Murphy SEO Services
Local SEO for contractors in Cherokee County, run from Andrews. This is the one market where the person doing your SEO lives ten minutes up the road.
The Market
Cherokee County Is Home
Most agencies pitching Murphy have never driven through it. This is the market Gridwork actually operates in, which changes what the work looks like.
Three states inside your service radius
Murphy sits close enough to Georgia and Tennessee that your real service area crosses state lines. Google's service-area settings and your location pages both have to account for that, and most contractors here have neither set up to match where they actually drive.
Traffic passing through, and traffic that stays
The Tail of the Dragon, the Nantahala and Ocoee rivers, and the national forest bring thousands of people through every month. A fraction of them own property here. Those are the ones typing a trade and a town into a phone.
A reputation nobody has written down
In a county this size everybody already knows who does good work. Almost none of it exists anywhere Google can read, which means the ranking goes to whoever bothered to publish, not to whoever is best.
Second-home owners who hire from four hours away
A lake or mountain property owner living in Atlanta or Knoxville cannot ask a neighbour who to call. They search, they read, and they judge you on whether your site looks like a real business.
One Google profile has to cover a lot of ground
Murphy, Andrews, Marble, Brasstown and out toward Hayesville is a wide radius for a single listing. Getting the categories, services and radius right is most of the map-pack work in a rural county.
What We Do
What's Included in Gridwork's Murphy SEO Services
One system, not a menu of tactics. Every piece feeds the others, which is why it compounds instead of plateauing.
Google Business Profile
Your listing has to rank across a county, not a neighbourhood. Categories, services, the service-area radius out toward Hayesville and Robbinsville, plus photos and posts kept current rather than set once and forgotten.
Service area pages
Real pages for Murphy, Andrews, Marble, Brasstown and the Georgia and Tennessee line where you actually take work. Each one earns its place with something true about that town.
Content that answers the pre-call question
What a job costs out here, which county permits apply, how a second-home owner four hours away can vet a contractor they have never met. The questions people type before they are ready to phone anyone.
AI search visibility
Ask ChatGPT who to call for a trade in Murphy and it names two or three businesses. Being one of them is a specific piece of work, and almost nobody in Cherokee County is doing it yet.
A site that converts on a phone
Half this county has patchy signal. Fast, click-to-call, and clear about the service area, because a slow site on two bars is a lost call.
Reviews and reporting
A system for asking customers for reviews, and a monthly report showing which searches produced calls. Local backlinks worth having here are the Cherokee County and Andrews chambers, not a national directory.
The Gridwork Momentum System starts at $2,000 per month, no long-term contract. You stay because it works.
Founder / Strategist
Meet John Ragon: Your Murphy SEO Specialist
I live in Andrews, ten minutes up the road, and Gridwork Marketing runs from here. No big-city agency understands Cherokee County like someone who buys groceries in it, and an in-person strategy conversation is genuinely easy.
I never take more than 10 clients at a time. The person who audits your site is the person who writes your content and answers your email. There is no junior behind me and no AI tool running unsupervised on your account.
Why Gridwork?
Why Contractors Choose Gridwork
I am ten minutes away
Andrews to Murphy is a short drive, and that is not a marketing line. It means site visits, real photos of your crew, and a strategy conversation at a table instead of on a call.
Built for contractors only
No dentists, no e-commerce, no restaurants. Every hour of experience here is in home services, which means no learning curve on your dime.
You own everything
The site, the content, the profile. If you ever leave, you take it with you.
Reviews
Results From Gridwork Clients
Ethan Anderson
Big Imprint (Greiner Buildings) · Client
John has been writing SEO-optimized blog posts for us, which have become some of the highest-performing pages on the website. The level of research and effort that John puts into his work is impressive. He is one of those rare people who actually makes my job a lot easier because he’s so good at his!
Luke Ritter
2 years ago
John is excellent at what he does, he helped me with two of my businesses. Great design work which gave me a nice professional presence. Highly recommend!
Erik Colleen
VP, Creek Engineering · Client testimonial
John cares more about why you are in business than what you are in business for. He encapsulates the specialty ‘why?’ behind your operation and presents it to the world in a professional and attractive manner. If you are looking for someone who can help make sense of your beautiful mess and take the presentation to the next level, Gridwork Marketing is the firm to handle it.
Bridgette Shumaker
5 months ago
I've been able to work with John on many website and marketing projects and he is a wealth of knowledge. He stays up to date on current trends, which platforms are working the best for various businesses, and knows how to grow your SEO. He is honest, hardworking, and someone that you would want in your corner as you are trying to grow your business.
Jon Johns
Macaw Plumbing & Tankless · 6 months ago
Working with John has been a great experience. He is very detailed when it came to building each page of our website. He is currently working on our local SEO. He also does all the market research for your area like in Asheville or your exact market. He makes it easy and you feel like a part of the team.
Joshua Zello
1 year ago
Great experience with John and I would highly recommend working with him. It was apparent that he cared about our business and our success, which is hard to find in the SEO world. He took plenty of time to walk us through both basic and advanced techniques to get more noticed and our website has really benefited from his recommendations. 10 out of 10 would recommend that you invest your time and money with John!
FAQ
Answers to your most pressing questions:
Is Murphy too small for SEO to pay off?
Small markets are usually cheaper to win, not less valuable. Fewer contractors are seriously competing for the same searches, so the work required to reach page one is smaller. The jobs are worth the same either way.
I get most of my work by word of mouth. Why bother?
Because word of mouth stops scaling before your costs do, and it goes quiet without warning. Search keeps producing when referrals pause. It does not replace your reputation, it writes it down where people outside your circle can find it.
Should I be trying to rank in Georgia and Tennessee too?
If you take work there, yes, but as separate pages rather than by widening one. Blairsville and Blue Ridge are different search markets with different competitors, and Google treats them that way even when the drive is shorter than one across your own county.
Can we meet in person?
Yes. Andrews is ten minutes from Murphy, and that is genuinely part of why this market gets treated differently from a remote one.
Do the tourists actually matter for a contractor?
Not directly. The visitors are not hiring a roofer. But a meaningful share of the property here is owned by people who first came through as visitors, and they hire remotely, which makes how you look online matter more than it would in a town where everyone is local.
What does it cost?
The Gridwork Momentum System starts at $2,000 per month with no long-term contract and no setup fees.
Western North Carolina
Serving Murphy, Andrews and Cherokee County
Based in Andrews and working with contractors across far western North Carolina, north Georgia and east Tennessee.
- Murphy
- Andrews
- Marble
- Brasstown
- Hayesville
- Robbinsville
- Cherokee County
- Clay County
- Blairsville, GA
Free Resources
Worth reading first.
Do City Pages Actually Work for Contractors? (What We’ve Seen After 60,000+ Impressions)
A service area plumbing company went from ranking only in their home town to #1 in Salisbury, NC in four months. Here's what made their city pages actually work.
Read the guide →
Why SEO Takes 6 Months (And What You Should Expect in Months 1–3)
SEO takes six months, but not for vague reasons. Here’s exactly what happens in months one, two, three, and beyond, and when to expect calls.
Read the guide →
Local SEO Statistics for Home Service Contractors: 35+ Data Points for 2026
35+ local SEO statistics translated into plain English for home service contractors, what the data actually means for your calls and booked jobs.
Read the guide →Free SEO & Website Review
Find out where you stand in Cherokee County.
I'll look at your site, your Google Business Profile, and what your competitors rank for that you don't. You keep the findings either way.
- 01
You fill out the form
Two minutes. Company, website, and the towns you actually want work in.
- 02
I do the actual research
Your listing, your map-pack position across Cherokee County, and whether Georgia and Tennessee searches reach you at all.
- 03
You get the review back
Which towns you already own, where the state-line traffic is going instead, and what I would fix first.
- 04
We walk through it together
Thirty minutes on a call. No pitch deck, no pressure.
- 05
You decide
If it is a fit, we start. If it is not, you keep the review and the plan.
Request your review
This comes to me, not a queue. I never take more than 10 clients at a time, so the person reviewing your site is the person who would do the work. You will hear back within one business day.
Prefer to talk first? Book a 30 minute strategy session instead.