Tucson SEO for Small Businesses That Need the Phone to Ring
I'm David Cragg. I've been in search since 1990, and I do local SEO, technical SEO and content for small businesses across Tucson and Southern Arizona.
One consultant, not an agency. $1,000 a month, no contract, and the person who answers the phone is the person doing the work.
Or call (520) 207-6000 and I'll tell you where you stand.
Written by David Cragg, Tucson SEO consultant, in search since 1990 · Last reviewed September 18, 2026
1990
In search since. Two internet marketing companies founded and sold along the way.
$1,000
A month, month to month. No contract, no onboarding fee, no discovery phase.
1 to 21
Trucks. R&R Plumbing, a Southern California client, over about ten years. The case study.
What Tucson SEO Includes Every Month
Every client gets a plan built around their trade, their territory and the three or four competitors actually standing between them and the phone call. The price is the same $1,000 for everyone. What happens inside the month is different for every client.
Local SEO and Google Business Profile
Google puts three local listings above the first organic result. If you're not in that Map Pack you're invisible to the customers with the most buying intent in your market. Profile optimization, citations, geo-targeted content and a review system that produces the trust signals local rankings run on. Google's own documentation says local results turn on relevance, distance and prominence, and only two of those three are anything you can influence.
Technical SEO
Good content on a technically broken site is premium fuel in a car with a flat tire. Site speed, Core Web Vitals, schema markup, crawlability and indexing — audited, fixed, then watched, because most of it breaks quietly.
Content Creation
Three to ten new pages of original, locally written content every month. Service pages, location pages and articles aimed at your keywords and your territory, with real local detail instead of a template with city names dropped into it. Google's guidance on helpful, people-first content is the standard I write to, and it's the part that compounds.
Website Design
If your site was built a decade ago, or it loads slowly enough that Google holds it back, no amount of SEO fixes the foundation. SEO-first WordPress builds with clean architecture, fast load times, working mobile layouts and structured data from day one.
SEO Audits
If you're not ready to hire anybody, start here. I go through your site, your Google Business Profile and your top three Tucson competitors, and hand you a prioritized list of what's holding you back. Some people take that list to their current agency. That's fine with me.
Reputation Management
Reviews are a ranking factor and a conversion factor at the same time. A system that asks the right customers at the right moment, plus monitoring on the profiles where your reputation actually gets decided.
What It Looks Like When It Works
I ran Temecula SEO in Southern California from 2007 until June 2022, when I moved the practice to Tucson. All three clients below are from those years, and I'd rather name them and say where they are than let you assume they're local. An electrician in Marana and an electrician in Murrieta are fighting for the same three Map Pack slots.
R&R Plumbing: one truck to 21
Ryan Roch called me when R&R Plumbing was one truck, one phone and a site that ranked for the company name and nothing else. Ten years later it was 21 trucks. Ryan reports revenue up 1,400 percent over the engagement — that figure is his, from his own books, not something I can see or verify. What I can show you is the traffic, rankings and review growth behind it. Read the case study.
Platinum Air: one city to the whole service area
Platinum Air, a heating and air conditioning company, ranked well in exactly one city — the one its office sat in. We built a real page for every town it served instead of one template with the city name swapped. The towns came online one at a time over about three years, and the company hired four technicians to keep up. Read the case study.
An electrician who stopped renting his customers
Beau ran a one-man electrical shop and paid roughly $3,000 a month in ads to keep the phone ringing. As organic calls came up the ad budget came down, and eventually went to zero. That money became payroll: three years in, he was a four-man shop that owned its own lead flow. Read the case study.
All three case studies, with what each number is and where it came from.
Who Does the Work on Your Account
I do, personally. I've been in search since 1990, I hold a BA in Economics from UCLA and an MBA from the University of Washington, and I founded and sold two internet marketing companies — Lotus411.com and MSD2D.com — before starting Temecula SEO in 2007 and moving the practice to Tucson in 2022.
There's no account manager between us and no junior associate learning on your site. When you call (520) 207-6000, I answer, and when your site breaks at midnight I fix it at midnight.
On how this site is written: I use AI tools to draft and to check my own work. AI does not supply the facts about your business, it does not invent sources, and nothing goes up here that I have not read first. If you find a claim on this site you can't verify, call me and I'll fix it or pull it.
The full background, with the SEC filings and press coverage you can check.
What the First 30 Days Look Like
No onboarding fee, no discovery phase you pay for twice. Here is the actual sequence, and you'll see the first deliverable inside the first week.
- Week one — the honest audit. Your site, your Google Business Profile and the three competitors who are actually beating you, written up as a prioritized list. You get this whether or not you continue.
- Week two — the technical floor. Indexing, speed, schema, mobile layout, broken links, duplicate pages. Nothing else works until this does, and most of it is invisible from the front end.
- Weeks three and four — content starts. The first service or location pages go live, written for your trade and your territory, not assembled from a template.
- End of month one — baseline and plan. Where you ranked when we started, what moved, and exactly what's queued for month two. Month to month from here. If it isn't working, you leave.
One Consultant Against a Tucson SEO Agency
| Factor | Typical Tucson SEO agency | David Cragg, Tucson SEO |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost | $1,500 to $5,000 a month | $1,000 a month |
| Contract | 12 month commitment required | Month to month, no contract |
| Who does the work | Junior associate or outsourced freelancer | David Cragg. In search since 1990, UCLA, UW MBA |
| Content per month | 1 to 4 generic blog posts | 3 to 10 locally written pages |
| Who you talk to | An account manager | David directly, on every call and email |
| Competitor conflict | Often takes several clients in the same niche | One client per niche per zone |
| Track record | Founded 5 to 10 years ago | In search since 1990. Two companies sold. |
Tucson Areas I Cover
I work the greater Tucson metro and most of Southern Arizona, and every community out here searches differently. The Map Pack in Oro Valley looks nothing like the Map Pack on the south side, and a Green Valley retiree looking for a dentist isn't searching the way a 28-year-old in Sam Hughes searches. I build around the ground you actually cover.
Those are the towns with a page of their own so far. I also take work in South Tucson, Corona de Tucson, Oracle, Tubac and Benson, and anywhere else inside about an hour of Tucson — there's just no local page written for those yet. Call and ask and I'll tell you whether the market is worth building for.
Tucson Industries I Work With
The fundamentals don't change between trades. Everything else does — the keywords, the competitors, the citation sources, the content that works and the trust signals that matter. So there's no package.
I take one client per competitive niche per zone. I won't rank two plumbers in Oro Valley against each other, which means my whole effort goes into beating your competitors instead of managing a conflict between two people paying me. Ask me whether your niche is open.
A Few of the Clients I've Worked With
Before 2007 my work was mostly enterprise technology, through the two companies I founded and sold. Since 2007 it has been hundreds of small local service businesses, first in Southern California and now in Tucson. Every logo below is a client whose site you can open and check for yourself right now.
What Clients Say
Four of the ten reviews on my Google profiles, quoted in full. Nine of the ten were left on the Temecula SEO profile during the Southern California years; Dr. Nguyen's and Weston's name SEO Tucson.
David has been a huge help to my business. He's knowledgeable, responsive, and consistently delivers great work. Since working with him, we've seen strong improvements and he continues to go above and beyond to help our business grow. Highly recommend David and SEO Tucson to anyone looking for someone who truly cares about getting results.
Weston Molitor Wild West Junk Removal · SEO Tucson
I have been a client of David at SEO Tucson for over 10 years. His wealth of knowledge of SEO marketing has been a tremendous help for my company. He's always up to date with all the new rules and changes and always willing to try new things to help push and keep my company on the top of Google listing.
Dr. Bao Nguyen Promenade Dental Care · SEO Tucson
David at TemeculaSEO is a unique professional. He has been in the industry almost longer than the web has been around. He cares about my success and spends as much time as it takes to make my business succeed. I wish that I could afford to pay him more.
Dr. Ryan Marshall, D.C. Chiropractor · Temecula SEO
David is great to work with. He takes his job seriously, is a wealth of knowledge not only in SEO, but also business in general. If you are looking to for someone to handle SEO for you — you can stop looking now.
Russ Colburn Temecula SEO
Questions People Ask Before Hiring Me
Do you work with businesses outside Tucson?
Yes. I work the greater Tucson metro and most of Southern Arizona, and I have kept clients further out when the market was worth it. The mileage is not what decides it. What decides it is whether the town has enough search volume to justify building pages for it and whether the Map Pack there is winnable. Tell me where you are and I will tell you honestly whether the geography works in your favor.
Will you take me on if you already work with a competitor?
No. I take one client per competitive niche per zone, so I am never ranking two plumbers in Oro Valley against each other. If your niche and your zone are already taken, I will tell you on the first call instead of signing you and quietly splitting my effort between two people who are paying me to beat each other. Ask early, because sometimes the zone next to yours is open when yours is not.
How many clients do you take at one time?
A small number, on purpose. I do all of the work myself, including the writing, the schema, the CSS, the profile and the reporting, so the roster is capped by how many sites one person can genuinely know rather than by how many contracts a sales team can close. When I am full I say I am full, and I would rather point you somewhere else than take money for work I cannot get to.
Do I need a new website, or can you work with the one I have?
Usually I can work with what you have. A dated design is not automatically a problem. A slow, unindexable or badly structured site is. I would rather fix the site you already own than sell you a rebuild you do not need, so if the foundation genuinely cannot support the work I will show you exactly what is wrong before I suggest replacing anything. If a rebuild is the right call, it happens inside the same monthly fee.
What do you need from me every month?
Less than you would expect, and more than nothing. I need access to the website, Search Console and manager-level access to your Google Business Profile, where you stay the owner. I need answers when I ask a trade question I cannot get right from the outside. And I need a rough sense of which jobs you actually want more of, because ranking for the wrong work is worse than not ranking. Most clients spend under an hour a month on me. The one thing I cannot do for you is ask your customers for reviews.
Who owns the website, the content and the Google Business Profile if we stop working together?
You do, all of it. The domain, the hosting account, the site, every page I wrote for you and the Google Business Profile stay in your name. I am added to the profile as a manager, never as the owner. If you leave, nothing gets switched off and nothing gets held hostage, because month to month only means something if leaving is actually easy.
Is SEO worth it if most of my work already comes from referrals?
Often yes, because referrals get checked. Somebody hands your name to a neighbor, the neighbor searches it, and what they find in the next ten seconds decides whether they call you or the shop with four hundred reviews and a site that loads fast. Search does not replace word of mouth for a business like yours. It keeps word of mouth from leaking. If your referral flow is already producing more work than you can handle, tell me that on the call and I will tell you to save your money.
Can you work alongside my existing web person or marketing staff?
Yes, and it is common. Sometimes I handle search strategy and hand implementation notes to your developer, and sometimes I make the changes myself and copy them in. What does not work is two people quietly editing the same templates and undoing each other, so we settle who touches what in the first week and I put it in writing.
How fast do you respond when something breaks?
Quickly, because there is nobody to route it through. Call or text (520) 207-6000 and you reach me, not an account manager and not a ticket queue. A site that is down, a page that fell out of the index or a review crisis gets worked the day it happens, including at night. Ordinary requests usually turn around the same day or the next one.
I already have an agency. Can you just tell me whether they are doing a good job?
Yes, and plenty of people use me that way. I will go through your site, your Google Business Profile and your top three competitors and hand you a prioritized list of what is actually holding you back, at no charge and with nothing to sign. Some people take that list straight back to their current agency and get better work out of them. That is a fine outcome. I would rather be useful than talk somebody into switching.
More questions: what the $1,000 covers · pricing and contracts · how local SEO and the Map Pack work · who I am and how to verify it.
Sources
The claims on this page about how search works come from Google's own documentation, not from industry folklore. If you want to check my reasoning rather than take my word for it, start here.
- Google Business Profile Help: how local search results are determined — relevance, distance and prominence.
- Google Search Essentials — the technical requirements and best practices a site has to meet to be eligible at all.
- Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content — Google's own self-assessment questions, and the standard the monthly content is written to.
- Google Search spam policies — what gets a site demoted, including the tactics some agencies still sell.
- Introduction to structured data markup — the schema layer behind rich results.
- web.dev: Core Web Vitals — the loading, interaction and stability thresholds measured in the technical work.
Find Out Where You Actually Stand
Call (520) 207-6000 and I'll look at your site, your Google Business Profile and your top competitors, and tell you honestly whether I can move the needle. No charge and no pitch. If I don't think I can help you, I'll say so.
Tucson SEO, formerly Temecula SEO
Serving Tucson and Southern Arizona
Phone: (520) 207-6000
Consultant: David Cragg, in search since 1990
Page last reviewed September 18, 2026 by David Cragg.










