SEO for plumbers, built around the jobs you want more of

Where a plumber's work comes from

Plumbing work comes in two kinds, and search treats them differently.

The urgent job is a burst pipe, a blocked toilet or no hot water on a cold morning. The customer searches with a phone in one hand, sees three businesses on the Google map, and calls the first one that looks open and well reviewed. Your website barely gets a look. That call is won by your Google Business Profile, your reviews and an answered phone.

The planned job is different. A hot water system near the end of its life, a drain that blocks every few months, a gas cooktop going into a renovation. These customers read for days. They compare two or three plumbers, look at photos of real work and ask for quotes. They search for the job by name, and a page about that job can rank for it.

SEO for a plumber has to cover both. The profile wins the urgent call. The website wins the planned work, which for many plumbers is the work they would rather book. Our guide to the plumber website that wins the work that isn't an emergency covers the website side in more depth.

Your Google Business Profile

We start here, because this is where the urgent calls are decided. Google says local results are based mainly on relevance, distance and prominence. Relevance comes from complete and accurate details, so we set your primary category to plumber and add secondary categories only for work you are licensed to do. We set the service area to the suburbs you really drive to and the hours you really answer.

Prominence is partly reviews. Google says more reviews and positive ratings can help a local ranking. We help you ask for them after each job, in a way that does not feel awkward, and we add photos from your own jobs every month.

A page for each job you want more of

A services page with one line for hot water, one for drains and one for gas cannot rank for any of them. A page about hot water replacement can. We build one page for each job you want more of, written for the customer who is still deciding.

A hot water page covers the systems you install, what changes the price, how long a swap takes and what happens to the old unit. A drainage page explains how you find the cause of a recurring blockage before you quote a fix. Each page carries your own photos, your licence details, a phone number that dials on a tap and a short quote form.

We only build pages for work you do. One trade site we run started ranking for trades the business does not offer, and every one of those visits was wasted.

Agents, strata managers and builders

Repeat accounts read your site with different questions. A property manager wants to know you can attend a tenant's leak without them there, send photos and invoice the owner. A strata manager wants your insurance details and how you deal with common property. A builder wants to know you will turn up for rough in on the day you said.

If those accounts matter to you, we give each one a page that answers its questions. They search rarely. When they do, they are looking for a plumber to keep.

Suburb pages, done properly

You cover a patch, and Google needs a reason to show you in a suburb twenty minutes away. A page about that suburb can give it one, if the page says something true about the work there. Jobs you have done nearby, the kind of housing, how soon you can get there.

Pages that swap one suburb name for another read as a template. Google's spam policies call pages like that doorways. We would rather build six good suburb pages than sixty thin ones.

Measured in calls

Rankings move every day and tell you little on their own. What matters is whether more of the right people ring you. We count taps on your phone number and every quote form, and we read Search Console for the searches that found you. Each month you get a plain report on what changed and what we did.

Most early clicks on a trade site come from people searching the business name. That is normal. The better sign is growth in searches for the jobs themselves, such as hot water replacement in your area.

What we will not promise

Nobody can promise a ranking, a date or a number of jobs, and you should be wary of anyone who does. What we can tell you is how we work: true details on your profile, a page for each job you want, your own photos and honest numbers every month. You can cancel the SEO add-on on 30 days notice.