Plumber SEO 101

Ready for some outstanding news? There are boat-loads of people out there—right in your service area—who need a plumber. How about even better news ? It’s entirely possible to turn those people-in-need-of-a-plumber into something much more interesting: Your customers. But first, those folks need to know you even exist.

We can help make that happen using SEO.

Here's a search for "Denver Plumbing". To keep it simple, we'll break this down in a couple of sections:

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is behind-the-scenes magic that helps Google rank sites for customers. Here’s how it works: Your potential customers type in a phrase or question, Google searches dozens of billions of web pages, and then it serves up a list of sites on a Search Engine Results Page (SERP) that likely address their phrase or question. SEO is the process by which you optimize the chances of Google finding your shop and then saying to those people-in-need-of-plumber: Check out this one! Looks like they can help!

Another way to say it: Websites are full of little homing beacons—words and other elements (which we’ll get to in a minute) that “light up” when they match search signals. The key to SEO is making sure you have your homing beacons configured correctly so they respond at the right time in the right way.

Fortunately, SEO is more science than art— which takes away all of the subjectivity on Google’s end and a good bit of the guesswork on ours. Unfortunately, to the average business owner it can feel like a PhD-level organic chem lab.

Dozens of SEO factors, some of which are more or less out of your control, contribute to your Google ranking.

Keywords for plumbing SEO are the terms, phrases, and questions people type into the Google search bar. If you use those same terms, phrases, and questions on your website, Google’s more likely to find it and include you on a SERP. Seems simple enough, right? Yes. Except no. Here are some tips for playing nicely with Google when it comes to keywords:

1. Do your keyword research. Don’t guess at what words and phrases people might be using to find a good plumber. Instead, take advantage of Google’s free keyword planning tool. If you’re in a hurry, you can even just start typing a query into Google and see what suggested searches come up.
   
2. Don’t overdo your keywords. In the early days of SEO, marketers tried to trick Google by stuffing websites with keywords. Some even went so far as to hide keywords randomly throughout the site—making them the same color as the background so Google, but not website visitors, could see them. Google was not amused, and these cheater websites now take a hit on rankings. Use keywords naturally and meaningfully.
   
3. Write well. In general, your website copy needs to be well-written and updated frequently. It should answer questions your potential customers are asking.
   
4. Link wisely. When providing a link, use keywords as the link. For example, rather than writing, “We’d love to help you with your SEO strategy. Click here for more details,” write, “ Schedule your plumber SEO consultation.”
   
5. Use keywords in HTML tags. Google gets giddy when it finds keywords in H1 and H2 headers. Which brings us to the next factor: HTML Analysis.
   

Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) is how websites are written. It dictates what fonts are used, where things show up on the page, how big the words are, what color they appear in, and more. To optimize your HTML:

1. Use meta description tags. The 160-character meta description summarizes a web page’s content, and Google both searches it and displays it on SERPs. Having a meta description helps both Google and your potential customer know if you’re a good fit for their query.
   
2. Include relevant keywords in your title, header, and subheader tags. When Google finds keywords that match a search query in your title, H1, and H2 tags, it knows a good portion of your content is relevant to the consumer. The result? It’s more likely to bump your site closer to the top of the SERP.
   
3. Use structured data. Google indexes billions of websites, and it greatly appreciates super-organized (structured) data it can process quickly. JSON-LD is a good example of structured data Google can easily read. This includes the schema code for things likes your hours, your service types, the payment you accept, your TRUE service area, and more.
   

Google likes websites that aren’t just covered in words. It’s looking for images and videos, too—properly tagged ones. It analyzes the number of words on a page, the number of pages on a site, and more. Google cares about:

1. Bounce rates* . Google can tell how long website visitors stick around, and that affects your placement in search results. If someone clicks on your website from a SERP and then immediately backs up and tries another site (your competitor’s, perhaps?), that tells Google that maybe your site wasn’t as relevant as it thought—which influences your site’s rank the next time.
   
2. Site activity* . Do your visitors watch a video? Complete a form? Do they spend time on each page, or are they just clicking around, perhaps having a difficult time finding what they’re looking for?
   
3. Quality backlinks . When another website links to your website, or when you link from one page of your own site to another page of your own site, that’s called a backlink. Having plenty of high-quality backlinks basically tells Google you know what you’re talking about and it can trust you enough to include you on its SERP. Three-quarters of a solid SEO strategy involves off-site work getting quality backlinks. If you’re wondering, “Why in the world would anyone ever link to my website?” we’ll have some answers for you in a future post. For now, let me simply say that whoever has the best links- and whoever has the most of those great backlinks- wins the SEO game.
   
4. Mobile-friendliness. Your website must, must, must be mobile-friendly. More than half of web traffic occurs on mobile devices, and that percentage is only going to climb. In March 2018, Google announced that it’s now using your website’s mobile version for indexing and ranking, rather than your desktop version. So, if you don’t have a mobile version, you’re invisible to Google and to all of those people-in-need-of-a-plumber.
   
5. Offer security. Google shys away from sites that appear to come with privacy or security concerns. Make sure your site is certified as Hyper Text Transfer Protocol Secure (HTTPS).
   

It’s important to understand that all Plumber & HVAC SEOfactors work together to determine your overall rank on Google. You might have an amazing copywriter on your team, but if your website isn’t mobile friendly—or vice versa—you’re in big trouble. Also, there’s simply no way to game Google. You can try to cheat the system, but you’ll pay for it with basement-level search rankings.

Want some advice? Don’t know your HTML from your HTTPS? We actually love chemistry, and we’d be honored to help grow your plumbing business. Start with a free consultation today, and learn how we use smart plumbing SEO strategies to grow your business, and outrank your competition! (See what we did there?)