SEO for Plumbers – Tactics That Can Help Your Business Grow
Every plumbing company knows that a well-designed and optimized website can make all the difference when it comes to the number of clients they acquire. Plumbing marketing has become more and more popular in the past years, which is why lots of companies are now offering SEO packages for plumbers.
But what is SEO for plumbers? How can you make sure that your SEO is doing a good job? We’re answering all of these questions and more in today’s article.
What is SEO for plumbers?
Plumber SEO is the same as search engine optimization for any other type of business. However, the main difference is that you are going to use plumbing keywords and optimize your GMB listing for your own business, as well as other such factors.
But the techniques are largely the same when optimizing a website for people looking for plumbers as they would be if you’d be in photography, not plumbing.
While SEO does take some time both to implement properly and to show any results, it can have long-lasting benefits.
If you make sure that your plumbing site is perfect in terms of technical SEO, for example, and you avoid making any mistakes in the future in this sense, you aren’t going to have to worry about anything — at least from this standpoint.
Technical SEO
Search engine optimization should always start with this part. Unfortunately, not a lot of plumbers know how to do technical SEO on their own and while some platforms come with the right optimization features, they might not know how to adjust them.
Technical SEO refers to coding, mobile optimization, site speed, as well as website design.
Your website has to be as easy to navigate as possible and it should also work on mobile devices. More than half of all Internet users now perform mobile searches first and only then might they use their desktop computers or laptops to become more informed.
Schema is another thing that the SEO company that you choose might be able to help you with and while in some cases, it can make all the differences, in others, it might not matter as much.
If your website loads fast, you have a better chance of retaining potential customers for a longer amount of time. If your site takes more than 3-4 seconds to load, you’re going to have a huge bounce rate as people are going to return to the search engine page and click on another result, instead.
As for website design, it goes without saying that nothing beats a clean and well-designed site, one that’s capable of showing your previous work, your certifications, but one that can also make it very easy for potential customers to find out everything they might want to know about you — including your location.
The aesthetics and the navigation matter, too, so do keep that in mind whenever hiring a web design company. SEOs and web designers can often have their differences, but both of their goals should be growing your business through a clean site and helping you rank for the right keywords.
On-page SEO
Besides the technical side, there are roughly two main types of search engine optimization that you must tackle when doing SEO for plumber companies.
On-page SEO refers to all of the changes that you can make on your site and that can make a difference in terms of how you appear in the search engines. We’ll go into more detail in the sections below, but the whole point is that you have the power to make all of these modifications — or the SEO can do them for you, of course.
Off-page SEO on the other hand deals with things that influence your rankings outside of your website.
Keyword research
There are heaps of tools that either your SEO or yourself can use to find out what keywords you need to rank for. More often than not, region or local-specific keywords can help you achieve your goals, and that’s because plumbers don’t offer online services.
Their services are practical and location-based. Choose the search terms wisely in that you do not want to rank for a specific town or small city — if you also offer your services outside your town or in your state, in general, you should include those terms too.
The easiest keyword research tools that can be used for the purpose are the following:
- Ahrefs
- SEMRush
- Keywordtool.io
Meta titles and meta descriptions
These two are quite important and they have to be optimized properly as they are going to be the ones that people searching for plumbers in their area are going to see first.
Try to make your titles and meta descriptions as enticing as possible. Answer a question and tell your potential users that they can find out the answers in your articles. You can also use keywords like ‘cheap’ or ‘non-stop’ or whatever terms you feel are going to help people make a decision as fast as possible.
Keep in mind that title tags and meta descriptions are limited in terms of characters, so make them short and sweet.
Header tags
Your main keyword should appear in one of your header tags – if possible, once in H1 (which is the title of the post of the page) and once in one of your H2s. But the rest of your heading structure has to be safe and sound.
Ask your SEO to tell you how to use header tags to stand out from your competition.
URL structure
Your URL has to contain your keyword, but it should be as clean as possible, too. Avoid using the automatic URLs that most content management systems create and try to customize them as best as possible.
While we’re at it, we might as well tell you that you should also avoid using years or dates in your URL structures. After all, the services you are offering are not going to become unavailable next year, right?
Internal linking
Internal linking is a very important part of on-page SEO but you also have to do it judiciously. If you have several different categories on your blog, you need to make sure that your internal links are well organized.
What we mean by this is that you should avoid linking from a post that’s in one category to another that’s in a completely different one. A perfectly organized internal linking structure can help the search engines understand your site.
All of your posts should be at 3 to 4 clicks away from the homepage. If they’re any deeper than that they might never be found by any search engine’s crawlers.
Off-page SEO
Having your website perfectly optimized is a great idea and can provide you with the rankings you need — sometimes without having to make a lot of effort off-page SEO wise. But your SEO strategy should also involve some of the tactics that we are going to describe below.
NAP citations
These refer to business citations that you can get from sites like HomeAdvisor or any other directories. Several other examples are Citysearch, Superpages, Local.com, Localeze, or ExpressUpdate. Yelp is another place you might want to get a citation from, but we’ll talk about reviews more below.
Social media
While most social media network links that you are going to get will be ‘nofollow’, you should still have business profiles on as many of them as possible. Even Instagram can make a difference for a plumbing company, and that’s because you can visually showcase your work there.
Facebook, Twitter, and even YouTube if you also make videos of the projects that you have tackled can also come in handy. And if you ever want to hire someone to join your team, it definitely wouldn’t hurt if you also had a LinkedIn profile.
Brand mentions
Brand mentions can be anything, but one of the typical links that you can acquire using this tactic is a press release link. Sure, advertising could cost you a lot of money, but traditional advertising and marketing in the local newspapers just doesn’t work anymore.
Your local newspapers and magazines obviously have websites in this day and age and getting a press release from one of the best-known ones in this category is definitely something you should consider.
Link building
Links can make a lot of difference when it comes to your SEO campaign, but you also have to make sure you are getting them from the right places. Back in the day, it didn’t really matter how and where you got your backlinks so long as there were as many of them as possible.
That is not the case anymore as search engines’ algorithms have improved significantly. You want your backlinks to be from websites that are relevant to your industry. If some of your clients also have websites and they might want to recommend you, that’s acceptable, too.
Read more:
Local SEO for plumbers
Google My Business
Claiming your GMB listing is extremely important. If you don’t, someone else might be able to create and claim your Google My Business listing before you do, and it can be a little complicated to get it back.
Make sure to include a top-notch description of your services, the hours during which you operate, your specific location, and also lots and lots of photos of where you work.
If you’ve had a great experience with a customer, you might as well ask them to leave you a GMB review — these reviews can both increase your click-through rate and make you look like a trustworthy business in the search engines.
Google Maps
You can also verify your business location on Google Maps. Some of the folks that are going to leave you reviews can try to change it if they’ve realized that your company is actually two blocks away from the location you have provided.
Maybe you’ve changed your location and forgotten to include this detail in your Google Maps or Google My Business listing. Make sure to stay on top of the situation as much as possible.
Reviews
Online reviews can make a lot of difference in making sure that your plumbing services stand out from the crowd. Ask your customers to leave reviews on Google, Facebook, or anywhere else they have the possibility to do so.
Tracking your results
While search engine optimization is great, it can take some time to give you any results. Even though some people might argue that it is a myth, there is a thing called Google Sandbox and if your website is brand new, you might have to wait for six months or more to see any results.
Track your rankings on a regular basis using a tool like the Google Search Console or any other one that you use for your regular SEO. Google’s Search Console is far more accurate than any other tool, though.
Look at what keywords and links you’ve acquired and see whether other plumbing businesses aren’t trying to sabotage you. After all, there is a thing called negative SEO, so people can purchase toxic links and direct them to your website.
Keeping an eye on everything once a week or once every two weeks can save you a lot of trouble in the long run.
Also analyze the traffic that you are getting and if it is targeted. If you do your business in Cambridge in the United Kingdom and there are folks from Cambridge in the United States trying to purchase your services, something is definitely wrong.
Traffic metrics have to be analyzed on a monthly basis rather than on a weekly basis.
Content optimization
Homepage
You should try to have your homepage as clean as possible, but there still needs to be some content on it. While some folks might recommend 200 words, try to create at least 500 to 1000 words.
Your homepage is the best place to showcase your qualifications and background and also give a detailed description of your company and perhaps how it has evolved over time.
Make sure to use your main keyword (e.g. ‘plumber in Cambridge’) at least once on your homepage. There should also be a button somewhere on the side or at the bottom of the homepage that people can click and get in touch with you (this is called a CTA – call to action).
Content pages
You should consider creating a blog where you can showcase your work without putting too much content on your homepage. Content pages are effectively created to give potential customers information about what you do, but their primary aim should not be people calling you right away.
Try to look for keywords that have an informational intent, such as how much your services might cost, how plumbers fix a specific issue, and so on.
You probably don’t want to teach people how to do their own plumbing, but you should try to be as helpful as possible.
Service pages
Your service pages should be optimized as best as possible in that besides your homepage, that’s where you want to look at your title tags and meta descriptions. Make sure the keywords you target are with a specific hiring intent and that your titles all include the services you can offer.
All of your headers should be short and sweet, as well as specific, and all of your services have to be described in the content as detailed as possible.
FAQs
You can have a unique section on your site where you can tackle some of the most common frequently asked questions that people can have with regard to your business or plumbing, in general.
You can either have a link to this section right from the homepage and it could contain several dozens of questions with short answers to them or you can choose a different route and create blog posts where you give detailed answers to each question.
What can you expect from someone offering plumbing SEO?
We might have mentioned this in several other posts, but the average cost of hiring an SEO for a plumbing website is somewhere between $700 and $2,000 a month.
The reason you’re going to need consultancy, if not hands-on action from an SEO is that there will always be things to fix and improve — and you’ll soon come to this conclusion if you see that your rankings are dropping for one reason or another.
If the SEO also has to perform all of the modifications themselves, it is going to cost you more. It sometimes might make more sense to hire someone in-house and an SEO consultant on the side so that your employee can make all of the changes based on the SEO’s recommendations.
Expect to pay at least $100 per hour if you want the SEO to give you advice.
Use the factors and tactics that we have mentioned in this article to tell whether the company or freelancer you have picked is really offering the best SEO for plumbers or not. Look at everything from your local SEO to the technical side of things and don’t forget about on-page and off-page SEO, of course.
Need help with your SEO or digital marketing efforts? We have lots of plans and courses available. Get in touch to find out how we can be of assistance!
Craig Campbell
I am a Glasgow based SEO expert who has been doing SEO for 22 years.
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