Citation building for contractors

Ask a builder which directories matter and you get the paid ones: Checkatrade, Rated People, hipages, MyBuilder. Our catalog says those are the lower-authority tier. Checkatrade is DR 74, Rated People DR 62, hipages DR 60. Meanwhile Nextdoor (DR 92), Angi, HomeAdvisor and Houzz (DR 91 each), OpenStreetMap (DR 89) and Porch (DR 80) all take a free profile. Whether a paid platform pays for itself in leads is a real business question and we take no view on it. As a citation decision it is settled: the strongest signals available to a contractor cost nothing, and skipping them to fund a subscription gets the trade backwards.

95 mapped sources is the largest of all 45 categories we track, ahead of plumbers (86) and legal (86). It is also the trap. The median DR across the scored contractor sources is 61, well under health (80) or legal (76), because the trade carries a long tail of small builder directories that add rows, not authority. Build the 13 sources at DR 70+ first, then your country's core directories, then stop. Our by-category data shows why row count is the wrong yardstick.

Builders work from a yard, a unit or a home office and sell across a radius, which makes them service-area businesses. Platforms handle that inconsistently: some hide the address, some demand one, some want the towns you cover. We enforce one rule across all of them: a single canonical address on record everywhere, hidden where the platform allows, identical name and phone, and the same service-area towns on every profile that supports them. Mismatched address handling is the most common defect we find in the trades, and the SAB entry explains why hidden data still has to agree.

The free DR 91 tier (Angi, HomeAdvisor, Houzz) is strongest in the United States. In the United Kingdom the trade layer is Checkatrade, MyBuilder and Rated People; in Germany it is CHECK24 Profis (DR 79) and MyHammer; in Australia hipages; in Spain Habitissimo. A contractor list copied from a US blog is mostly inapplicable in Manchester or Munich, which is the whole reason our set is built per country and industry rather than from one global top-50. See the country lists for what your market actually holds.

Send us your canonical business details once. We build the ranked set for your country, apply the service-area rules per platform, and record every listing with its live URL and screenshot as proof. Listings are permanent and yours: there is no recurring fee that removes them, while your subscription keeps them monitored and corrected as directories change and your details move. Google Business Profile and Apple Business Connect stay recommended citations you manage directly. See pricing, or check your current consistency free with the NAP checker.