What Homeowners Check Before They Call a Contractor

A contractor knows the day a job is won. Nobody knows the day a job is lost before the phone rings, because nothing happens. Someone looks at the listing, reads a few reviews, moves on to the next name, and calls a competitor.

A study BrightLocal published this summer is unusually useful for seeing into that moment. The local-search software company surveyed 1,227 U.S. consumers who had searched for a local business in the previous three months, asking how many businesses they considered, how fast they chose, and what made them call one and pass on another.¹ The survey covers every kind of local business, from restaurants to accountants. Most of its findings will sound familiar to anyone who has read about reviews. Two of them are specific to the trades, and they point at questions many contractors leave unanswered: how pricing works, and whether the crew will come to you.

Do you need to rank first on Google to get the call?

Ranking matters, and BrightLocal’s own leadership says so plainly. In the first part of the study, 72% of consumers said they looked at three or fewer businesses before deciding, and only 1% looked at more than ten. BrightLocal’s co-founder and CEO, Myles Anderson, reads that as making “being at the top of the results matter more than ever,” and the report says businesses on the second page have “virtually no chance of making the shortlist.”²

When people describe their own choice, though, position sits near the bottom. Asked what they looked at while researching, 16% named how high a business appeared and 6% said they simply clicked the first result. Asked for the top three reasons they contacted the business they chose, 18% named appearing first or near the top, tied for last among the eleven reasons offered.¹

Both can be true. People report what they consciously weighed, and position probably does its work before anyone is weighing anything, by deciding which names they see at all. BrightLocal also notes that the businesses on a person’s shortlist aren’t necessarily the top three results, just the ones that caught their eye.² Our reading is that a contractor’s online presence has two separate jobs. Ranking gets the business seen. What the listing and website say decides whether a person who sees it calls.

Trades customers look for pricing more than most

The second job is where the trades stand apart. BrightLocal found that 36% of trades and home-service customers looked at clear pricing or an offer while researching, against 30% of consumers overall. It also reports, without publishing the figures, that star ratings and review counts carry more weight for trades customers than in any other industry.¹

Across all industries, unclear pricing was the second most common reason people looked at a business and decided not to contact it, cited by 32%, just behind negative reviews at 33%. Clear pricing or an offer was the third most common reason people chose the business they did.¹ The survey doesn’t break those rejection figures out by industry. But trades customers look for price more than most, so our reading is that the trades pay more than most for staying quiet about it.

That puts contractors in an awkward spot, because price is one of the hardest things to state before someone has seen the job. The survey’s wording leaves room. It asked about “clear pricing or a deal/offer”, not a fixed price, and BrightLocal’s advice to trades is to be upfront about rates or to offer a clear way to get a quote.¹ A contractor who can’t publish a number can still answer most of what a homeowner is really asking:

• Is there a charge to come out, and is it credited against the work?
• Are estimates free?
• What’s the usual range for a common job, and what moves it up or down?
• Is financing available for larger work?

The survey can’t tell us which of those answers matters most. It does show that a listing silent on price gives people a reason to keep scrolling.

“Do you come to me?” is the trades version of “how close are you?”

The most common thing people checked while researching was the address, or how near the business was, at 44%. On the list of reasons people chose a business, BrightLocal grouped two things together: “the closest, or able to come to the customer’s home”, at 27%.¹

For a restaurant or a dentist, proximity is a fact about a building. For a roofer or an HVAC company, the building barely matters, because the work happens at the customer’s house. The survey didn’t test the two halves of that answer separately, so what follows is our interpretation: the useful version of “nearby” for a contractor is a plain statement of where the crew works. An address in the next town over, with no service area beside it, can read as “too far” to someone a ten-minute drive away.

This is one of the places Rule & Form’s work lands directly. Every town a business serves gets its own page, written about that town, so someone in a neighboring community can see that the company actually works there.

Why customers pass on a business without calling

The rest of BrightLocal’s findings explain how the losses happen. In their most recent search, 52% of consumers looked at a business and decided not to contact it.¹ None of those people show up in a contractor’s numbers. At most, an analytics report records a visit that went nowhere. As our earlier piece on disappearing clicks argued, dashboards describe only the evidence they can see.

Source: BrightLocal, part 3.¹

Several of those reasons are signs of neglect rather than poor work: no reviews, old reviews, missing information, no photos, a listing that looks unclaimed. BrightLocal found that 62% of the people who were put off cited at least one reason of that kind. Almost everyone surveyed, 96%, said it’s important for a local business to actively manage how it appears online.¹ As Rosie Murphy, who wrote the report, put it about the businesses that get passed over: “Sometimes they’re just the ones where it seems like nobody’s home.” For a contractor too busy in peak season to touch a listing, that’s an uncomfortable thought. Nothing on the listing tells a stranger the difference between a company that’s busy and one that has closed.

What this survey can and can’t tell you

This is a survey of what people say influenced them, not a record of what they did, and people may underreport how much position in the results shaped what they saw. The sample covers all local businesses, and the published results include only a few trades-specific findings: the pricing figure, the unquantified review finding, and one about decision speed. BrightLocal sells listing-management and review software, so it has a commercial interest in these conclusions. It’s one well-documented survey, not an industry consensus.

The decision-speed finding is worth a careful look. Overall, 75% of consumers chose a business in under 30 minutes and 28% in under five. “Trades or home repairs” was among the categories least likely to be decided within five minutes, but “home or garden services” was among the most likely.² Our guess is that someone hiring for repair work inside the house takes a little longer and reads more closely, while someone booking yard work may pick much faster, on less. Either way, three in four people give the decision less than half an hour.

How to check your listing the way a customer does

Most of this costs no money to act on. It takes a look at the business from the outside, a few times a year and before each busy season, asking the questions a stranger would:

• Does the listing or the website say how pricing works, even without a number?
• Is it clear which towns the crew works in?
• Do the hours and phone number match everywhere they appear?
• Are there reviews from this year?

Rule & Form handles part of that list. A Rule & Form website is built from one set of business details, so a changed phone number, a new town or a dropped service updates every page that mentions it, once the owner approves the update. We also check where a business appears on Google Maps, and help keep its Google profile matching its website when the owner adds us as a manager. That keeps hours, phone numbers, towns and services true everywhere, and clear and complete information was the most common reason people gave for choosing a business. Reviews and prices stay the owner’s to earn and to set.

None of the people who pass on a contractor will say why. The listing and the website are the only part of that conversation the contractor gets to write in advance.

Sources

1. BrightLocal (Rosie Murphy), “6% of consumers ‘just click the top result’. So what wins over the other 94%?”, part 3 of BrightLocal’s consumer search behavior series, July 15, 2026. A representative panel of 1,227 U.S. consumers who had searched for a local business in the previous three months. Source of the research-stage, decision, rejection and industry findings. BrightLocal sells local listing and review software.
2. BrightLocal (Rosie Murphy), “You have less than 30 minutes to win a customer. Here’s what the data says.”, part 1 of the same series and panel, June 24, 2026. Source of the shortlist and decision-speed figures and the quotations from Myles Anderson, BrightLocal’s co-founder and CEO.