Toronto SEO
Home services / contracting · Calgary, AB · serves Calgary + surrounding (Airdrie, Cochrane, Okotoks) · 10 months (ongoing)

Owner, Calgary residential renovation contractor (~12 employees)

A Calgary residential renovation contractor was getting most of its leads from HomeStars and Houzz at high lead-fee costs. We ran a 10-month local SEO program covering GBP, neighbourhood landing pages, and a structured review-request workflow to shift the lead mix toward owned organic.

Editorial note: Anonymized per our editorial policy. No fabricated client names or quotes. All metrics are directional and qualified with attribution; client-reported figures are labelled.

Service & engagement

Service
Local SEO + neighbourhood landing pages + GBP review velocity
Engagement length
10 months (ongoing)

The challenge

The contractor was paying an estimated C$2,000–C$3,500/month in HomeStars + Houzz lead fees and roughly C$3,000/month in Google Ads. Direct organic-sourced lead volume was an estimated 2–4 quotes per month. The website had a single 'Service Areas' page listing 14 neighbourhoods as a comma-separated text block. The GBP had 38 reviews with no responses and a 4.2 average rating dragged down by 4 unaddressed negative reviews. None of the four core service categories (kitchen, bathroom, basement, full-home) had a dedicated landing page.

Approach

  1. 1
    Built four service landing pages (kitchen renovations Calgary, bathroom renovations Calgary, basement renovations Calgary, full-home renovations Calgary) with 1,800–2,400 words each, project galleries, FAQPage schema, and Service + LocalBusiness schema.
  2. 2
    Built six neighbourhood landing pages covering the highest-value Calgary communities (Mount Royal, Aspen Woods, Tuxedo Park, Inglewood, Bridgeland, Mission) with distinct content and project examples per neighbourhood.
  3. 3
    Ran a structured GBP rebuild: addressed all 4 unaddressed negative reviews with substantive professional responses, set up monthly GBP posts with completed-project photos, expanded service categories to 9, uploaded 80+ project photos.
  4. 4
    Established a review-request workflow tied to project completion: owner-sent personal SMS within 48 hours of final walkthrough with a direct GBP review link. Targeted 4–6 new reviews per month.
  5. 5
    Set up monthly tracking on 30 commercial Calgary renovation queries + 12 neighbourhood-specific queries, plus a quarterly comparison of cost-per-lead across owned organic vs HomeStars vs Houzz vs Google Ads.

Outcomes

approx. 2–4/mo → 22–28/mo
Estimated organic-sourced quote requests (M10 vs M0)
client CRM + intake form 'how did you find us'
4.2 → 4.7
GBP rating
as of month 10, 79 new reviews + responses on all negatives
approx. C$340 → C$95
Estimated cost-per-lead across all sources
client-reported; owned organic now lowest CPL channel
approx. C$3,000/mo → C$800/mo
HomeStars + Houzz lead-fee spend
client-reported; kept on for incremental volume

Reflection

The Calgary contractor pattern is the same as the Toronto dental pattern: review velocity + neighbourhood content + GBP discipline. Home services contractors tend to underinvest in neighbourhood-specific content because they assume Calgary is one market — but Calgary's neighbourhood-level intent is real, and a Mount Royal kitchen renovation buyer searches differently than an Aspen Woods buyer. Six neighbourhood pages with substantive distinct content outperformed 18 months of HomeStars spend within three quarters.

Local SEOHome ServicesCalgaryContractorReviews

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