Macy is a content marketing consultant with over five years of experience creating content for dozens of industries including home services, recreation, and education. She’s written about every marketing topic under the sun, from SEO to AI to email marketing. Her work has been featured by Search Engine Journal, HubSpot, Entrepreneur, Clutch, and more. In her free time, Macy enjoys crafting, reading comic books, and walking her dog Daisy.
There are over 132,000 plumbing businesses in the United States, meaning there are a lot of plumbers for home and business owners to choose from. If you’re here because you’re trying to figure out if SEO is a good solution to stand out in a saturated market, we’ve got good news — it is!
Watch the jobs flow in with these SEO tips for plumbers
Ready to keep your business busy with jobs? Follow these quick tips for leveraging SEO successfully for your plumbing business:
1. Focus on plumbing-related keywords
✍️ SUMMARY: Target keywords that contain three or more words and are related to the services your plumbing business offers. Think of keywords like “toilet installation services” or “sump pump maintenance tips” that have a more specific intent.
Search engines are one of the first places people go to find a plumber. Whether they’re looking for leak detection help or drain cleaning services, people turn to Google to find a plumber that can do it for them. Targeting relevant keywords like these, on your page, will help you appear when people search those terms.
Let’s say someone has a plumbing emergency. They’re likely to search terms like “emergency plumber near [insert location]” or “24/7 emergency plumber near me.” Optimizing for these keywords would allow your plumbing business to appear in those searches.
Here are some more examples of keywords you could target:
Water heater installation services
How to unclog a sink drain
Tips for identifying a leak source
How to prevent backflow
Sump pump installation services
These keywords are great examples of targeting specific, plumbing-related keywords that will drive the right leads to book jobs with you.
2. Create title tags and meta descriptions that make homeowners click
✍️ SUMMARY: Your title tag and meta description are what appear in search results when people look for a plumber. Optimizing these to make them descriptive, informative, and enticing will help drive clicks and valuable traffic.
Think about the last search you conducted on Google (maybe it the one that led you to this page!) — What made you click on the listing to explore? Likely, you looked at the title tag, thought it was relevant, and clicked.
Title tags and meta descriptions help tell your audience what to expect on your page, so they’re enticed to click it. Optimizing these tags will help drive traffic to click on your listing vs. a competing plumber’s website.
With title tags, you want to ensure you:
Put the plumbing-related keyword at the front of your title, so people know it’s relevant to their search (i.e. Why is My Drain Clogged? 5 Common Causes of Clogged Pipes)
Keep your title tag within the 60-character limit
Avoid putting your titles in all caps or all lowercase
For meta descriptions, you can see success by:
Providing a summation of the page, so people know what to expect
Using your targeted plumbing keyword in the text
Staying within the 155-character limit
Optimizing these tags will show homeowners that your listing is relevant to their search, so they click on it.
3. Optimize your Google Business Profile
✍️ SUMMARY: Add your business description, service area, and company details to your Google Business Profile to help drive local leads. Add photos to your listing to enhance performance and clicks!
As a plumber, you operate within your local community. So, what can you do to reach local leads? Answer: Optimize your Google Business Profile.
When a home or business owner wants to hire a plumber, they’re often searching in their local market for one — they’re searching with keywords that include their location or phrases like “near me.” And within those results? Google Business Profiles.
Your Google Business Profile provides locals with your important business information, like your contact information, hours of operation, and services you offer.
Here are some best practices for creating a top-notch Google Business Profile listing:
Ensure your name, address, and contact information are accurate on your listing
Add a short blurb about your business and the services you offer (drain cleaning, faucet installation, shower repair, etc.)
Add photos related to your business, like pictures of your plumbing crew or jobs completed (and the final product)
Set your service areas to reach the right towns (you can set up to 20 locations)
Claiming and optimizing your Google Business Profile will help you get a leg up on competitors that aren’t paying attention to it. Why? Because 70% of people are more likely to choose a business that has an optimized Google Business Profile.
So, with an optimized Google Business Profile, you’ll stand out from your competition and get more service calls from your listing.
4. Optimize the technical components of SEO
✍️ SUMMARY: The backend of your website needs optimization to ensure it performs well for your audience. You’ll want to make sure your website loads quickly, is mobile-friendly, has clear, easy-to-read URLs, and can easily be crawled and indexed by Google.
If you want to see success with SEO for plumbers, you must ensure the technical side of your strategy is sound. Technical SEO involves all the optimizations done on the backend of your website to help it rank better in relevant plumbing search results.
Here’s how to do technical SEO right:
Optimize your website to ensure it loads quickly and gets website visitors information fast about your plumbing company
Ensure you’re using responsive design, so your website is functional on mobile (it’s also required to get indexed in Google)
Identify and fix broken links that keep search engines from crawling your pages and indexing them in search results
Optimize your robots.txt file and sitemap to help Google crawl your website
Optimize your URLs to help search engines and users understand the context of your plumbing pages
Prioritizing technical SEO will ensure you deliver the best experience for people who visit your website to learn about your plumbing services.
💡 Pro Tip: When you’re busy with burst pipes and customer calls, you don’t have the time to research, learn, and figure out how to do technical SEO. Outsourcing your technical SEO is a great way to reap the benefits of a technically sound website without having to waste the time learning how to do it.
5. Create industry-related content
✍️ SUMMARY: Building your plumbing company as an authority in your industry helps build trust with your audience. Content creation helps you share your industry knowledge with your audience and show that you’re an expert in your field. You can create blogs, videos, infographics, and more to showcase your expertise.
Part of optimizing your plumbing company’s website is creating content that other sites will want to link to—a key part of building your online profile. This SEO tactic requires creating new content regularly. Google favors sites with regularly updated content and links from other websites.
Content creation strategies typically include:
Starting a blog on your website that covers various plumbing topics
Creating videos about plumbing and projects you’ve completed
Designing infographics that share helpful plumbing information
Creating informative, helpful content not only helps you build trust with your audience, but it also helps you rank for relevant searches to drive more qualified traffic that turns into service calls.
6. Managing your online directory listings
✍️ SUMMARY: Your business will appear across multiple directories on the web. Ensuring all of your business’s information, including name, address, and phone number, is accurate will ensure people can get in touch with you to hire you for a job.
A crucial component of plumbing SEO is managing your online directory listings. From Google to Yelp, people use different platforms to discover local businesses. It’s important that you keep these listings up-to-date, so people get the most accurate information about your business.
You’ll want to check any local directories where your business might be listed, including:
Google Business Profile
Yelp
Bing Places
Apple Maps
Angi
HomeAdvisor
Your local chamber of commerce
Nextdoor
And more!
If you’re listed in these directories, you’ll want to make sure your information is consistent across the board.
💡 Pro Tip: Use a tool like LocalFX to help you manage your local directory listings across 40+ platform. Instead of wasting your time checking each individual platform, LocalFX can analyze them all and identify which ones need information fixed. It saves you time, so you can worry about fielding service calls instead.
7. Boost local reviews to enhance SEO
✍️ SUMMARY: Local reviews help you build trust with people looking to hire a plumber. Not only do you want to ask customers to leave reviews (in-person, through email, etc.), but you’ll also want to take time to respond to reviews to show you’re engaged and listening.
Did you know that 90% of people rely on reviews to evaluate a local business? That’s why review management is a crucial component of SEO for plumbers — you need to build a positive reputation of your business to ensure you drive leads to your business, not away from.
Having reviews on your local profiles, whether it’s Google Business Profile, Yelp, or somewhere else, will help people determine if you’re a good choice. So, you want to try and provide as many reviews as possible for people, so they can make that determination.
You can ask for reviews by:
Asking in person after completing a job
Sending a follow-up text message after the service completion
Sending a follow-up email after service completion
When you get reviews on your profile, make sure you take time to respond, whether positive or negative — 88% of consumers are likely to use or visit a business if they see the owner responds to all reviews. Taking time to respond shows you’re listening and engaging with your customers, which sends a positive message to your audience.
💡 Pro Tip: Use a review management tool to help you solicit more reviews and boost your online credibility.
8. Create location-specific and service-specific pages on your website
✍️ SUMMARY: Location and service-specific pages help you drive people to your website that look for a specific service or are looking for a provider in a specific area. Create these dedicated pages to create a more tailored experience for your audience, which can help you earn more jobs.
To wrap up this list of plumbing SEO tips, let’s talk about creating service and location-specific pages. Both of these types of pages have the same goal: Deliver a tailored page experience that drives people looking for that exact service/provider.
With the location-specific pages, you create pages for each local area you service.
For example, a Harrisburg plumber might create location pages for places like Carlisle, Lemoyne, Hershey, and York. That way, if someone searches “Plumber in Hershey,” they could come across the location-specific page tailored to people in Hershey.
On the other hand, service-specific pages highlight the individual services you offer for people. Instead of having a generic service page that lists everything you do, you create a page for each service. That way, if someone’s searching for a specific service, they get directed straight to that page to learn how you help.
You can create service pages for things like:
Drain cleaning
Faucet installation
Faucet repair
Outdoor plumbing repair
Sewer cleaning
Sewer repair
Sump pump repair
Toilet installation
And more!
Having these individual service pages enables home and business owners to know, right out the gate, if you can solve their problem.
Creating these individualized service and location pages will help you deliver a more tailored experience for your website visitors, which will ultimately lead to increased service calls.
FAQ on SEO for plumbers
Get answers to your questions about plumbing SEO services below:
SEO for plumbers, or plumber SEO, is the practice of optimizing your website to appear in search results on places like Google and Bing. Plumber SEO includes tactics like researching keywords, writing content, improving page speed, and more.
Search engines are the online version of a popularity contest.
Search rankings are based on complex algorithms that look at dozens of different criteria. The sites that rise to the top of those rankings are those that get the most links from other sites and provide the most authoritative information on a subject.
The goal of plumber SEO is to make your plumbing company’s website stand out to these search engines. A website must be optimized (or improved) for off-page, on-page, and technical SEO in order to deliver the best search results.
The strategies for SEO are complicated and change frequently, because Google is always updating the algorithm that determines search results.
An SEO “best practice” can become outdated in a matter of months — a good SEO company will stay on top of these trends and keep optimizing your website to increase results.
SEO can include work done to your plumbing website, but it may also include work done on other sites.
For example, your SEO agency may help your company research keywords and create content for those keywords, plus conduct outreach to help your website attract relevant and authoritative links to improve your backlink profile.
Did you know that 54% of customers research plumbing services online before scheduling an appointment? When people want to find a plumber to do the job, they’re turning to the web to search for the right one.
If you aren’t optimizing your presence in search results, you’ll miss the opportunity to drive these searchers to your business and turn them into service calls. Instead, they’ll book the job with your competitors, which means you miss out on revenue.
With a plumbing SEO strategy, you’ll optimize your presence in search results to help drive people to your website, learn about your services, and ultimately hire you for the job.
Here are a few other reasons SEO for plumbers is valuable:
SEO evens the playing field against chain plumbers: Chain plumbers like Roto-Rooter and Mr. Rooter Plumbing often have more resources, making it harder to compete. With SEO, you can compete against the chains (and outrank them) by delivering more helpful and relevant information than them.
SEO is affordable: Many plumbers run Google Ads, which is a great strategy, but some high-value keywords are competitive, which is costly (and digs into your ROI). SEO is a great counterpart to pay-per-click (PPC) for plumbers because it has a lower customer acquisition cost (CAC) compared to PPC.
SEO provides long-term growth: A well-executed SEO strategy will continually drive traffic to your website, so you continue to book new jobs.
Expert insights from
Tim MooreInternet Marketing Specialist
“SEO for plumbers is the perfect long-term digital strategy that can build the foundation for all other digital marketing investments. SEO allows you to sit back and watch your customers come to you by improving your presence online and displaying your industry expertise. Plumbing can be a highly competitive industry, so investing in SEO and local SEO often gives you the competitive edge you need to succeed online.”
At the end of the day, your goal is to increase service calls and keep your team busy with jobs. If you feel like you aren’t getting as many jobs, SEO can help.
SEO helps you put your plumbing company right in front of leads when they’re searching for a plumber. It helps you target keywords your audience actively searches when looking for a plumber, so they can see you before your competition.
When you rank better in search results, you drive more traffic. More traffic means increased leads, and, in the end, more booked jobs.
Here’s some food for thought: When homeowners experience a leaky pipe or need help installing a new water heather, they outsource it to the professionals — you.
So why should it be any different when it comes to your SEO?
Outsourcing your SEO to a skilled agency takes the work off your plate. You can focus on managing service calls, while your agency focuses on increasing those service calls.
Here are some added benefits to hiring someone to handle your plumbing SEO:
You don’t have to learn all the technical aspects of SEO, which can be time-consuming, confusing, and overwhelming
You’ll get ahead of competition by having experts work on your strategy
You’ll save time from having to learn how to do SEO, develop your strategy, and maintain it
Your strategy will stay modern and allow you to keep pace with algorithm changes, so you don’t fall behind
While it’s possible to do plumbing SEO yourself, just like it’s possible for a homeowner to fix a leaky pipe, it’s always better to rely on the experts to do the job.
If you feel you don’t have the time to dedicate to plumber SEO, you can opt to invest in plumbing SEO services from an agency. Partnering with a skilled and reputable agency will ensure you reap the benefits of having an SEO strategy without worrying about how to put the SEO strategy in place.
At WebFX, we have over 29 years of experience creating custom SEO campaigns that help businesses like yours grow.
With WebFX, you’ll get:
A customized SEO strategy built for your plumbing company
A team of 500 SEO pros optimizing your campaign
Open communication and monthly reporting, so you know what’s happening with your strategy
An agency that has experience working with plumbers
Want to see what we can do for you? Check out our case study on Bruni and Campisi, a plumbing and HVAC company we helped to double their goal conversions for SEO!
Don’t let your plumbing SEO budget go down the drain — hire an expert
Don’t waste valuable marketing dollars trying to figure out how to get plumbing SEO to work for you. Instead, partner with an SEO agency, like WebFX, to improve your performance in search results.
We have over 48,000+ hours of expertise in home services, helping businesses like yours increase service calls and revenue growth. Our team creates custom marketing strategies built to help you succeed in your local market.
Get your free, no-obligation quote to start exploring what our SEO services can do to help your plumbing business grow!
Try our free Marketing Calculator
Craft a tailored online marketing strategy! Utilize our free Internet marketing calculator for a custom plan based on your location, reach, timeframe, and budget.
Craft a tailored online marketing strategy! Utilize our free Internet marketing calculator for a custom plan based on your location, reach, timeframe, and budget.
Solving key challenges for home services companies
Our website isn’t ranking in the search results for home services
When people or businesses need home services in their area, they take to search engines like Google. Ensure your website appears at the top of the results when your target audience needs your services.
We’re struggling to grow our team
Expanding your team and growing your business go hand-in-hand. If you need help growing your team with talented and friendly employees, our recruitment marketing services have you covered.
We’re not generating enough leads
Are people visiting your website but not getting in touch with you? Our expert marketing specialists and web designers can optimize all areas of your website so you can attract and convert more of your target audience to use your home services.
We’re not attracting new customers
Having trouble increasing your online visibility, so you can attract new customers? Our award-winning marketing services get your brand in front of the right people in your local area.
Macy is a content marketing consultant with over five years of experience creating content for dozens of industries including home services, recreation, and education. She’s written about every marketing topic under the sun, from SEO to AI to email marketing. Her work has been featured by Search Engine Journal, HubSpot, Entrepreneur, Clutch, and more. In her free time, Macy enjoys crafting, reading comic books, and walking her dog Daisy.
