Local SEO Strategy for Plumbers and Plumbing Companies

It’s no longer a secret that Local SEO is one of the best marketing strategies that help to gain visibility in the local searches, improve organic traffic and conversions. So, if you own a local plumbing business, go and search on Google “plumber near me” or “plumbing company in my city.”

If Google doesn’t show your site, then guaranteed, you are losing severe opportunities and business to your competitor plumbers. So, how do you ensure that your plumbing company holds the top list of SERPs when local customers are looking for a plumber?

Well, in this guide, I will walk through the proven local SEO strategy for plumbers and plumbing companies. So, stay tuned to this guide for more details.

Local SEO Strategy for Plumbers and Plumbing Companies

These days, it’s become much more common that whenever people need any service, they simply search on Google. And usually, they select the top-listed one from Google. But, when I researched, I found that many site owners don’t focus properly on the local SEO strategy. Therefore, in maximum time, they lag behind the competition.

So, here’s the local SEO strategy for plumbers and plumbing companies that will help you make your business visible locally.

1. Keywords Research

The first and foremost step is to research keywords that will drive your business further. You should focus on research keywords that are related to your business and describe your plumbing services. So, list out all the services you offer and start researching keywords for each of them.

Keywords that will describe your service may seem like these, “plumbing service,” “emergency plumber in my city,” “city plumber near me,” “drain and sewer repair,” “faucet installation or repair services,” “plumbing fixture installation,” “water heater repair,” etc.

Also, make sure to choose the low competitive keywords, long-tail, and have a decent search volume. Another thing is, you have to consider whether your business is state-wise or local, and based on this, find out the best-suited keywords.

Let’s see how it works from a real-time example. When I search for the term “plumbing services” using Ubersuggest, specifying the location with the state of Mexico, here’s what I find-

Among all these keywords, “Plumbing service 24 hours” and “plumbing services in my area” both keywords come with buying intention and long-tail. So, you can decide if you can utilize these keywords or not after analyzing the competition factor with other keywords.

After analyzing the competition, if you identify that these keywords have lower competition than others, then I’ll suggest targeting them for your plumbing site.

Usually, there are two categories of keywords that users use while searching for specific services or information. The first one is to search with implicit keywords where users usually search with buying intent, and the second is explicit keywords that imply research intent. In that case, along with the service-related keywords, you also have to focus on your audience’s search intent.

Implicit Keywords:

Here, the customers directly use keywords intending to take action immediately. So, here are the best examples of keywords with hiring intent- “plumbing companies in Mexico,” “sewer repair,” “emergency plumbing service in my area,” “Tankless water heaters Phoenix” “plumbers near me,” “plumbing companies in my city,” etc.

Explicit Keywords:

People use such keywords to learn something or gather information for specific subjects. Generally, keywords with research intent are used at the long end of the sales cycle. For example, “how to choose the best plumbers,” “tips for selecting a plumber,” “what should I look for when hiring a plumber,” “how to choose plumbers in Mexico,” “how can I install a water heater,” etc.

Now, here are some free and paid keyword research tools that you can use for local keyword research-

• Moz Local
• Semrush Listing Management Tool
• BrightLocal
• Keywords Everywhere
• GrowthBar (Chrome Extension)

2. Competition Analysis

It’s always worth analyzing what your competitors are doing or you can say you spy on your competitors. There’s nothing wrong with it; rather, it’s an opportunity to learn something new from your competitors and try to do better than them. Here’s why should you do competitive analysis-

• It will help you to identify your service’s uniqueness and what makes your services different from competitors.
• You can explore the things your competitors are doing “Right.” By exploring this, you can ensure outperforming the industry standard.
• Competitor analysis allows you to find out your competitor’s weaknesses. It’s a great way to take advantage of identifying the area of opportunities and make the best use of it.
• Learn what’s missing in your competitor’s services through the customer reviews. So, you can implement them in your services to meet their needs and add value to the customers.
• Moreover, you can see the current keywords they are working on and their SERP position. That way, you’ll be able to find those keywords related to your service and determine if you can target them.

So, now that you have done the keyword research let’s start analyzing the competitors based on those keywords. First, find your true competitors by looking for those who are doing well in local searches in your area. It would be better to compare at least ten competitors of SERPs first page to get a richer analysis. Once finding the competitors, here’s what you should next focus on-

Keyword Analysis:

Pay attention to where you are lagging behind your competitors and find out those keywords that your competitors have targeted but you didn’t.

• Pick the valuable keywords that they have targeted and are in a high-ranking position.
• Look out for those keywords from which your competitors are gaining more traffic and the highest ROI.
• Choose the low competitive, long-tail, and buying-intent keywords that they are ranking for.
• Analyze the popular pages keyword gap and see which pages rank for the most keywords.

Your competitors may rank for hundreds of keywords, so it will be a bit tough for you to do this analysis manually. In fact, among all these keywords, you’ll find that not all of them are related to your service. In that case, you can sort out the best-suited keywords using the following tools. Also, these tools will help you by making this task quicker and easier.

• Moz’s Keyword Explorer
• SEMrush
• Similar Web
• Ahrefs

On-Page Factors:

Once identifying the specific keywords, then you should move forward to analyzing the on-page factors of your competitor’s site. In this way, you can identify the factors resulting in your competitors outranking you.

1. The position of your competitor by doing Google SERP analysis.
2. Find their content strategy, content quality, and content gaps.
3. Identify the most popular content topics and most linked content.
4. Examine how they structured their site’s internal linking which includes, URLs, breadcrumbs, anchor text.
5. See how your competitors are optimizing their keywords within their content.

Off-Page Factors:

Analyzing the off-page factors will help you to understand what strategy your competitors are following that makes it harder to compete against them. So, here’s what you should do to find out their strengths and make the best use of them.

• Compare the number and quality of backlinks your competitors are using.
• Find out the backlink profiles and their sources.
• You should focus on high-quality backlinks.
• Search for all the potential guest blogging opportunities.
• Check for both no-follow and do-follow links. Google algorithms don’t use no-follow links, but they can be an important source of traffic.
• Consider backlinks which are important for both a page level and on a domain level.
• Strong backlinks have topical anchor text like plumbing services, plumber, plumbing, etc. So, when analyzing, make sure to identify the anchor text variation your competitors are applying.     

Tools to use-

• Alexa’s Competitor Backlink Checker.
• Majestic’s Backlink Checker

Technical Factors:

Site optimization is a big factor for instant traffic boost, and to develop a strong website foundation; technical SEO is one of the best strategies. You can analyze your competitor’s technical strengths and weaknesses to compare with your site. So, here’s how it works.

• Visit your competitor’s site from a mobile phone and navigate the whole site to see how mobile-friendly their sites are. In this way, you can find out the loopholes to improve your site.
• Analyze their page speed or loading time.
• Identify if they are using robot.txt files and XML sitemaps.
• Find the broken pages on your competitor’s websites and take advantage of those pages.
• Figure out the content of the dead pages and create something similar but in a better way.

Tools to Use-

• Ahrefs Site Explorer
• SpyFu
• QuickSprout
• SerpStat
• Similar Web

3. Site Architecture

According to research, 63% of consumers primarily use a company’s main website to engage with them. That means when your potential customer searches for your services; your website is the first thing that they will visit and see. So, what can you do to engage your audiences or potential clients?

You should focus on building a better site structure. Here’s why site structure matters-

• A better-structured site has more chance of ranking higher in the SERP and is more likely to engage the customers.
• It can ensure a great user experience.
• Provides your website with sitelinks which are the listing format in the SERPs.
• A good SEO practice that helps Googlebot to crawl and index the content.

Now, you may wonder how to create a site structure that will stand out from other plumber’s sites and attract more clients to your site. So, here’s what you need to know-

Plan Out the Hierarchy:

Plan out a logical hierarchy of your website, and the architecture should be very simple. As complicated architecture may confuse the audience, it’s bad for the user experience too.

Navigation:

Along with a well-structured homepage, it’s also essential to have a clear navigation path on your site. So, focus on the categories of your header menu and footer menu.

• Header Navigation Menu

As a plumbing company, the header of your site should include your main pages. For example, “Home,” “Our Story,” “Services,” “Service Areas,” “Blog,” “Reviews,” “Schedule Service”, etc. within these categories, you can add sub-categories, just like the following image. In this way, your clients can easily navigate to another page of your site.

• Footer Navigation Menu

The next thing is the footer, where you can include your address, contact information, location, social media buttons, privacy, policy, terms of use, etc.

Internal Linking Structure:

Lastly, your site architecture will determine how well your pages are linked together. Therefore, link to your category pages from the navigation menu to individual pages of that category. For example, “Plumb Crazy” links to its services from its homepage, and all the service pages link to its subcategories.

4. Home Page Content Strategy

Your homepage should be the face of your plumbing website. Through the homepage, let the clients know that they are in the right place and you are the one they are looking for. Include all the core essentials of your business that will express your excellence and can convenience the clients.

1. You can add some creative images and videos which will imply your services.
2. Add all the services you provide with small descriptions.
3. Point out your expertise, specialists, and team members efficiency.
4. Explain the benefits your clients will get from you.
5. Add a contact us form.

   

6. Share the customer reviews or testimonials,
7. Implicit keywords are the most powerful, easiest, and quickest way to rank higher and get new clients with your local SEO campaigns. That is why you should target main keywords with the intention of immediate action. Additionally, these keywords must be present in your home page content.

   

5. Service Pages

Potential clients require you to feel confident that you provide the exact service they want before contacting your company. Therefore, it’s essential to put all the services you provide on your site so that the clients can see them and make sure your company meets their needs. Let’s see how to do it-

1. Dedicate separate pages for each service you provide with optimum information to deliver the best SEO results. For example, your services are water heater services, whole home water filtration, leaks repair, drain, and sewer cleaning. So, you should create separate pages for each of them.
2. Include service-related keywords which come with a buying intent.
3. Make sure to provide detailed content about each of your services.
4. Share your experience of solving plumbing problems and what additional benefits your customers will get from you.
5. If you target Multiple states or locations, then you have to create landing pages for each location.
6. Include a transparent pricing range on each service page and the contact us button.

6. Contact Us Page

For any business, the contact us page serves as the website’s lead drive. The main goal of every website owner is to get as many leads or clients as possible. It should be really simple or easy to find you for people to contact and hire you.

For example, Infinity Plumbing services added 3 different ways to contact them along with a separate contact Us page. So that clients don’t have to waste their time to figure out how to get in touch with them. This is a fool-proof way to generate a maximum number of inquiries from visitors to your website.

Though you use the prominent link to contact us at your home page, service pages, or other pages, you should create a separate Contact Us page as well.

• Don’t forget to list your business name, phone number, address, and email.
• If you provide service in 3 or 4 locations, then you should also add all the location’s addresses to the contact us page.
• Having online booking software on your site will make things easier.

  

7. Location Page

If your business provides services in more than one location in an area, then the location page is a must. The Location Page of your site should include the following-

1. Include your service hours, name, address, and phone number.
2. Individual office description for each location.
3. Share the testimonials of each location’s happy customers.
4. Provide the parking/transit information and promotions.
5. Create unique content for each location page and avoid duplicating them.
6. Don’t forget to add Google Maps to your location pages for each location.

   

For a single location, you can create a location-specific or locally descriptive “About Us” page along with your company’s other information.

8. Website Design and Development

In today’s marketplace, only having a digital presence is not enough; you should have a well-optimized, interactive, SEO Friendly, and functional website. If your website is not user-friendly, there’s no point of having it. Visitors will judge your site in a matter of seconds, especially when they are in a hurry to hire a plumber.

So, to deliver a dynamic user experience and an engaging site, you should focus on optimizing your website design and development. So, here’s the checklist that will help you to build a user-friendly website and add value to your clients.   

Plumbing Website Templates:

Finding the right plumber site template is actually a matter of preference. But, you should choose a standard design that will make your website stand out from others. It should be simple, comprehensive, easy to navigate, and not at all complicated. Do not overdo things; this will make it difficult for the visitors to find their way around.

Page Speed:

Remember these words forever that no one will wait if your site takes too long to load. So, design your website in accordance, which will make the loading times prompt. Use Pagespeed Insights by Google to check your website speed and improvements.

Mobile-Friendliness:

According to Hubspot, 61% of mobile searches are more likely to visit or contact those local businesses that have mobile-friendly sites. Also, in 2021 mobile devices will influence over $1.4 trillion in local-based sales. Now, you may understand the necessity of developing a mobile-friendly website to engage the customers and generate more sales.

So, run a mobile-usability test on Google for your site and see if your site is mobile-friendly or not. If not, then look out for where you need improvements.

Strong Security:

You should never compromise on your website security. The website should include fundamental security and privacy protocols to protect the visitor’s and client’s data.

• Enable HTTPS with an SSL certificate across your entire website,
• For online payments, use an AVS to add additional security in the checkout process. Some reputable AVS are- Melissa, Loqate, Square, etc.
• Also, you can purchase financial verification software like MasterCard Merchant Fraud protection, VeriSign, etc, to boost the level of security for payment.

9. Blog Section Strategy

The primary purpose of your blog section is to educate your audiences with proper information and in-depth plumbing knowledge. Content pages will feature explicit keywords with research intent. By doing so, you can build an internal linking strategy and add value to your customer. As a result, you can convert more traffic towards your site.

These are some keywords best suited for your blog post contents, “how to choose a plumber,” “what to consider while choosing a plumbing company,” “things that jam a garbage disposal,” etc. While your general topics can attract wide crowds, sometimes it’s essential to focus on and write about local topics to attract the local audience.

Here’s how can you do this-

• Be the local authority for your plumbing industry by promoting local gatherings, activities, news, and other educational blogs.
• If you serve different locations in your area, set up location-specific pages on your site with high-quality and unique local content. This will help you to rank for each specific location.
• Use your relevant local keywords throughout your blog content.
• Link internally to other relevant pages of your site and refer to your own blogs while writing.
• Also, link to other authority sites relevant to your service. This will increase the authority signals of your site to search engines.

10. Technical SEO

It’s really rare to find any business owner who doesn’t want to be found and rank higher on search engines. However, some business owners unintentionally restrict their discovery and crawl by search engine web crawlers. Thus, when clients search online for specific services related to their service, they fail to show their sites.

In that case, technical SEO strategies can help your local business site to be found online whenever clients search for something related. It can make or break your site’s ranking in the search engine result pages. So, the following are the technical SEO checklists that will help your local plumbing website an instant boost.

1. To measure the technical factors and find technical issues related to site performance, sitemaps, page experience, loading speed, etc., sign up for Google Search Console. If you still don’t have an account, you should create it as soon as possible.
2. Search on Google with site:yourdomain.com to see the number of results of your site. If you see some missing pages, that means you have indexation issues.
3. Create and optimize a robots.txt file and XML sitemap.
4. Use Google Webmaster Central to upload your sitemap.
5. Add the appropriate schema markup for your local business site to boost your local ranking. You can use schema generator tools like Hall Analysis schema markup generator, Google Structured Data Markup Helper, Microdata Generator.com, etc.
6. Find the broken links on your site and fix them.
7. When you add new pages and delete the old ones, make sure to instruct the search engine crawlers (301 redirects) to update indexes with new pages.

11. Google My Business Setup

For every local business, optimizing Google listing or business profile is a must and the most effective way to rank higher on Google Maps. It helps to gain visibility in Google search local results. So, to get access to your business profile, you need to create an account and claim your business on Google My Business. Here are the steps to optimize your Google my Business page.

1. Sign up with your business email, then enter your business name and category and click on next.
2. After that, add your location and then enter your service areas.
3. Add the phone number you want your clients to use to connect to your business. You can change this number at any time.
4. Then, add your business website URL, and it will be included in your business profile.
5. Verify your business, and you are ready to promote your business and gather customer reviews.
6. Provide all your up-to-date information accurately, including your logo, hours of operation, services or products, and payment methods
7. If you have a physical office, you can add the front side and other images of your office. It will help to create more value for your business.
8. Encourage your clients to share their reviews, and you should respond authentically to all the reviews.

12. Optimize for Voice Search

Voice search is growing rapidly nowadays. According to Search Engine Watch, mobile voice-related searches are three times more likely to be local-based than text. Now, to get information about a local service people pull out their phones and start searching for it. For example, “what are some good plumbing companies near me,” “what are the opening times for….” “Alexa, call an emergency plumber in Chalco, etc.

In fact, almost 53% of people who own smart speakers like Google Home or Amazon’s Alexa perform such searches for a local business every day in the USA. Therefore, in local SEO, it’s essential to optimize your website for voice search. You should figure out how people ask questions when they speak into devices. So, let’s see what to consider to optimize voice search for your plumbing business.

1. When doing voice search, customers generally use more long-tail keywords compared with type searches. For example-
   • Typed Search: “Plumbers near me.”
   • Voice Search: “Who are the best plumbers in my local area.”

   So, you have to create content in a more conversational, natural, and concise way. By doing so, you can match the language people used in their voice search, which ultimately helps to drive engagement.

2. Again I will recommend using schema markup or structured data. It’s one of the SEO factors that doesn’t really affect your ranking, but you can definitely get an edge over your competitors, especially when it comes to voice search.
3. Create content answering the audience’s frequently asked questions. Also, you can create a separate page for FAQs.

13. NAP – Local Citation

NAP implies the official versions of your business name, address, and Phone Number provided on your Google My Business page and your website. Local citations are vital to rank higher for local search queries and helping the customers to discover your business online whenever they search. According to Moz, citations are the 5th most important ranking signal for local searches.

So, follow the below steps to build the citations your plumbing site actually need-

• Your NAP should be accurate and consistent across all the directories, as having a consistent NAP is a positive factor to local SEO.
• Get listed with the data aggregators like Data Axle, Neustar Localeze, Factual, etc. they will distribute your business information to hundreds of other websites.
• Submit to other core directories like Apple Maps, Yelp, Yellow pages, BBB, Foursquare, etc.
• Go for directories that are specific to the plumbing industry.
• Track your citation status to prevent losing the citations. In that case, you can use Screaming Frog or Little Warden tools.

14. Directory Submission

As I said in the above section, you should get listed your business NAP in several directories. Which includes national, local, and plumbing industry directories.

Here are the lists of top online local business directories and top business listings for specific industries.

1. HubSpot’s Local Business Directories
2. WhiteSpark’s Best Citations for Plumbers
3. BrightLocal’s industry listings

So, here’s what your company listing should include-

1. Accurate Name, Address, Phone number across all directories related to your business category.
2. A backlink to your website will make it easier for potential customers to get in touch with you.
3. A thorough description or business summary of your business.
4. Get your business listed in local directories as well, like the local chamber of commerce and other local business associations.
5. You can use automated tools like Yext or Moz Local to identify quickly what online directory listings you have claimed and which still need some attention.

15. Social Share

Social media is much beneficial for companies in different industries, including local businesses like plumbing. You can reach a large audience, Increase customer engagement, increase social signal ranking factors, build your brand, relationship, authority, get qualified leads through social sharing.

Let’s see how can you get all these-

1. Pick the most popular social media channels like Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Reddit, Google+, etc.
2. Post helpful plumbing-related posts or tips like how to save water or the best water heaters on your social media platforms.
3. Share plumbing-related facts like did you know, the single handle faucet was invented in 1939 by Al Moen that can control hot and cold water in just one turn. In this way, your audience will find you as a plumbing expert.
4. Show off your services and work through posts and images. This is helpful to create 2x more engagement.
5. Share informational content, DIY videos, and arrange contests to keep the follower engaged with your business.
6. Encourage customer reviews and ensure responding to their comments always.

16. Content Marketing/ Outreach

Off-page SEO is a big factor; in that case, to improve your site’s authority and trust, you will require to focus on content marketing or blogger outreach or getting high-quality backlinks. As per Moz, link signals are the first and second most vital factor respectively for localized organic ranking and local packs.

It’s essential to get inbound links from other authority websites related to plumbing referring to your website to boost your local SEO. Every inbound link tells Google that your business is legitimate and also helps to raise the authority of your site. There are several ways to get backlinks-

Guest Posting:

Still, it is one of the great ways to build high-quality links. So, for your plumbing website, focus on-

• Writing high-quality local guest blogs and publications
• Industry-specific blogs
• Contact the other trusted and reputable websites in your industry and act as a resource provider.
• Get your content published in the industry publications to build your brand, visible expertise, and of course, getting backlinks. For this, you can set up press request alerts from several mediums like HARO, Source Bottle, Gorkana, Muck Rack, etc.
• You can look out for Twitter hashtags used by journalists #JournoRequest or #PRrequest.

Sponsorship or Partnership:

To get backlinks from sponsorship and partnership, consider sponsoring a webinar or meet-up, promoting something local related to your services, and hosting community events. In this way, you can build a strong relationship with prominent people or influencers and can receive more digital PR.

Also, go a step further and build co-marketing partnerships. When partnering up with another company, you can reach out to them and ask if they can feature you in their partner directory. In this way, you can manage more links and buzz with less work.

17. Client Testimonial/ Reviews

In addition to blog posts or content, another great form of content that you can post on your website is testimonials. So, you can collect testimonials from your previous clients or ask them to give reviews about your business or services. Then, post them on your website. The following image is from AS Plumbing who uses several testimonials of their customers on their site.

It’s a big factor for the new audiences to build confidence in your site. Research by Brightlocal states that 85% of consumers trust businesses with positive reviews. You can also collect reviews from Google My Business, trust pilot, yellow pages, clutch.co, Facebook, and all other social media and directories. All these reviews and testimonials will help you to create more value for your business.

18. Adding Accreditations, Awards, and Case Study

To establish your plumbing business as legitimate and trustworthy, obviously, you have worked really hard. So, why not show off your badges, awards, accreditations, and case studies to your prospective clients. You can add your-

1. Plumbing Contractor license.
2. Master plumber license.
3. Better business bureau grade.
4. Your “Best Of” certifications or badges.
5. Trusted partners you are working with.

   

6. Case studies by sharing how you provide any particular service, the time it was required, and its outcome. For example, you can share the experience of water heater installation or repair in your case study. You can also add before and after images to add more clearance and value to the case studies.

Wrapping Up

The success of a local business actually depends on the overall application of local SEO strategies. In recent days, local business owners have become much aware of Local SEO, which is why they started investing in it. But, unfortunately, many of them can’t get their expected result or audience due to the lack of fair or proper local SEO strategies.

Actually, the local SEO strategy is a bit different for the existing or new sites. For existing sites, you have to audit the site first to identify the issues, and then develop strategies according to the issues. On the other side, you have to plan the strategies from the beginning for the new sites.

In that case, only a local SEO expert can plan and implement accurate local SEO strategies that will boost your local business for local searches. That means these will help your company to reach potential clients after a certain period of time.

So, if you want help with Local SEO strategies for your Plumbing Companies, Giant Marketers can help you out. We’ve already worked with several plumbing companies to develop and implement local SEO strategies. Also, specialize in helping plumbers to attract local customers who are searching for services and beat their competitors. So, if you’re ready to get started, feel free to contact us.