Are you a plumber looking to increase your visibility online?
Then this guide on SEO for Plumbers is for you!
SEO is the key to getting more leads and customers. But where should you start? This comprehensive guide will show you the best SEO practices for plumbers and give you the tools and tips you need to take your plumbing business to the next level.
TLDR
SEO can be a technical subject that takes many hours to learn and get right and even longer to implement!
Following this guide will get you results but if you are busy check out our seo packages for plumbers we can do this all for you and over time will GROW your organic search Traffic. You can even sign up to our seo platform on this page and be guided through this process with or without our support.
What is SEO?
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation and is the process of optimising your website for search engines and users. The aim is to help discover your website by potential customers looking for your services and ultimately become customers.
For plumbers looking to get to the top of the search results in their local areas, SEO is an important part of your overall strategy. With a strong Plumber SEO strategy, local plumbers can optimise their websites for organic search rankings and make sure customers know about their services.
Using this digital marketing tactic, plumbing businesses can extend their reach beyond traditional methods of advertising and increase sales (and revenue) too! With the right combination of knowledge and resources, carrying out SEO on your plumbing website will help put your business ahead in no time.
SEO can be a daunting task, to say the least. It involves all sorts of things like optimising a plumber’s website for search engines, content creation and even link building. All this can seem like an uphill struggle, but it need not be – with the right strategy and an experienced team on hand, you can have your website soar up the rankings in no time.
Moreover, SEO is a powerful method for allowing plumbing businesses to reach the right audience. Plumbers can build trust with their target audience and grow their online presence by optimising website content with effective popular plumbing SEO keywords.
Why is SEO important for Plumbers?
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a key for plumbing businesses looking to reach potential customers online. By ensuring that your website is optimised for search engines like Google, you can increase visibility, drive organic traffic to your website and build trust with customers. It helps to increase the quality of website traffic, improves online recognition, and can help to establish brand credibility and recognition. SEO also gives plumbing businesses access to more targeted customers by increasing their reach to people in their local area. This increases your chances of finding more customers and gaining more leads. SEO helps plumbing businesses to be more competitive and provides more opportunities for customers to find your services.
The benefits of optimising your Plumber Website for SEO
SEO for plumbers is an essential part of running a successful plumbing business.
Optimising your website for SEO can help attract more potential customers, increase visibility in search engine rankings, and ultimately give your business an advantage over competitors.
Optimising your website involves optimising content, using keywords effectively, and ensuring that your website is properly indexed and structured. This will make it easier for customers to find you and create a more positive user experience.
Optimising your website for SEO can help with local SEO efforts, allowing you to gain more visibility in local search results. Ultimately, optimising your plumbing website for SEO will help bring your business more success, by increasing visibility and drawing more customers to your services.
Step 1 – Find Keywords to focus on when optimising your Plumber website for SEO
Developing a list of target keywords related to plumbing services and local areas is essential for powerful plumber SEO – without them, your website will never be found! Get savvy with your search terms and watch those customers flow in.
Plumbing SEO keywords are an important step in optimising your website for local search engines and reaching a wider audience. This will help you target potential customers and ensure that you’re doing everything possible to increase your visibility.
The first step in optimising your website’s SEO is to find the keywords relevant to your plumbing business. To help you prioritise, we have produced an article about keywords for plumbers and a spreadsheet (click here to download it) (there are too many to list here) with a list of possible keywords for plumbers/plumbing websites and their approximate search volumes each month. This list is not exhaustive and if you offer a service that is not on it, you can research it through a keyword tool to find its popularity, or send us a message and we will do it for you and update the spreadsheet.
You will also need to decide where you are targeting your services, this is important because you can then target the locations Counties/Cities/Towns/Boroughs closer to where you live!
If you want to see who your competitors rank for, type the domain into the box below. It will get you started with SE Ranking; you get a 14-day trial, and it comes in at a fraction of the price of the larger SEO tools while still having the features you need to find keywords, improve your website and track your rankings.
Step 2 – Create web pages specific to your services and locations
Having worked out what the service keywords are for your business you then need to create a page for each of them. These pages can combine up to 3 similar keywords and could also target the primary location of your business as an example “Boiler Installation in London”. Doing this means you are targeting a Long-tail keyword, increasing the chances of you appearing on page 1 on search engines like Google. When first starting a website, it is unlikely to rank for a head term like “boiler installation” as many large organisations have optimised their websites over a long period. However, Google shows you local businesses that offer this service on the search results page (More on this later!).
Once you have created your service pages you can then start to work on your location pages
These keywords shouldn’t be “stuffed” on the pages but written in to the copy and headings of the page in a natural way that would be useful to reader. This is a skill in itself if you need any help with this get in touch it is just one of the things that we do!
Step 3 – Optimise On-Page SEO
Write compelling title tags and meta descriptions
When it comes to SEO, title tags and meta descriptions are essential elements for improving the online visibility of plumbers. Title tags provide a brief summary of the page’s content and give search engines and their users an idea of what the page is about.
Meta descriptions are also an important part of SEO as they are used to describe the page content in a concise way (Usually less than 160 characters) and help draw in potential customers.
They are added in different ways depending on your web hosting platform, for all of our websites we use Rankmath the free version has enough features for most people but if you want to take your SEO to the next level the Pro version adds even more features.
Other popular platforms like Squarespace have written a guide for their platform, and WIX also have also written a guide for theirs also.
Title tags
These should be short and to the point (Try to have less than 60 characters) as an example, normally the service you are offering and your business name. You could also add your primary business location.
Boiler Installation – Guildford – [Your Business Name]
Or for a location page, the primary service you are offering and the location
Plumbers in Godalming
Make sure you don’t duplicate the locations though, if you include your primary location in the Service pages. Once you have completed these, you can add further location pages covering the more popular services in the search results.
Meta descriptions
These don’t need to be complicated either just make sure they include the keywords you are targetting! For example:
[Your Plumbing Company] are experienced plumbers in Godalming, offering a range of services including central heating systems & boiler servicing.
These will truncate if you use too many characters, so they need to be around 120 but no more than 160. Rankmath have a great tool for checking your titles and meta descriptions on their website and in their WordPress Plugin.
Short URL slugs
The URL for each page should be kept short to avoid them getting cut off in the search results, they should quickly describe the page so the user can see what the page is about.
Your service pages could have a URL slug like:
boiler-installation
Your location pages could either be just the location name or if you have produced pages for more than one service in a location then use the example below:
boiler-installation-godalming
If you have taken this even further and have produced a directory of pages you could use the below format:
county/town/service
Whatever you choose though try and make sure you stick to it as changing it in the future can be a challenge as to maintain your search rankings you will need to redirect the old URLs to the new ones.
Step 4 – Technical SEO
Technical SEO is an important and often overlooked aspect of SEO for plumbers. This includes making sure the website is fast, optimising the code, setting up proper redirects and making sure it is mobile-friendly.
You should also ensure your site structure is organised so that search engines and users can understand your website better. This will help ensure that your website appears in the right places and with the correct information.
Finally, make sure your website is secure and that you have a good sitemap to ensure search engines can properly crawl your website. All of these steps are important for helping your website rank higher and improving your online visibility.
Hosting and Site Speed
Hosting and site speed are two important factors to consider when looking to improve your online visibility as a plumber. A good hosting provider can help ensure that your website loads quickly and reliably, giving visitors the best possible experience.
This is important for SEO, as slow loading times can have a negative impact on rankings. A secure, stable hosting solution can also help protect your website from malware and malicious attacks. Investing in a reliable host can also boost your SEO efforts, as it can help reduce downtime and ensure your website remains visible to search engines at all times.
By finding a quality hosting provider and improving the speed of your website, you can significantly improve your SEO and increase your online visibility.
Our websites are hosted on Secure dedicated fast hosting with regular backups so we can restore them quickly if anything goes wrong. We also ensure there aren’t too many sites on each server, which can cause severe bottlenecks. As a rough guide for WordPress hosting the cheapest options (under £10 a month) are rarely good enough to host your website fast enough for Google to take it seriously, the reason they are so cheap is that they put many websites (sometimes thousands) on one server. If you have a WordPress site we can host it and maintain it for you on one of servers just get in touch.
Alternatively, if you are looking for just hosting, we recommend using WP-Engine as they offer fast, reliable hosting that will provide your potential customers a better experience.
Plan your site structure
A well-structured website will help visitors to quickly and easily find the information they need, as well as helping search engines to index your content.
When planning the structure of your website, start by mapping out the main service that you want to include. Identify the most important pages and make sure they’re easily accessible in the navigation.
We have produced an example structure for a website with service pages below:
If you are also going to include location pages on your website, the below example would be a good starting point.
You should also use internal links on the pages and blogs to help search engines find and index your website’s pages.
Make sure your site is Mobile -Friendly
Mobile-friendly websites are essential for plumbers looking to improve their online visibility and reach more customers. With the vast majority of internet searches now conducted on mobile devices, having a website that is optimised for mobile use is key especially when you target audience may be looking for help quickly.
Having a mobile-friendly website ensures pages load quickly and properly on a variety of mobile devices, as well as providing a better user experience. Additionally, Google rewards websites that are mobile-friendly with higher rankings in its search engine, making it easier for customers to find your business. Google also crawls most websites from a mobile point of view first, so if your website doesn’t display well on mobile devices, you will likely be penalised in the search results.
Sitemap
A sitemap is essential for any plumber looking to improve their online visibility. A well-structured sitemap provides search engines with an easy-to-follow guide of your website’s hierarchy. This helps search engine robots find, index, and rank your pages, which can improve your SEO ranking. As such, it is important to ensure your sitemap is current and includes all pages you want indexed by search engines.
Our websites include a sitemap by default and WordPress does include a sitemap by default but if you want to have more control over what appears in your sitemap an SEO plugin like Rankmath is our preferred option.
You can normally find the site map for your website at yourwebsite.com/sitemap_index.xml
Once you have your sitemap, you should submit it in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster tools so that both search engines can start to crawl your site.
Use HTTPS
HTTPS is a crucial part of improving your online visibility as a plumber. With HTTPS, your website is better secured and will rank higher in search engine results as Google prioritises sites with HTTPS over sites without. It also allows customers to trust that their data is secure when they visit your website and without HTTPS it is possible that they will receive a warning when they try to navigate to your site, this is likely to cause them to bounce back to the search results.
Monitor your SEO health
Monitoring your SEO health is important in improving and maintaining your website’s visibility. Regularly tracking and assessing your SEO performance will help you identify areas of improvement and gain insights into the effectiveness of your SEO efforts.
To monitor your SEO health, you should start by using SEO tools to track your website’s performance, such as keyword rankings, click-through rates, and backlinks. Additionally, review the content on your website to ensure it is optimised for search engine algorithms, and check for any broken links or missing metadata.
Finally, you should measure the performance of your website against competitors to create a benchmark for your own SEO performance.
You can use tools like SERanking to carry out this work. It works out cheaper than the big names in SEO, which usually cost between $100 and $120 a month, and they both then have a steep learning curve. SE Ranking offers all the main features of these platforms and is significantly cheaper and even offers a 14 day trial.
Set up Google Search Console and Google Analytics
With these tools, plumbers can get valuable insights about how their website is performing in search engine rankings and track important metrics such as organic search traffic and keyword rankings. With the Search Console, you can submit their website to be indexed by Google and monitor any potential issues that may arise. Additionally, you can view the search terms people use to find your website and identify potential opportunities to improve their visibility.
Google Analytics, tracks the performance of your website, measures user engagement, and gain an understanding of how visitors interact with your site. By setting up Google Search Console and Google Analytics, you can easily find opportunities to further improve your website. Both of these tools integrate with SEO tools, including our own SEO platform, to process the data they provide and give extra insights and automated action suggestions to take any guesswork out of SEO.
Step 5 – Local SEO, Google Business Profile and Bing places for business
What is Google Business Profile?
With Google Business Profiles, plumbers can create their own business profile and add detail such as their contact information, hours of operation, and photos. They can also add reviews and post updates to keep customers informed.
The reason that having a Google Business Profile is so important for Plumbers is that when searching for plumbers on Google the business profile results appear above the Organic results and just below the paid ads. There are generally only 3 businesses shown on the results page so it is important that your profile is optimised to have a chance of appearing here.
It is important that you don’t break Google’s guidelines for Google Business Profile as if you do, then you are likely to have your profile suspended and recovering it can be time-consuming!
Add your business to Google Business Profile
Visit Google’s website and follow the sign up process to either set up a new profile or claim yours if Google already has it listed.
The initial part of the signup process asks for your business name, business type (select service).
Then they ask for a business category this will normally be plumber, you could select gas engineer if you only carry out gas work, but you can add extra services later so we would advise using plumber.
Next, you have to tell Google where you travel to in order to serve your customers, you can choose multiple locations just make sure they aren’t too far from your where your business is located.
You can then add your phone number and website, photos of your business, logo, and opening hours. You should add as much information as possible. The better your profile is filled out, the more chance it will be found.
The final part of creating your Google Business Profile is adding the services you offer, Google will make suggestions based on your initial category but you can also add others.
Once you have published your profile
Add your profile to Bing places for business as well
Once your Google Business Profile is live, you can then copy it across to Bing as well. Sign in with your Microsoft account and then click Sync with Google My Business.
Ask happy customers for five-star reviews
Reviews are really important for building trust with potential customers, they also help get your profile into the search results.
Another benefit of getting reviews on Google is that you can then display them on your website so visitors can read your reviews, further building trust with your website visitors.
You can create a link to email to your happy customers, once a customer leaves a review, you should respond to it, whether positive or negative, to show any potential customer that you deal with any feedback you receive.
Add your website to online directories
Adding your plumbing website to online directories is a good way of getting your business found and generating links back to your website, which helps search engines better understand and rank your site. These directories can also help to increase your website’s traffic and build your brand’s awareness. Additionally, some directories offer the opportunity to include additional information about your business such as contact information and business hours, allowing potential customers to learn more about your services. With the right approach, submitting your website to online directories can greatly improve your online visibility and SEO.
You should consider adding your site to some or all of the following directories, just make sure you are consistent with the listings and that you update them if any of your information changes:
You can also add your website to industry-specific and local directories. Examples of these are:
plumbersforums.net/plumbers-directory
Read More: The best directory sites for plumbers
Step 6 – Content Marketing
Content marketing is a great way of growing your organic search traffic. It involves creating high-quality, engaging content that will draw potential customers to your website. This content should be informative, interesting, and keyword-rich. It should be optimised for search engines and contain the right keywords to get the attention of potential customers.
Additionally, use social media to help distribute your content and reach a larger audience. Content marketing can help you build trust with potential customers and increase your online visibility as a plumber. By providing relevant, helpful content, you can also build your reputation as an expert in the field. Use our tips below to create a successful blog post.
Finding a proven topic
The first step to creating your blog post is to decide what it is you are writing about. Our SEO platform can produce content suggestions based on the keywords that you are looking to rank for.
You can also search on Google for terms around the services you offer and look at the questions that other people have searched for the answers to (see below). When choosing your topic, make sure you Google the phrase that you are hoping to rank for and check that the results are from websites of a similar size to yours, as you don’t want initially write content that is going to be difficult to rank.
When writing your blog post, make sure to link it to other relevant pages on your site and vice versa.
Optimise your post for SEO by:
- Checking the intent of the search by analysing the existing search results
- Use the rules above to write your title and meta tags and pick your URL.
- Use images, videos, lists and subheadings to make the most appealing to read
Once published, make sure you promote your post on your social media.
Step 7 – Link Building
Link building is an important step in any SEO strategy, especially for plumbers. It involves creating links from other websites to your own website to improve online visibility. The reason for doing this is that it builds your website’s authority, which can be a signal that your site is providing value to its visitors.
This can be done by actively seeking out link opportunities, such as guest blogging on other relevant websites, submitting content to directories
One particularly effective method is answering journalist’s requests on sites like HARO or Twitter, these will almost always result in a backlink to your site and if its from a reputable publication then it will carry extra weight.
Our SEO platform automatically searches for these opportunities and emails them to you every day, it also allows you to check what backlinks your competitors have got so you can attempt to also get a link from the same site.
Good content creation and utilisation of social media can also help build links naturally.
By building up a network of quality links, potential customers can discover a plumber’s website more easily, leading to increased traffic and improved search engine rankings. Link building is a challenging process, but it can be a highly effective way to improve your online visibility with the right techniques and strategies.
One thing you should never do, though is to buy links from sites like Fiverr, this will almost always do more harm than good!
Step 8 – Schema Markup
Schema markup is a type of code that helps search engines better understand the content on your website. It is important for plumbers because it helps them achieve better search engine visibility and increases their chances of appearing in local search results. Schema markup also helps search engines provide more relevant results to users, which can drive more traffic to their website.
If you are using WordPress for your website RankMath is the easiest and best schema markup solution for WordPress. It is an easy-to-use plugin that provides you with an intuitive interface for creating and managing schema markups. It also allows you to customize the markups to best fit your website and its content. Additionally, RankMath provides an SEO score for each page and post on your site, helping you optimise your content for better search engine visibility best of all most features are free but you can upgrade for additional functionality.
If you use Wix they have a guide to adding Schema markup to a wix website here.
Can you do SEO for your plumbing business yourself?
The short answer is yes, as long as you have the time to put everything we have discussed in this article to practice! There is a lot to learn though so if you want to make things easier for yourself we have SEO packages available that will over time optimise your website and build up your organic search rankings. You can even use our platform to guide you through the process, each month it gives you a list of actions to take to improve your site’s SEO and it even prioritises them so you make the largest impact!
How long does SEO for plumbers take to work?
SEO can be a slow process, but it is well worth it in the end. It typically takes several months to see the full potential of your website’s optimisation and you should certainly start to see results within 6 months. That said depending on the age of your site Google can take longer.
How much does plumbing and heating SEO Cost?
You can find details of our SEO packages here and even use our SEO platform to do it yourself, or get in touch with us if you have any questions.
Why do plumbers need SEO?
Plumbers need SEO to bring in more customers. By optimising your website for search and creating content that is optimised for search engine ranking, plumbers can reach more potential customers and increase their visibility. SEO also helps plumbers build their brand and establish their business as an authority on search engines like Google for plumbing services.
SEO helps plumbers reach their target audience more effectively, resulting in an increase in leads.
To Conclude
In conclusion, SEO is a powerful tool for plumbers looking to improve their online visibility and generate more leads and customers. By following these SEO best practices, you’ll be well on your way to a successful online presence and a successful plumbing business. With the tips and tools provided in this comprehensive guide, you’ll be able to optimise your website, create high-quality content, and build your brand identity. Best of luck in your SEO endeavours!
If you get stuck we are here to help just get in touch
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