SEO for plumbers, heating engineers & drainage, rank #1

  • October 24, 2018
  • obm
  • 15 min read
SEO for plumbers, heating engineers & drainage, rank #1

SEO is important for plumbers as it helps them reach a larger audience and gain more local leads. SEO allows customers to find their business easily, helping increase visibility, build trust and credibility among potential customers, and grow their customer base.

With the right SEO strategies in place, plumbers can ensure that their website shows up on relevant search engine results pages (SERPs), which will make it easier for people to find the services they offer.

Additionally, SEO is a great form of advertising for plumbers and can also help increase their online reputation by enabling them to keep track of what people are saying about their company across social media channels and other websites.

By optimising content with relevant keywords and phrases related to plumbing services, plumbers can further increase their website traffic and attract more visitors who are looking for the services they offer. Furthermore, SEO helps plumbers stay ahead of the competition by allowing them to better understand their target market so they can adjust their strategies accordingly. 



1. Creating and Optimising Google Business Listing

If you haven’t already set this up you can create a listing by going to google.com/business and create a listing, Google will then send you a pin within 3-5 days with a verification pin.

Do the following things for optimising your listing:

  • Company logo
  • Business address
  • Opening hours
  • Website link
  • Phone number
  • Email address
  • Company mission
  • Company description
  • Areas you cover
  • Images of your work
  • List your services
  • Categorise pictures of the team

On-going map listing maintenance (Google now places more active map listing higher)

Getting Reviews

Getting reviews – this is essential for converting traffic, we all know when we search for a company on-line we like to read reviews; this is why trip advisor is so popular when booking a hotel room. So, this is the same for your plumbing company.

Send links to your happy customers with a direct link to your Google business listing review page. (just ask them to leave a review does not work, 9 times out of 10 they will not know where to post them online) so send this direct link will make this a simple and easy process for them to do this.

SEO plumbing reviews

You can do this by searching your company name on Google, clicking “write a review” on the map listing and copying the URL, then sending this to your happy customer.

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Posting on Google

Google now offers a feature where you can post directly to the Google business listing, this is a great place to post offers, latest work, blog posts and things that are happening in your business such as local awards or accreditations you have received, for example, if your company has just become gas Safe registered post it on Google.

Plumbing google listing post

This is very much like a Facebook post but will show up under your map listing.

Leveraging traffic from other sites

Sometimes it is not just about getting keywords found on google but getting traffic from already highly ranked domains.

Let us explain

If you Google the keyword ‘Plumber Essex’ you will see 4 Paid ads, 3 map listings, and the top 3 organic listings are:

Rather than fighting these websites, get listed on them, they have already done the hard work so getting prominent positions on these sites can generate a lot more traffic.

So, it’s not just about getting top ranking on Google it’s about leveraging the current rankings of other sites that are listed in your local area.

2. Site structure

Creating the best site structure

Now it’s easy to think your website only needs the following pages.

  • Home
  • About
  • Services
  • Contact

Your website structure can be broken down into many pages to capture more long tail keywords, for example, if you are a heating maintenance contractor your services can be broken down into separate pages as follows:

  • Boiler repairs
  • Boiler installations
  • Boiler servicing
  • Gas safety inspections
  • Boiler types
  • Heating repairs
  • Radiator repairs
  • Boiler guide
  • 24 Hour Boiler Emergencies
  • Power Flushing
  • Survey and Inspections
  • Commercial Boilers

It may seem like a lot of pages, but it is essential to have subpages and do further keyword research and add good quality and engaging content for the user. Then optimise these pages using the keywords in the URL, title and header tags. This will help for better ranking on search engines for each of the keywords and the services.

So, a site structure can look like this, this can be broken down even further pages by doing keyword and competition research.

plumbing website structure

3. Technical SEO Audit

Here is a simple checklist of errors you might have that are affecting your Google position.

There are various platforms or tools available to perform technical SEO audits like; SEMrush.com or SEOptimer.com, which provides a detailed report on improvements, which help you understand what could be damaging your website ranking.

via GIPHY

It is always required to improve your website’s health, and hence it is necessary to regularly check your site for errors and improvements (we recommended doing a health check every two months).

Main areas to fix immediately:

  • Crawl errors:

This error occurs when any search engine tries to reach a page of your website but fails to reach it.

  • XML Sitemap:

It is the potential file that holds a complete list of page URLs along with some additional information.

  • Robot.txt file:

This is the file that instructs the search engine crawler not to crawl certain files.

  • Responsive check:

Is your page mobile responsive, check here (link)

  • Toxic links:

Potential harmful links pointing to the website that are unnatural and unsecure.

  • Page load speed:

Loading speed of the page must be minimum to improve the session timing.

  • Duplicate titles, descriptions, and headers:

Avoid duplication of titles, descriptions, and headers.

  • Broken links:

Adding incomplete URLs in the text or changing the URL address without updating the URL, can create a broken link. Such links should be redirected to appropriate pages of the website.

  • Mixed content on the website:

When https pages can find HTTP links, then mixed content errors can be detected.

  • Checking HTTP or https (having https is recommended):

It is recommended to have https (SSL) on your website.

These are all important factors to getting large amounts of traffic going to your website.

4. Plumbing Directory Citations

For local search optimisation any business must do the following things:

Local citations and directory listings are business profiles on websites like Yelp, Yell.com and Free Index. There are also many industry-specific directories such as gassaferegister.co.uk / watersafe.org.uk and ciphe.org.uk

Top free directories to get your plumbing business on straight away

These citations are valuable to local SEO because they’re essentially online phone books that associate your website with a physical location.

There are thousands of local directories to build profiles on that will drive traffic and links through to your website.

Make sure that these are directories that are located in your country and you are not just creating spammy links.

Once you have submitted to these directories you will start receiving sales calls asking you to upgrade your listing, the majority of the time a simple link is all you need, so only upgrade if you really think it is worth it.

5. User Experience

Improving user experience

User experience plays a significant role here in. You can get tons of traffic through to your website, but an essential factor is to make sure it converts! Hence utmost care must be taken when serving for user experience.

Look at your website from an outsider perspective, does your plumbing website have?

  • Unique selling points (what makes you different from the competition)
  • Reviews (do you have reviews from good sources like Checkatrade, Trustatrader & Google Business)
  • Does the website build trust on the first visit?
  • Is it forcing people to take action to either call or submit their email or number
  • Is the number displayed clearly?
  • Is the website mobile responsive – (https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly
  • Is the site fast and not taking ages to load? (check here)

These are all factors to consider and fix if there is an issue.

6. Adding Keywords to your plumbing website

Google search query and results:

When Google displays the results of our search query, it is in the format where the Google ads are placed at the top & very bottom of the page. The portions after Google ads are usually Business listings followed by the organic search results. The organic search results are the links that rank because of their SEO. You don’t need to pay Google to get into this page, but this requires a well-orchestrated SEO strategy.

Follow these tips to make sure you keep ahead of the game when looking at SEO for plumbers.

Keyword research:

There are many ways to perform keyword research for your website, Click here for some of the best tools to use. These are some of our favorite keyword research tools:

  • SEMRush
  • Google AdWord Keyword Planner
  • Google Search Console

We are not going to cover how to find plumbing keywords – others have already done that (see Brian Dean’s guide).

Keywords are relevant as they drive traffic to your blog or website pages for ‘free.’ When searching for relevant keywords for your business, you need to put in some reasonable time and thought.

Adding Keywords on the page:

This is basic SEO, but still, some people miss these fundamental principles. After keyword research, you need to do SEO by placing the keywords in the right place.

The keywords must be included in the following places:

  • The URL www.yourplumbingwebsite.co.uk/boiler-repairs-london

Well-crafted URLs are easy to understand both for users & search engines indicating what the destination page will contain.

  • Title of the Page:

It is the HTML tag that denotes the title of the page, which is displayed on the search engines result page as a clickable headline for the given result.

  • Meta description:

Targeted keywords relevant to the content on the webpage should be used in the meta description. This will be displayed in the Google search results.

  • H1, H2, H3 & H4 Tags

It is the heading tag that must contain targeted keywords because the crawler crawls these tags in search of keywords.

  • Image title:

Every title must be given a relevant title it helps in Search Engine Optimisation.

  • Image alt tag:

Image alt tags are used to describe the image or what the image is representing. This is for search engines.

  • In the content:

Placing the targeted keywords at the right place could help SEO and eventually improve your ranking and traffic towards your website from search engines.

  • Maintaining the keyword density:

Keywords must be used around 1 to 3% of the total content. Remember keyword stuffing or unnecessary use of keywords can adversely affect the SEO.

  • Website Internal Linking

Internally linking pages to relevant pages passes ranking signals to other pages, for example, if you mention ‘boiler repairs’ in a blog post or other service page, this should link through to the boiler repair page, which will help promote the pages and get you more boiler leads. A website that does this extremely well is Wikipedia; every page is filled with links to relevant page sources. So essentially over time, we want to make your website an encyclopedia of knowledge for the plumbing industry.

7. Blog Posting

Creating a blog and adding plumbing related content

Done correctly having a blog on your plumbing website will grow your business and expand the reach on search engines.

For e.g. As we are discussing SEO for plumbing businesses, the services of plumbing include emergency plumbers, unblock drains, drain surveys, gutter cleaning, sewers cleaning, etc. So these services can get more exposure and reach from the content on the blog.

Someone with a blocked drain may search on Google ‘How do I unblock a drain?.

Now if you build a blog with a comprehensive guide on how to unblock a drain you have a potential customer on your website.

Another example, if a potential customer has got a burst water main, they may ask Google, ‘how to turn my water off from the mains?’ now you post an excellent informative blog and instructions on how to do this, you have offered free advice and got another potential customer on your website that is looking for a plumber.

This is one of the most significant ways to generate more plumbing leads from the blog content. There are thousands of different questions people will be asking Google when having a problem with their plumbing. These can be researched using platforms like Ahrefs or Buzzsumo.

Outreach

  • Getting high authority plumbing Links

Outreach can be described as making good relationships with an influencer that already have a good following in your niche (plumbing) and trying to convince them to add your content on their blog or social media channels while promoting our services.

Many of the bloggers now ask for money if we want to add our link or promote your services in the content on their blog.

The trick is to write a great piece of content and reach out to this blog and ask for them to link back to you. This will increase domain authority (what is domain authority) and show Google that you are a major player in the plumbing industry.

8. Guest posting

Guest posting is one of the most popular off page activities to gain the traffic (can also be very time consuming), create brand awareness and get a backlink. It is just reaching out to the bloggers, pitch them and request to make your piece of content live on their website with a link back to your site.

Some websites that fall into the plumbing niche that accept guest posting

Plumbing Social media Influencers

The same rules apply for social media outreach, just reach out to influencers in your areas or the plumbing niche and ask them to promote your business.

Here are some plumbing Social media Influencers

Quora participation

Quora is a platform that provides you with an opportunity to answer any kind of question regarding plumbing. People ask questions to Quora every day, so this is an excellent platform for you to respond and then and add links of your blog, webpage and put social media accounts there.

9. Plumbing Infographics

Creating traffic through infographics

Infographics have been gaining popularity and become widely used amongst businesses for both digital and print media. They are a bright, effective and artistic way of presenting information without losing the attention of the viewer.

These are great for getting links from infographic websites such as graphs.net and infographicbee.com. Also, great to post on your social media and shows potential customers you are going the extra mile and are experts in your field.

10. Analysing the Traffic on Google Analytics & Search Console

SEO does not happen overnight, but within the first few months, you will notice a dramatic increase in organic traffic if the steps have been implemented correctly.

Google analytics will break down how many new and returning visitors you are getting. Also, you will need to install Google Search console to find out what people are typing into the search engines to find your website.

  • Set up Google Analytics
  • Set up Google Search Console

Analytic help you provide the referral links you have received. It also helps you understand the audience like; segmenting the audience according to gender, geographic, sources, page views, session time, bounce rate. This data enables you to understand which blog post is getting more viewers and help understanding user psychology regarding their areas of interest and provide us with a base to create valuable SEO strategies.

The plumbing industry is getting more and more competitive online, and there are no signs of it slowing down, but many companies are not following even the basic steps in SEO.

Just remember slow, and steady wins the race, SEO is a must, just work on it. 

Results take time, but when Google loves your site, it will give you all that you want for your plumbing business.

Grace

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