in the set at $11.00 a click |
| storm damage restoration | #4 of 28,000 monthly searches, difficulty 0 |
| general contractors near me | #8 of 20,000 monthly searches, difficulty 0 |
| construction companies near me | #7 of 17,000 monthly searches, difficulty 0 |
| general contractor near me | #9 of 15,000 monthly searches, difficulty 33 |
| siding replacement | #2 of 15,000 monthly searches, difficulty 8 |
| remodeling contractor | #5 of 14,000 monthly searches, difficulty 56 |
Three patterns produced that. They cover the whole job rather than one trade, so windows, siding, decks, bathrooms, roofing and storm damage each get their own page, and the umbrella rankings came out of that depth rather than being chased directly.
They also treated the plural and the singular as two separate fights. General contractors near me and general contractor near me are both in their top ten, and as you will see in a moment those two searches are nothing like as similar as they look.
And they hold the hard umbrella terms from a standing start. Fifth for remodeling contractor at difficulty 56, and tenth for contractors near me at difficulty 34, all at Domain Rating 6.
None of this needed a franchise. Their 1,399 organic keywords bring 61,557 visits a month, 106 of those keywords sit in the top three, and the traffic is worth $208,769 a month in equivalent paid clicks. They spend about $56,331 a month on ads, so the organic side is returning roughly 3.7 times what the advertising costs them.
In the guide below we show you how to do SEO and AEO for construction companies the same way, using our five-step framework.
All figures from ContentMonk, US data, August 2026. All Seasons Construction has no affiliation with ContentMonk and is not a customer.
Below we walk through each of the five steps of how to do SEO and AEO for construction companies, in order: finding the searches and prompts that bring enquiries, working out why other companies are winning them, building better pages, getting mentioned on the sources AI trusts, and keeping the results once you have them. Run all five and you get rankings on Google, recommendations in AI answers, and signed projects from both.
Everything here is specific to construction, including the commercial side that most contractor marketing ignores entirely. The examples are real searches clients run and the difficulty scores are real.
Start by writing down every search and every question that comes from somebody ready to ask for a quote.
A bottom-of-funnel prompt is one where the person has already decided they need a contractor and is choosing which ones to invite. Who does home additions around here is one of those. What is the difference between a joist and a rafter is not, because that person is not building anything. Both are worth having eventually, but only the first one gets you on a bid list.
| Keyword they type into Google | Prompt they give an AI assistant |
|---|---|
| general contractors near me | Who are the good general contractors near me and how do I tell them apart? |
| home addition contractors near me | We want to add a bedroom and bathroom, who does additions around here and what will it run? |
| design build contractor | What is design build and which firms near me work that way? |
| tenant improvement contractor | We are fitting out a leased office, who handles tenant improvement work in this city? |
| basement finishing contractors near me | Who finishes basements near me, and do I need permits? |
In most trades the big generic search is the hardest one and the specific services are wide open. In construction it runs the other way round.
General contractors near me gets 20,000 searches a month at difficulty 0. Construction companies near me gets 17,000, also at difficulty 0. Meanwhile remodeling contractor sits at difficulty 56, custom home builders near me at 52, and commercial general contractor at 47. The umbrella terms are open and the specialisms are defended.
Now look at these two.
| Keyword | Monthly searches and difficulty |
|---|---|
| general contractors near me | 20,000 searches, difficulty 0 |
| general contractor near me | 15,000 searches, difficulty 33 |
Same intent, one letter different, thirty-three difficulty points apart. If you had assumed one page covers both, you would have aimed at the hard one by accident. This is why you check each phrasing rather than trusting a rule of thumb, and it is the single most useful habit in this whole guide.
Almost every construction website in the country is written for homeowners, which leaves the business side unguarded. Tenant improvement contractor sits at difficulty 0. So does warehouse construction companies, and so does design build contractor at 1,400 searches a month.
If you do commercial work at all, those pages are the cheapest wins available to you, and the projects behind them are larger than anything on the residential list.
Work through every service you offer, every project type you take on, every town you cover and both sides of your business. Use the words clients use rather than the trade terms, and check the plural and the singular separately.
Whoever ranks and gets recommended today did the work to get there. Nobody is going to hand you the method, so you look at what is producing their results and build something better.
For each search on your list, check four things.
Once the research is done, everything starts with your own pages. This is the part you fully control and the part most companies skip, because a gallery of finished projects and a contact form will not rank for anything competitive.
For a page to rank and get cited, or as we prefer to put it, to influence what AI says about your market, it has to be objectively better than what is already there. Better means more actionable, backed by something only you know, and genuinely more useful to the person reading it.
A company relying only on its own website tends to reach roughly 15 to 20% AI visibility and then stall. Everything above that comes from other websites talking about you.
Backlinks from trusted domains are still one of the strongest ranking factors in Google, and those same domains are the ones AI assistants cite. One relationship pays you twice.
Construction has two citation landscapes because it has two buyers, and most companies work only the first one.
On the residential side: Google Business Profile, which is free and feeds both the local pack and much of what appears in AI Overviews, then Houzz, which carries more weight in building and remodeling than in any other trade. After that Angi, HomeAdvisor, Thumbtack, Porch, BuildZoom and the Better Business Bureau. Watch the cost of the paid ones: HomeAdvisor charges roughly $15 to $60 a lead whether or not you win the job, and BBB accreditation runs from a few hundred dollars up to about $4,000.
Then the association directories, which are undervalued and cheap: the NAHB, NARI and your local builders association. All Seasons is listed with all three.
On the commercial side there is a whole second set that almost no contractor's SEO touches. The Blue Book Network, now part of Dodge Construction Network, along with Dodge itself, ConstructConnect and BuildingConnected, plus the Associated General Contractors and Associated Builders and Contractors chapter directories. If you bid commercial work, these are where general contractors and owners go looking.
Positions move, competitors publish, and models get retrained and start citing different sources. A page that named you in March can name someone else by August without anything on your site changing.
Four things to check every week: which tracked prompts stopped naming your company, which pages lost positions, which competitor started appearing where you used to, and which pages are collecting impressions without clicks.
When a page slips, improve it rather than replacing it. Put a sharper answer near the top, refresh the cost ranges and the dates, add the projects you have finished since you wrote it, and you keep the authority the URL has already earned.
Construction searches happen less often than plumbing or roofing searches, because people remodel rarely and build almost never. What changes the arithmetic is what each one is worth. Here is the maths for one company in one major city.
These are ten bottom-of-funnel searches in Denver, each a different intent.
| Bottom-of-funnel search | Monthly searches |
|---|---|
| bathroom remodel denver | 500 |
| kitchen remodel denver | 450 |
| basement finishing denver | 300 |
| general contractor denver | 250 |
| home remodeling denver | 250 |
| deck builders denver | 200 |
| construction companies denver | 200 |
| custom home builders denver | 150 |
| adu builders denver | 150 |
| design build denver | 20 |
That is 2,470 searches a month in one city, which is a fraction of what a plumber sees. The click prices tell you why it does not matter: the highest in the set is $18.00 for basement finishing denver, and a single one of those clicks can turn into a project worth more than a plumber earns in a quarter. The national near-me terms are where the volume really sits, and general contractors near me alone is 20,000 a month at difficulty 0.
Traffic per page varies enormously, so counting articles tells you nothing useful. One page on the right bottom-of-funnel term can carry a thousand visits a month while five others carry fifty between them. What follows is per-plan capacity: how much of the opportunity each plan lets you research, publish against and monitor at the same time.
| How you run it | What you can work at once | Organic visits per month by month 12 | Signed projects per month by month 12 | Revenue earned in year 1 * |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Starter, $99/mo | One town, a focused set of project types | 900 | 1.1 | $188,800 |
| Pro, $199/mo | Residential and commercial plus the cost and process questions | 1,800 | 2.2 | $377,500 |
| Scale, $449/mo | Multiple towns or divisions, tracked and updated together | 3,800 | 4.6 | $797,000 |
| Done for you, quoted | Our team runs the whole framework for your company | 6,500 | 7.8 | $1,363,300 |
* These figures are deliberately conservative. The model treats every page as an average performer, and that is not how this works in practice. When the work is done properly, one page on the right bottom-of-funnel term can outperform ten others, so real numbers are likely to be considerably higher.
Custom plans go beyond Scale, so the top self-serve row is a starting point rather than a ceiling.
Done-for-you sits higher on judgement rather than output. Our team picks winnable targets on the first pass, produces content that gets cited sooner, and does the third-party work in step 4 that busy companies postpone, with scope agreed per engagement.
On the payback: at $35,000 a project, one signed job covers the Starter plan for nearly thirty years.
Illustrative model built on the assumptions listed above. ContentMonk data, US, August 2026. Not a guarantee of results.
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Get a Free Strategy CallAEO, or answer engine optimisation, is the work of getting your company named when a client asks an AI assistant who to call. It covers ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. In practice it means building pages that answer client questions clearly and getting mentioned on the third-party sources those assistants cite.
SEO gets your pages ranking in Google's list of blue links. AEO gets your company named inside an AI-generated answer, where only a few names appear at all. They rely on the same pages and the same third-party mentions, which is why running them together costs little more than running one.
Assistants build answers from pages they trust: your own site, Google Business Profile, Houzz, your NAHB and local builders association listings, the Blue Book if you do commercial work, local press, and the Reddit and Facebook threads where clients ask for a name. Companies that get recommended have accurate listings everywhere, strong pages on the work they do, and third-party coverage backing both up.
Referrals are finite and they arrive on someone else's schedule. General contractors near me gets 20,000 searches a month and not one of those people has a referral, which is precisely why they are searching. Most companies use search to fill the gaps between referred projects rather than to replace them.
It works better for commercial, because almost nobody is doing it. Tenant improvement contractor, warehouse construction companies and design build contractor all sit at difficulty 0 in our data, while the residential specialisms like custom home builders near me sit above 50.
Running it yourself with software starts at $99 a month, and a seven-day free trial needs no card. Agency retainers in construction typically run from a couple of thousand a month upward depending on how many markets and divisions you cover. Our done-for-you engagements are quoted per company.
Expect the first movement around month three or four, with results compounding from there. Bear in mind the sales cycle sits on top of that, since a client who finds you in month four may not sign until month seven. The forecast on this page assumes nothing happens at all for the first three months.
Yes. Google still sends the largest share of client traffic, and the assistants read the pages Google ranks. Strong SEO is what makes your site visible to the crawlers that feed AI answers, so dropping it removes the foundation the AI visibility sits on.
Start a free trial to see exactly where your company stands, get the opportunities ranked in order of what is worth your time, and turn both into signed projects. Or have our team run the five-step framework for you.