Content for home service and trade companies

A homeowner with water on the basement floor is not comparing brand stories. They want to know whether you work on their street, whether someone can come soon, what the first visit costs, and whether the person who arrives is licensed and insured. Most trade websites answer a different question: what the company sells.

Hudson South closes that gap for HVAC, roofing, plumbing, electrical, remodeling, and basement and foundation companies, with service pages and question pages built from what the company actually knows. This page covers what homeowners ask before they call, the rules that shape trade content, what a trade site has to carry, how our four steps run for a trade business, and the work we decline.

What homeowners ask before they call a trade company

The questions sort into a few groups. Fit: does this company serve my town and work on homes like mine. Timing: can someone come today, and what happens after hours. Money: is there a diagnostic charge, is the estimate free, is financing offered. Trust: is the company licensed and insured, who will be inside my house, and what happens if the fix does not hold.

None of this is news to the people who answer your phones. A useful starting point is to ask them, "What did the last ten callers want to know before they asked about price?" and to write the answers down in the callers' own words. That list is usually more specific than the website, and it changes by trade: a roofer's caller the morning after hail worries about different things than someone planning a kitchen remodel.

The rules that shape what a trade company publishes

We do not summarize any state's contractor licensing rule on a client page. In its advice on avoiding scams after weather-related disasters, the FTC tells homeowners to check with their state or county government to confirm a contractor's license, so a page that gives the license number and issuing agency makes that check easy. Your licensing details come from you.

Reviews and testimonials carry federal rules. The FTC's rule on consumer reviews and testimonials (16 CFR Part 465) has sections on fake or false reviews, buying positive or negative reviews, insider reviews, company-controlled review websites, and review suppression. The FTC's Endorsement Guides say endorsements "must reflect the honest opinions, findings, beliefs, or experience of the endorser." Our page on reviews and project proof covers how those rules apply to trade content.

Google publishes rules of its own. Its Business Profile guidelines say a business name should reflect the real-world name, without added service or location information, and that a service-area business should hide its address from customers. Google's spam policies name "multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page" as an example of doorway abuse, and name generating many pages with generative AI tools without adding value for users as scaled content abuse. That is why we write service area pages only where there is something true to say about the place.

Some trades add federal rules of their own, covered on the trade pages. None of this is legal advice; it is the list of topics to bring to your counsel before a page goes live.

What a trade site needs to carry

Google's documentation on AI features says there are "no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary," and that a page must be indexed and eligible to be shown with a snippet to appear as a supporting link. Its listed best practices include keeping important content in textual form and making sure structured data matches the visible text on the page. Our working hypothesis: the plainer the written answer, the more an assistant has to work with, while prices locked inside a brochure image may have limited visibility to those systems.

The answers that matter most are practical: what the first visit includes and costs, which jobs the company takes or refers out, how an estimate is built. An estimate request form is not an explanation of the estimate, and a homeowner comparing three companies notices which one bothered to explain. Trust facts belong in writing too, from license numbers to the insurer to warranty terms and who stands behind them, as our page on license, insurance, and warranty facts sets out.

Hours, service area, fees, and emergency policy should also read the same on the website, the Business Profile, and the phone. When they disagree, a homeowner has a reason to doubt all of them.

How the four steps run for a trade company

Authority Asset comes first. We collect what the company already has: license and insurance documents, warranty terms, approved pricing policies, technician certifications, job photos homeowners agreed to share, and notes from real customer calls. A writer should not have to invent what your technicians already know about the homes in your area, so this step is where that knowledge gets written down and approved.

Hudson Twenty-One records how the company explains things. For an owner-led shop, that usually means how the owner talks a homeowner through a repair at the kitchen table: the plain words, how price comes up, how they say a job is not worth doing. Hudson Twenty-One turns that into a written profile any writer can work from.

Market Intelligence studies the questions homeowners ask in your service area, the seasons that drive demand, competitors' pages, and what assistants currently say when someone asks who to call. AEO Creation then turns those inputs into answer-first pages: each opens with the direct answer, carries only facts the company approved, and goes back to the company for review before it publishes. A fictional plumbing company in Ohio might start with pages on its diagnostic visit and its water heater advice, each written from its own records.

What we will not do

We do not invent reviews, results, response times, years in business, or customer stories. We do not build pages for towns where the company has nothing particular to say, and we do not publish a license, certification, or code claim the company has not confirmed in writing. Questions about what a license permits, what a code requires, or whether a claim is lawful stay with the company's licensed professionals and its counsel. We make no promise that any assistant will mention the company. We take on one business per trade in each market.