Nine industries, and they are not nine different jobs.
They split into four groups by how the customer behaves — how fast they decide, what they check before they call, and what actually determines who gets the work. The SEO follows the buyer, not the industry.
When something has already gone wrong
Roofers · HVAC · Painters
Nobody is researching. There’s water coming through a ceiling, or the heating has failed in the first cold week of the year. They search, they look at the map pack, they call two or three, and whoever picks up gets the job.
Roofers. The single most common failure has nothing to do with keywords: the site isn’t ready when the season starts. Storm season doesn’t creep up on anyone, and firms still begin thinking about search after the phones should already be ringing.
The two things missing from almost every roofing site I open are finance options and insurance claims help. A new roof is a five-figure decision made under duress by someone who hasn’t budgeted for it. Most of them are also about to have an argument with an insurer they don’t know how to have. A page that says “we’ll help you with the claim” and a page that says “here’s how you can pay for this” answer the two questions actually stopping the call — and most roofing sites answer neither.
HVAC. One site serves both the emergency work and the maintenance contracts. They’re different buyers, but they’re not different websites, and splitting them is a common and expensive mistake.
Painters. The odd one out, because there’s no emergency. Painters get called on portfolio and reviews — specifically reviews with photographs attached. Nobody hires a painter from a description. They hire from seeing a room that looks like theirs, finished well, with someone else’s word attached to it.
When people read before they book
Chiropractors · Dentists · Naturopathy
Higher lifetime value per patient, longer consideration, and unlike an emergency call-out the website genuinely gets read before anyone picks up the phone.
Chiropractors. I audited three clinics this year and found the same five gaps in all three: the Business Profile map missing or pointing at a different business entirely, no schema anywhere, no reviews page on their own site, no video, and no decision about whether they were targeting one town or several. None of it exotic. All of it missing from three out of three practices paying for a website and wondering why it wasn’t working.
More on how I approach local SEO →
Dentists. Here the website does matter, and it comes down to two things: the services you actually offer, spelled out properly, and your reviews. Practices lose patients to a competitor whose site simply says more clearly what it does.
Naturopathy. The hardest of the three, and the reason isn’t technical. It’s a slow niche because most people don’t know what naturopathy is for over the long run. You’re not competing for someone who has decided and is choosing a provider — you’re often the first page that explains why the thing is worth doing at all. That changes what the content has to be.
When one client is worth a year of the others
Personal Injury · Criminal Defense · Senior Living
One conversion can be worth more than everything else on this page combined. All three carry real trust requirements and all three have the longest, most difficult decision process — nobody chooses a defense attorney or a care home casually.
Criminal defense is where the standard local playbook breaks hardest. Everyone tells you to build review volume. But a client whose serious felony charge was dismissed will never write a public review under their own name, so at that end of the practice you cannot win the review race and shouldn’t build a strategy that depends on it.
Why review advice fails for criminal defense →
Senior living has a structural quirk worth naming: the person searching is almost never the person moving in. It’s usually an adult child, often at a distance, often guilty about it. They need to see the place — photographs and video of the actual facility, and the features that matter to someone with reduced mobility or memory problems. A brochure site with stock photography of smiling strangers fails that person completely.
Automotive
Dealer, service and parts are three different problems wearing one industry label. Service and parts are where the work is — that’s recurring, local, and searched constantly. Dealer inventory is a different game and usually somebody else’s.
I’ve worked both the local side and the ecommerce side, including a marketplace where 8,317 pages out of roughly 9,200 indexed had nothing on the site linking to them.
Twice, it worked too well
The two engagements I’d point to as my best results — one roofing, one automotive — both ended the same way. The client stopped the service.
Not because it didn’t work. Because they were getting more calls than they could answer, and it became a problem they’d rather not have.
I’ve thought about that a lot, and I’ve stopped treating it as a compliment. A campaign that outruns what the business can handle is a planning failure, and it’s mine as much as theirs. More calls than you can take means missed calls, and a missed call from someone who needed a roof today is a customer who called your competitor ninety seconds later. The visibility was real. The value leaked out of the other end.
So it’s now the first thing I ask about. Not “how many leads do you want” but “what happens on the day you get eight of them, and who answers the phone at seven in the evening?” If the answer is nobody, we fix that before we fix the website — because there’s no point being found by people you can’t serve.
What doesn’t change
The diagnosis. I went back through eleven audits I’ve written since 2021 — clinics, a Shopify store, a car marketplace, education platforms, an ad agency — and the same three findings came up almost every time. Internal linking in eleven out of eleven. Schema in ten. Thin content in ten.
Nothing else came close, and none of it sorted by industry.
What changes between verticals is the fix — what to do first, what the buyer checks before calling, what you can safely ignore. That part needs someone who has seen the vertical. The diagnosis doesn’t.
What an audit actually covers →
If your industry isn’t here
It probably still applies. The list above is where I’ve done the most work, not the limit of it.
If a site should be ranking and it isn’t, that’s the job regardless of what the business does. An SEO audit is where that starts — and if I look and there’s nothing worth fixing, I’ll tell you that.