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Glossary
Contractor marketing glossary
The local-marketing terms that come up across this site, defined plainly — what each one means and why it matters to a contractor who would rather be on a job site than reading about SEO.
- Service area page
- A page targeting one service in one place — “gutter replacement in Naperville”. It ranks when it carries real substance for that area: completed jobs, photos, and local reviews. Read more →
- Doorway page
- A thin, near-duplicate page created only to rank, usually by swapping a city name in a template. Google treats doorway pages as spam; substance is what separates a service area page from one. Read more →
- Before-and-after gallery
- Paired photos of a job site before work started and after it finished, usually on a drag slider. The fastest way for a homeowner to judge quality of work without reading anything. Read more →
- Google Business Profile
- The free business listing that decides whether a contractor appears in Google Maps and the local pack. Formerly Google My Business. Photos of completed work are one of the signals it rewards.
- Local pack
- The block of three map results Google shows above the normal links for searches with local intent. For home services it captures most of the clicks, which is why local visibility outranks national SEO. Read more →
- NAP consistency
- Name, address, and phone number matching exactly everywhere a business is listed. Mismatches split a business’s local authority across what search engines read as several different companies.
- Proof of work marketing
- Marketing built from evidence of completed jobs — photos, locations, and reviews — rather than claims about quality. The premise ProjectProof is built on: finished work is the most persuasive asset a contractor already owns. Read more →
- Structured data
- Machine-readable markup (schema.org JSON-LD) describing what a page is about — the business, the service, the location, the reviews. It lets search and AI engines read a page without inferring its meaning from prose. Read more →
- Project map
- A map of a contractor’s completed jobs, pinned where the work happened. It answers “do you actually work near me” — the question a homeowner asks before any other. Read more →
- Listing
- One published completed job: photos, the service performed, where it happened, and the review attached to it. In ProjectProof, listings are the unit everything else is assembled from. Read more →
- Generative engine optimization (GEO)
- Making a site quotable by AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews. It rewards self-contained, verifiable, well-structured answers rather than keyword density. Read more →
- E-E-A-T
- Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness — the qualities Google’s rater guidelines describe. For contractors, documented completed work is the most direct evidence of the first two.
Stop reading about it, start proving it
Every term on this page describes something your finished jobs already earn. Publish a few free and watch the pages build themselves.