A gutter installer in Plantation covers everything from Weston to Fort Lauderdale beach. On his Google profile, he listed nineteen cities. He assumed that was the whole job — tell Google where you work, and Google shows you there. Then a homeowner two miles from his shop searched gutter installation near me and got three companies from Sunrise instead. He was on page two of the map results, in his own neighborhood.

Nothing was broken. His profile was doing exactly what he told it to do. The problem is that a service-area profile and a storefront profile are two different objects on Google, and most contractors set theirs up as a storefront with the address deleted — which is neither.

The math

Google says the local pack is decided by three things: relevance, distance, and prominence. What has changed is how much of each signal now lives inside one property you control. In Whitespark's 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors survey, Google Business Profile signals carry roughly 32% of local pack weight, review signals about 20%, and on-page factors 15%. Eight of the top ten individual ranking factors in the local pack come straight out of the profile itself — primary category, proximity, and keywords in the business name lead the list.

The demand is there, and it starts on a phone. The 2025 Roofing Contractor homeowner survey found that 79% of homeowners still start with word of mouth, but 62% use an online search engine — and the two are not separate paths. A neighbor gives your name at a cookout, the homeowner types it into Google that night, and what loads next decides whether you get the call or whether the map hands them a competitor with 140 reviews.

The referral gets you searched. The profile decides who gets called.

There is a second reader now, and it uses the same data. Google's AI Overviews summarize local results before the map pack is scrolled to, and assistants answering "who does seamless gutters in Weston" are pulling from categories, service areas, review text, and business descriptions — the same fields, read by software instead of a person. Contractor Magazine has been tracking how quickly homeowners are adding an AI assistant to the front of that journey. You do not need a separate strategy for it. A profile written for a machine to parse cleanly is the strategy — which is exactly what the steps below produce.

Here is the part most contractors get wrong. Adding a city to your service area does not move you up in that city. Google's own guidance treats service areas as a description of where you will travel, not as a set of extra pins. Local SEO practitioners who run grid tests — Sterling Sky among them — consistently find that distance is still measured from the physical address you gave Google, even when that address is hidden from the public. Nineteen listed cities and one warehouse in Plantation still means you rank like a business in Plantation.

Why Florida contractors specifically

Three things make this sharper here than in most states.

The service radius is unusually long. A roofer based in Davie routinely quotes in Weston, Hollywood, and Pembroke Pines — three separate municipalities inside forty minutes. Google recommends keeping your service area within roughly a two-hour drive of your base, and allows up to twenty areas. Most South Florida contractors are nowhere near that ceiling on distance, but they blow right through it on count, listing every city they would accept work in rather than the ones they actually serve weekly.

Season compresses the decision. Peak hurricane season runs mid-August through mid-October. After a storm, homeowners do not browse — they call the first three legitimate-looking results and book whoever answers. Roofing, gutters, fencing, tree work, and pool service all spike inside the same 72-hour window. A profile that ranks in one city instead of five is losing its entire season's overflow, quietly, with no error message.

The customer is often not searching in English. In Miami-Dade, a homeowner may type reparación de techos cerca de mí. Your primary category and your service description are what Google matches against that, not your website copy. Contractors who never touched the Spanish side of the profile are invisible to a large share of their own block.

The playbook

Step one — decide honestly whether you are a service-area business. If customers never come to you, Google's guidelines require you to hide the address. Not "recommend" — require. A shop with a counter where a homeowner can walk in and buy gutter guards keeps the address visible and adds service areas on top. A crew that works exclusively at the customer's home clears the address fields entirely. Getting this wrong is the single most common cause of a suspended contractor profile in South Florida, and reinstatement takes weeks you do not have in September.

Step two — cut your service areas down to what you can defend. Replace the list of nineteen with the five to eight cities where you actually completed jobs in the last twelve months. The list itself is not a ranking lever, so a longer one buys you nothing; what it does is set the expectation Google shows searchers, and mismatched expectations produce the review that starts with "they don't even come out here." Order matters less than truth here.

Step three — pick the most specific primary category that exists. Not "Contractor." Not "Home improvement." If Google offers "Gutter cleaning service," "Roofing contractor," and "Metal roofing contractor," take the one that matches the majority of your revenue and add the others as secondary. This is consistently rated the strongest single profile signal in the local pack, and it takes ninety seconds to change.

Step four — build proximity you cannot fake with prominence you can. You cannot move your warehouse. You can outrank a closer competitor by being obviously more established: review volume and recency, photos with real job sites, answered questions, weekly posts, and city pages on your own site that describe actual completed work — the Weston re-roof, the Coral Gables copper gutter run — with photos and dates. Prominence is the only one of Google's three factors that responds to effort.

Step five — make review text carry the geography your address cannot. When a Weston customer writes "they re-hung the gutters on our house in Weston in one afternoon," that sentence does two jobs: it is prominence, and it is the only place in your profile where a city appears in a voice that is not yours. You cannot script a review, but you can ask at the right moment — standing on the driveway at handoff, phone out, one link — and you can reply to every one by name and job. Review signals sit at roughly a fifth of local pack weight in the 2026 Whitespark data, second only to the profile itself, and they are the fastest-moving thing on this list.

Step six — instrument it, then check monthly. Search your main service from a phone in each target city, or use a grid tool, and write down where you land. One measurement is a data point; three months of measurements is a decision. If Weston never moves after ninety days of real work, the answer is usually a second physical location or a partner crew based there — not another twenty cities added to the list.

What good looks like

A gutter contractor in Plantation. Address hidden. Primary category "Gutter cleaning service," secondary "Roofing contractor" and "Gutter installation." Six service areas: Plantation, Sunrise, Davie, Weston, Fort Lauderdale, Pembroke Pines. Forty-one job photos, most under a year old, several with the house number cropped out but the street visible. A post every Tuesday during season showing that week's install. Business description opens with what he does and where, in one sentence, and repeats it in Spanish in the second paragraph.

A service description that works: "Seamless aluminum and copper gutter installation, repair, and cleaning for homes in Plantation, Sunrise, Davie, Weston, and Fort Lauderdale. Family-run since 2011. Free on-site estimates, most jobs completed in one day."

Three questions answered before anyone asks them. The Q&A block on a profile is owner-editable, and almost nobody uses it. Post the three you answer on every call and answer them yourself: Do you serve Weston? — "Yes, Weston is one of our six regular service cities; most estimates there are scheduled within two business days." Do you charge for estimates? — "No, on-site estimates are free within our service area." Are you licensed and insured in Broward County? — with the license number written out. These are the lines an AI assistant can quote back to a homeowner verbatim, and they are the objections that otherwise cost you the call.

A service description that does not: "We are Broward County's premier full-service exterior solutions provider committed to quality and customer satisfaction." It contains no category, no city, and nothing a homeowner or an algorithm can match against a search.

Start with what is already broken

Almost every contractor profile we open has at least one of these: a visible address on a business with no walk-in counter, a primary category two levels too broad, or a service area list written from ambition instead of a job log. None of the three cost money to fix. All three cost visibility every day they stay wrong, and the bill comes due in the same week the storm does.

If you want to see where yours stands before hurricane season peaks, we will look at it — free five-page audit, 48 hours, no sales call. We check the profile setup, the category, the service areas, review velocity against your three closest competitors, and where you actually rank on a map grid across your service cities. You get the findings whether or not you ever hire us: boostmyspot.com/audit.