18 months with a prior agency.
Zero calls. Here is what we found.

Three patterns from this specific engagement that generalize across renovation contractor work in dense urban Northeast US markets — surfacing them because most agencies do not, and they affect audit conclusions more than most technical findings:

1. A residential address on a contractor's Google Business Profile is a ranking suppressor that most agencies never audit for — and it is one of the first things we check. Service-area businesses (contractors who go to the customer rather than receive walk-ins) should never display a home address on their GBP profile. Google's local ranking algorithm treats a displayed residential address as a trust-diluting signal for service-area businesses: it creates category ambiguity (is this a showroom? a walk-in business?) and triggers suppression in local pack results where a properly configured service-area business without a displayed address would rank higher. The fix is straightforward — switch to service-area business configuration, remove the displayed address, define service area by named cities or postal codes — but it requires knowing to look for it. The prior agency had managed this GBP for 18 months and had not identified or corrected this. We found it in the first 20 minutes of the audit. It was the single most impactful fix in the entire 90-day remediation plan, and it cost nothing to implement.
2. New York City is not one Local SEO market, and agencies that treat it as one are producing reports without producing rankings. The five boroughs — Manhattan, Brooklyn, Bronx, Queens, Staten Island — each have their own Google local index context, their own competitive landscape, and their own search demand patterns for renovation services. "Kitchen renovation" searches in Park Slope Brooklyn are different query events from "kitchen renovation" searches in Riverdale Bronx, even though both are technically NYC. A contractor with one generic service page claiming to serve all five boroughs has no page that tells Google they are specifically relevant to a homeowner in a specific borough. We built dedicated borough-specific location pages for all five boroughs, each with borough-specific H1, schema with borough-specific areaServed, and borough-referenced body content. The result is five separate ranking opportunities instead of one underperforming generic page. Most renovation contractor agencies in the New York market are not doing this because it requires building five pages instead of one. The ranking gap is exactly proportional to that effort gap.
3. When an agency delivers monthly reports for 18 months without generating calls, the problem is almost never the channel — it is the foundation. Fixing the foundation before adding any new spend is always the right sequence, and clients almost never hear that recommendation from their current agency. In this engagement, the 18-month prior agency relationship had added content, tweaked meta descriptions, and sent monthly ranking reports. But the GBP had a residential address suppressor, the citation profile had 5 harmful listings, the schema was on an unmaintained plugin, and the redirect map was undocumented. None of these are content problems. None of them are fixed by writing more blog posts or improving meta descriptions. They are foundation problems, and foundation problems block all other SEO work from producing results. The correct sequence is: audit the foundation, fix what is broken, then layer on content and citations. An agency that skips the audit and goes straight to monthly deliverables is billing for outputs that cannot produce outcomes on a broken foundation. We recommend this audit-first sequence to every contractor we onboard, specifically because this engagement showed us what 18 months of output-without-foundation looks like in practice.

These observations generalize across renovation contractor and broader home services work in dense urban Northeast US markets — not unique to this single engagement.