Plumber SEO

Digital Marketing for Plumbers

Expanding your visibility online is a great way to grow your plumbing business, and most will turn to SEO to get the job done. However, it’s important to implement smart digital marketing strategies alongside SEO to get the best results.

The right digital marketing techniques will differ depending on your trade, and at Supple Digital we offer a great range of strategies we can use to boost your plumbing company’s online profile.

You can showcase your experience and knowledge in the industry through more creative mediums like SEO Blogs and YouTube Marketing. This optimised content positions you as an industry expert your customers can trust for reliable plumbing solutions, and they’ll be more likely to turn to you when they need a plumber.

PPC Advertising involves targeting specific worlds, demographics and locations to ensure you are seen when these are searched online. This form of digital marketing is also known as Google Adwords.

A strong Social Media presence means you can stay constantly connected with your customers. Creating short, snappy content, such as bite-sized videos, handy tips and tricks and walkthroughs of certain services, will keep them engaged.

Supple Digital can design and implement all of these digital marketing strategies for your plumbing business. Get in touch today to start strengthening your online profile.

Google Maps vs. Google Results: What’s the Difference?

Speaking about getting on the first page of Google search results, there are multiple options that you can consider. Depending on your goals and strategy, you can pick the ones that you want to target and adjust your plumbing SEO strategy accordingly.

When a user is searching for a plumbing-related term, they are likely to come across three kinds of search results. Let’s understand this with an example. Say, the user is in Adelaide, and wants to find plumbing services in the area. They are likely to search for a term like “best plumbers in adelaide”. This is what the search results will look like for this query:

Now you see the three different types of search results clearly. They are

1. Paid Results
2. Map Pack Results
3. Organic Results

The paid results are basically ads that businesses display by creating campaigns on Google Ads. These are pretty straightforward and require you to invest in PPC advertising. However, the map pack and organic results, are two of the most common kinds of results that businesses focus on.

When a user searches for a local business or a search query with local intent, the Google-3 results that are displayed as the highlighted SERP feature are map pack results. If your business location is registered on Google Maps, you can feature in these results, and the users can search for your business with the help of a dedicated pin in the map as well.

On the other hand, organic search results are the ones that Google deems to be most relevant and ranks based on search algorithms. These are results that you can target by stepping up your plumbing local SEO strategy and efforts.

Now you know the function and approach of targeting the three kinds of search results that are produced on the SERPs and can quickly figure out which ones to target.

However, your success on the SERPs can easily be traced back to the effectiveness of your plumbing SEO strategy.

What Does Plumbing SEO Include?

For plumbing businesses, the opportunities are ample, but the competition is equally tough. But before you start making up scary scenarios – hear us out. By strengthening your SEO efforts, you can not only improve your online presence but also beat your competition at their own game.

All you need to do is create a perfect balance between the various kinds of SEO strategies and the efforts that you carry out. This means that you will need to have a strong hold on at least the following:

• Technical SEO
• On-Page SEO
• Off-Page SEO
• Citation Building

But these are not the only areas that you would need to pay attention to. To be able to nail plumbing SEO the right way, you will need to do a lot more, and consistently so. With that in mind,  here are some of the most important steps that you can start taking right away.

Google Business Profile Optimisation for Plumbers

We will shortly talk extensively about the various steps you can take to strengthen your plumbing SEO performance. Before we dive into that, let us discuss a bit about the one listing on the Internet that you absolutely need to have, regardless of the size of your business or scale of operations.

No points for guessing — we are talking about your Google Business Profile, of course.

Your Google Business Profile is the one online listing that grants you maximum visibility, and your users’ necessary information to access your business. It is particularly useful when a user is searching for a brand-related term.

For instance, if a user searches for “supple digital marketing agency”, they are likely to immediately come across this GBP listing — consistently being maintained and updated by us.

Users looking for our agency to contact us can immediately get the relevant NAP details, and go through customer reviews to affirm their decision.

Having said that, GBP does require a certain amount of optimisation including keyword integration, and the addition of relevant information. What are the exact steps though, you wonder?

Let us discuss it more.

1. Add or Claim Your Google Business Profile

The first step to having a strong GBP is — well, creating or claiming yours.

If your plumbing business has been around for a while, chances are that your GBP listing already exists. You simply need to claim it and fill in the necessary details required to optimise it.

For starters, visit this page, and click on ‘Manage Now’. In the next window, type in your business name. If your business already has an existing listing, it will show up in the drop-down. In this case, select, claim and set up your business profile.

If there is no existing listing for your business, you can add your business name and create one for it. Allow us to demonstrate this to you with an example.

For your understanding, we will be showing you the process of creating the GBP for a dummy business — ABC Plumbing based in Canberra.

Since we have not provided any additional information, Google displays all the existing business listings with the same name. Of course, none of the existing ones is relevant to our listing, so we click on the first option in the drop-down — the one for creating a new Google Business Profile.

2. Set your business category

Next, you will be required to choose the type of business that you are creating a listing for. This lets Google know how to categorise your business and what kind of search queries to display your listing for.

In this case, we will set the business type to “Local Store” as it is the most relevant one to the business we are registering. Once done, click ‘Next’.

You will then be asked to set a business category for your business. This is where you declare that yours is a plumbing business. Here’s how:

Click ‘Next’, once done.

3. Set your service area

In the next step, you will be registering your business address and other details that would narrow down the area where you offer services.

If you click on ‘Next’, you will be given the option to enter the contact details. Go ahead and facilitate the contact number that you want your customers to use to get in touch with you.

Enter the relevant details and click on Next. You may be prompted to add your business on Google Maps. We highly recommend doing this, as this doubles the chances of potential customers finding your business easily.

4. Verify Your Business

Once you have inserted all the relevant information about your business and set up a basic business profile, you will be required to verify your business. You see, you can not simply create a dummy business profile, which is why we would not be able to show you a demo of this step.

You will be required to enter the contact information for your business and provide the actual business address where you can receive communication. Using these details, Google will reach out to you, and verify whether your business actually exists and whether the details you have provided are accurate.

Once you finish the verification process, your GBP will go live.

Tips to Optimise Your Google Business Profile for Plumbers

After your Google Business Profile goes live, here are a few additional tips that you can consider for optimising your listing.

• Add your operational hours and days accurately.
• Upload high-resolution images of your business and past contracts as social proof
• Answer questions that users are asking on your listing
• Keep your profile updated regularly

2. Get Listed in Directories

Now that you are all set with your Google Business Profile, the next crucial step is to have a listing for your business in all the major directories. We might be living in the age of Google, but even then, people rely on online directories to find a trusted local business for their needs and requirements.

There are two types of online directories that you need to specifically target for your plumbing business.

Get Listed with Big Data Aggregators

Gone are the days, when Yellow Pages — the huge yellow book was the only answer to your questions about local businesses near you.  While Yellow Pages is very much still relevant and authoritative in an online format, you will also find other major data aggregators that can help you get the online visibility that you may need.

It is important that your business has updated listings on such websites. The process of discovering these directories is actually as simple as conducting a Google search — literally.

Let’s see what pops up when we search for “plumbers in sydney”.

If you look at the highlighted search results, right below the map pack results, you will see that some of the top-ranking websites are those of aggregator platforms. They rank so high considering their domain authority and high amounts of organic traffic.

Online aggregator websites are often preferred by individuals who do not know much about the local businesses in the vicinity. You will find that if the user is new to the area and does not have many acquaintances to get recommendations from, they would rely on these reputed aggregator platforms for suggestions.

These are also the easiest customers to acquire because they are looking for a new local business to rely on, and not switching from an existing one. To be visible to such potential customers, you will need to have a complete online listing on aggregator platforms.

Get Listed in Industry and City-specific Directories

Say you already have listings live on several online directories and aggregator platforms, and are looking for more localised visibility — we get it. You are not as concerned about who is looking for a plumber in Sydney if your business is based in Melbourne.

In this case, you want to be more visible and accessible in city-specific online directories.

You will need to list your plumbing business on websites such as WOM, Yelp, or Foursquare to be able to fulfil this goal. In addition to this, you may also want to go a bit more specific by listing your business on directories related to your specific niche or industry.

Why?

Well, when a user is looking for a business on an industry-specific directory, they have pretty much made up their mind about availing services of a vendor in that industry. Think about it — why would you be looking for a plumber in a plumbing directory if you do not have any requirements for one?

With that in mind, you want to create business listings on websites such as

• https://www.localplumbersdirectory.com.au/join
• https://fixatap.com.au/find-a-plumber/register

These are websites dedicated to plumbing business listings, thus targeting the specific audience that you are looking to attract for your business.

Tips to Create Effective Listings for Plumbers

• Choose the right directories for posting your listing
• Use Keywords in your listing
• Add testimonials to your listing to strengthen your profile
• Keep it simple and talk directly to your target audience

3. Get More Reviews

Yes — this is one of the most important things that you can do for your local plumbing business SEO.

The success of every business relies heavily on their customer experience, and what they are saying about the business. The reviews that your business gets online are a major indicator of your service quality and expertise for potential customers who have never heard about you before.

In 2020, over 93% of consumers attested to the fact that online reviews highly influenced their purchase decisions.

Whether positive or negative — you need reviews to show potential customers that your business is legitimate, and handles different kinds of issues. Of course, negative reviews can adversely affect your customers’ purchasing decisions.

Tips to Get More Reviews

• Provide users with multiple spaces online for leaving reviews
• Offer incentives in exchange for reviews
• Narrow down platforms preferred by your customers and be present in those
• Promote the testimonials you have received so far

We are pretty sure that you now have a good idea of what you need to get your plumbing SEO basics sorted. However, there are many more facets that you should consider if you want to level up your local SEO strategy for plumbers.

With that in mind, let us talk about the other aspects that you need to pay attention to.

On-Page SEO for Plumber Websites

Now that we have got keyword research and basic content creation out of the way, let us discuss a little bit more about what you can do to boost your on-page SEO performance. Remember how we talked about striking a balance between on-page SEO, off-page SEO and technical SEO efforts to ensure that your plumbing business SEO is strong and helps your website outrank existing competitors?

Well, it all starts with a strong on-page plumbing SEO strategy. There are many steps that you can take to ensure that your website is armed and ready to be indexed and ranked on the search engine.

However, before you start overthinking and start making big plans to hire an SEO agency, let us discuss a few basics that you can get done right away.

Write Compelling Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

Ask yourself this — when you are searching on Google, what makes you click on a certain result over others?

Sure, the first ranking page always gets the preference. But beyond that — what makes you click on the fourth result instead of the third?

Maybe the title seemed to exactly match your search query? Maybe the description below the title seemed to pique your interest or seemed useful?

Our point beyond all these questions is that the title and meta description hold a lot of value. These factors help users decide whether they should click on a certain result or not. With that much importance assigned to it, you should of course make your titles and meta descriptions compelling and engaging.

Ensuring that your title tags and meta descriptions are optimised and engaging can ensure that you get more clicks on your ranked page on SERPs. At the same time, these tags should also tell the user what the page is all about and whether they are likely to find it useful.

Lastly, remember that first impressions do matter a lot and hence should be given a lot of importance.

Use Short, Descriptive URL Slugs

Gone are the days when URLs consisted of a bunch of characters that did not make sense as a phrase. You may have already noticed that businesses today put a lot of thought into creating URLs rather than just stringing auto-generated letters and numbers together.

This part of your URL is known as the slug and serves as an indicator of a particular web page on your website. Ideally, your slug should describe the specific page that it is pointing to.

Take one of our URLs — https://supple.com.au/tools/ for example. Here the slug is “tools” and lets our users know that they can find a collection of tools on this page. Simple enough, right?

Making slugs short and descriptive is important in the process of optimising them, and ensuring that it informs users that are clicking on them, about what they can expect on the web page. In addition to these factors, one of the most important considerations when optimising your URL slug is including the target keyword in it.

Like meta titles and descriptions, having relevant and user-friendly URL slugs can ensure that your user knows right away whether a page is relevant, thus preventing them from potentially abandoning your website after landing on it.

Technical SEO for Plumbing Businesses

Remember, strengthening your on-page SEO is not just about getting the few aforementioned elements right. It is so much more and can impact your website performance on the SERPs heavily.

We are, of course, talking about Technical SEO. It might seem like a backend consideration that might not impact your user experience much, but you would be wrong to play it down like that. Remember, that certain aspects of technical SEO are as much for your users as much as they are for search engines.

It is undoubtedly one of the most underrated albeit one of the most important aspects of your website. It is that element that drives the other SEO aspects of your website to reach its fullest potential.

So, pay attention to the three basic aspects of technical SEO that you should take care of right away.

Plan Your Site Structure

Site structure is a highly crucial aspect of any website as it helps users navigate your website effectively, and helps Google find all the pages on your website.

Your site structure needs to be diligently planned to ensure that you are able to establish links between different web pages. After all, you don’t want to end up with a bunch of orphaned pages, do you?

Internal links act as the connectors that draw a logical structure between the various pages on your website. It also charts out the natural trajectory that you would want potential leads to follow once they land on your website.

Let us understand this better with an example. Say, you have a plumbing website that operates in three locations — Melbourne, Sydney, and Gold Coast. You offer a few specialised services, however, you are what people would call experts when it comes to these services. These service areas are — Leak Detection and Repairs, Bathroom Plumbing, Kitchen Plumbing, and Commercial Plumbing.

You have dedicated location pages for all your operating locations, and service pages for each service that you offer. Imagine a potential customer from Sydney browsing your website to get their kitchen plumbing done by you. Wouldn’t it be useful to add an internal link to the Sydney location page on the Kitchen Plumbing service page and vice versa?

Now, let’s play out the same scenario from a search engine’s standpoint. When your website is being crawled the internal linking of the Sydney page on the Kitchen plumbing service page can be very fruitful. This will let the search engines know that your kitchen plumbing service page can be displayed in the search results when a user in Sydney searches for a relevant query.

With all of these requirements in mind, here is the ideal site structure that you should follow:

Use HTTPS

At this point, even the most uninitiated know better than to click on links that are not prefixed as “https”. But do you know the reason behind this?

HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) is a protocol that is used for the secure transfer of information on a server. The ‘Secure’ part of this protocol comes from the underlying SSL (Secure Socket Layer) Certificate that websites need to add to their website to be able to use HTTPS in their URLs.

This basically means that all the communication and data that is transferred to and from this website by the users is completely encrypted — thus adding an extra layer of security.You may ask why this is so important if you are already implementing security on your website.

Well, over the years, HTTPS has become synonymous with secure browsing and is widely used by legitimate websites and businesses. If you are still not convinced, think about the fact that HTTPS is considered to be a lightweight ranking factor that has been implemented by Google since 2014.

Basically, you can forget about gaining priority on the SERPs over your HTTPS counterparts if you do not have the SSL certificate, and prefix for your website.

Note: To quickly check if your website has implemented HTTPS, look at the URL in the search bar and see if there is a lock icon before your website URL. If yes, you are all set, and if not, ask whoever handles your website updates and maintenance to upgrade your website status.

Monitor Your SEO Health

You may be tired of hearing SEOs go on and on about how their job is never ending — but they are right. Implementing SEO for your website is not a one-time process. It requires you to consistently update and monitor the SEO health of your website.

Firstly, you can try to keep your website up to date with all the Google algorithm updates, but the truth is that you may still need to make changes every time there is an update. What’s more, if you have an outdated website with measures that are now penalised in the most recent update, your website can even lose its ranking and worse, get blacklisted.

Other than the algorithm updates, you need to keep the user experience front and centre. Several elements on your website contribute to the overall user experience you deliver, and if it is not SEO healthy, this experience can get hampered.

Think of internal linking. Optimisation of titles and meta description. URL structures. Having the most updated keyword research integrated within the content.

All of these factors and more come together to define the SEO health of your website and its performance on SERPs. You can use several different kinds of SEO tools such as Ahrefs, Google Analytics, and SEMrush to determine the SEO health of your website.

Conclusion

When it comes to local SEO for plumbers, there is no one right way or wrong way to do things. However, you can slowly but consistently build an authoritative online presence for your business by following the strategies and tactics that we have discussed in this guide.

More importantly, remember that SEO is an organic strategy and can take a while to start generating actual visible results. Be patient, and stay consistent with your efforts and you shall definitely see a surge in the way your plumbing business website performs on the SERPs.

Meanwhile, if you need extra help with boosting the SEO performance of your plumbing website, we would be happy to help! Get in touch with us so that we can get to know your goals.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do plumbers need local SEO?

Plumbing businesses today face a lot of competition online as well as offline. While there are only a few standard strategies to face the competition offline, there is much you can do online. With the help of local SEO, plumbing businesses can establish their online presence and boost visibility for relevant search queries. What’s more, by getting it right, they can even generate leads and establish website authority in the field.

How long does SEO for plumbers take to work?

SEO is an organic strategy and requires a lot of patience and consistent efforts. While there is no definite period of time in which SEO can start working for plumbers, with the right strategies and efforts, businesses can expect definite results in a few months.