Most SEO companies in Ontario sell contractors the same thing — keyword reports, ranking screenshots, and a monthly invoice. I do something different.
My name is Trevor Tynes. I’m an SEO consultant based in Southern Ontario, and I work almost exclusively with contractors: excavation crews, concrete contractors, foundation repair specialists, demolition outfits, waterproofing companies, roofers, siding installers, plumbers, masons, and the trades that keep this province built and maintained.
If you’re reading this, you probably already have a website. Maybe a few Google reviews. Maybe a Google Business Profile someone half-finished for you. But your phone isn’t ringing the way it should, and you can see your competitors taking local jobs you’d happily do better. That’s the problem I solve, and this page explains exactly how — so you can decide if I’m the right SEO company for your contracting business.
SEO — search engine optimization — is the process of getting your website and Google Business Profile to appear at the top of Google when a homeowner in your service area searches for the work you do. For a contractor, that means showing up for queries like “basement waterproofing Sarnia,” “excavation contractor Vaughan,” or “foundation repair near me.”
An effective SEO service for a contracting business has four main components:
If your current SEO company can’t tell you which of your jobs came from which keyword in which city, you’re paying for activity, not results.
I’ve audited a lot of contractor websites in Ontario. The same problems show up again and again, regardless of which agency built them.
They treat your trade like every other client. A generic SEO agency in Ontario will plug your business into the same template they use for dentists, accountants, and e-commerce stores. The result is service pages that read like brochures, no understanding of how excavation differs from demolition, and zero awareness that a foundation crack lead is worth twenty times a driveway sealing lead.
They sell rankings, not leads. Hitting position one for “concrete contractor [city]” only matters if it makes your phone ring. I’ve seen contractors paying $2,500/month for top rankings on keywords that haven’t produced a single quote in a year.
They don’t track calls. If you can’t tell which page, keyword, and city produced a lead, you can’t optimize. Most Ontario SEO agencies don’t install call tracking, which means they can’t prove ROI and you can’t fire them with evidence.
They lock you into long contracts before proving anything. A confident SEO company should be willing to show results before asking for a 12-month commitment.
If any of that sounds familiar, you’re not getting SEO — you’re getting billed.
I don’t take every client who calls. I take contractors. Below are the verticals I have direct ranking experience in, with the contractor SEO work I do for each.
Excavation SEO is one of my strongest verticals. Topics I rank excavation contractors for include site preparation, residential excavation, basement digs, septic tank installation, trenching, and grading. Excavation buyers are typically property owners, general contractors, and developers — the page architecture and trust signals differ for each.
I rank concrete contractors across Ontario for poured foundations, concrete driveways, garage pads, sidewalks, decorative and stamped concrete, and repair work. I also do dedicated concrete pumping SEO, which has its own search behaviour — pumping contractors are usually found by other contractors, not homeowners, so the keyword strategy is fundamentally different.
Demolition SEO covers residential teardown, commercial demolition, interior selective demolition, concrete breakout, and disposal. Demolition leads often overlap with excavation and junk removal — I structure the site so each service has its own ranking page without cannibalizing the others.
Foundation and waterproofing are two of the highest-intent contractor verticals in Ontario. A homeowner searching “wet basement Toronto” or “foundation crack repair Burlington” is ready to spend money this week. I cover foundation repair SEO and waterproofing SEO in detail — exterior membrane systems, interior weeping tile, sump pump installation, crack injection, and underpinning each get their own ranking page.
Exterior trades have brutal competition in Ontario, especially in the GTA. I run roofing SEO, siding SEO, eavestrough SEO, and stone masonry SEO programs that combine ranking pages, lead-gen landing pages, and Google Business Profile optimization to win in saturated metros.
I also run programs for plumbers, insulation contractors, patio contractors, general contractors, home builders, and home remodelers. If your trade isn’t listed here but you serve homeowners or commercial property owners in Ontario, ask — the methodology transfers.
I work across all of Ontario, with deep experience in Southern Ontario and the GTA. These are the cities where I currently rank contractor clients and have city-specific local SEO pages built out:
For each city, I build a dedicated service-area page, optimize the client’s Google Business Profile for that geography, and use proximity-aware strategies to compete in the Map Pack. If you want the detail on that, I wrote a piece on how business location affects Google Maps rankings.
This is the part most Ontario SEO agencies skip, and it’s the reason contractors get burned.
Every program I run installs dynamic number insertion (DNI) call tracking on the website. That means each visitor sees a unique phone number tied to the source they came from — Google organic, Google Maps, Google Ads, Facebook, direct, referral. When the phone rings, I know:
Pair that with Google Search Console, Google Analytics 4, and Google Business Profile insights, and you get a complete picture. Not a vanity dashboard — actual lead attribution. When I tell a contractor their Google Maps ranking in Burlington produced 14 calls last month worth roughly $86,000 in pipeline, I can show them every call.
That’s what “SEO services in Ontario” should look like.
You’ll see a lot of marketing language thrown around — SEO company, SEO agency, SEO firm, SEO consultant, digital marketing agency. They aren’t all the same.
For most contractors in Ontario doing under $5M in annual revenue, the consultant model is a better fit. Lower overhead, faster decisions, and the person who knows your account isn’t going to be promoted off it in six months.
I keep it simple. There’s no proposal theatre, no 40-slide pitch deck, and no 12-month minimum to find out if we’re a fit.
I also run Google Ads for contractors when SEO alone isn’t fast enough — usually for new builds, expansions, or seasonal pushes.
Pricing depends on the size of your service area and the competitiveness of your trade. A single-city excavation contractor in Sarnia is a smaller program than a multi-city waterproofing company covering the GTA. Rough ranges:
I’ll quote you a real number after I look at your site and your competition — not before. Anyone who quotes you SEO pricing without auditing your situation is selling a package, not a strategy.
For most contractors in Ontario, you’ll see Map Pack movement and early call volume within 60–90 days of starting a properly executed program. Significant organic traffic and keyword ranking gains typically take 4–6 months. Competitive markets like Toronto roofing or Mississauga concrete take longer than a single-city program in Sarnia or Peterborough.
Local SEO targets searchers in a specific geography and includes Google Business Profile optimization, local citations, reviews, and Map Pack rankings. Regular SEO (sometimes called organic SEO) targets the traditional 10 blue links and doesn’t always have a local component. Contractors need both, with most of the emphasis on local. I wrote more about what local search actually is if you want the longer version.
Sometimes. If your current site is built on a platform that’s hard to update, slow on mobile, or structured in a way that hurts rankings, a rebuild is often cheaper than fighting it. I’ll tell you honestly during the audit. I also offer website design when a rebuild is the right call.
For most contractors, the answer is both. SEO builds long-term asset value; Google Ads gives you immediate calls while SEO compounds. I wrote a detailed take on whether Google Ads are worth it for contractors. Short version: yes, when paired with proper landing pages and call tracking.
Yes, I work with contractors across Canada and have clients in the U.S. as well. But the bulk of my work is Ontario-focused, and that’s where my market knowledge is deepest.
If you have $90,000+ to pay a competent in-house SEO and enough work to keep them busy, sure. For most contractors that math doesn’t work. You get more leverage from a senior consultant who has already ranked dozens of contractor websites than from a junior employee learning on your dime.
I take on a small number of contractor clients each quarter, and I won’t take you on if I don’t think I can move the needle. The first conversation is free — I’ll look at your site, your competition, and your Google Business Profile, and tell you what I see.
If you’ve read this far, you already know whether I’m the kind of SEO company in Ontario you’ve been looking for. If I am, get in touch, and let’s talk about what your phone ringing more often is actually worth.