SEO for Plumbing Companies

Do Plumbers Need SEO?

Let’s start with an explanation of why modern plumbers need SEO.

• Emergency contact information. Today’s SERPs make it easy for customers to take action. When searching for emergency plumbing services on a mobile phone in a panic, customers will be able to click a button and call a company; SEO will help you make sure yours is the one they call.
• Brand visibility. No plumbing business can survive without some kind of initial brand visibility. Printed ads, billboards, and stencils on your van can all help—but SEO has the power to reach just about everyone in your city.
• Organic traffic. It takes some time to reach rank one, but once you get there, you can count on a steady stream of inbound traffic—a passive source of potential new customers.
• Local domination. SEO allows you to optimize for a local area, so if you’re trying to become the dominant plumbing business in, say, Tulsa, you can tailor your strategy to focus on appealing to Tulsa residents.
• Authority and reputation. The process of SEO provides you with opportunities to produce expert content, provide advice to prospective customers, and get your brand mentioned in top publications. It’s a great opportunity to boost your authority and reputation in the industry.
• Competition safeguarding. Most plumbing businesses are already turning to SEO to improve their brand visibility. Getting involved yourself is a defensive measure that can ensure they don’t completely overrun you.

The Formula for SEO in the Plumbing Industry

SEO can seem complex to newcomers, and if you dig deep enough, you can find thousands of variables to potentially concern yourself with. But high-level, SEO can be simply broken down into three categories of strategies:

• Onsite optimization and technical SEO for plumbers. First, you’ll need to clean up your website. For your site to rank, it needs to be fully functional, user-friendly, and optimized for target keywords relevant to your demographics. Onsite technical optimization is usually a one-time process, but a vital one if you want to succeed.
• Onsite plumbing content. Next, you’ll need to work on developing strong onsite content. These will serve as opportunities to showcase your expertise, optimize for target keywords relevant to the plumbing industry (and your location), and even embed calls-to-action to incentivize customer contact. Additionally, these serve as what we call “linkable assets,” vital for an effective link building campaign.
• Link building and offsite SEO. Technical SEO and onsite content provide a good foundation, but you’ll also need an offsite SEO strategy to be successful. Offsite SEO requires you to build links from external publishers pointing to your site to boost your own authority. It’s the trickiest, yet arguably most important component of your campaign.