Local Plumbing Business SEO

Background

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is one of our specialisms and we are often approached by designers (of all shapes and sizes from freelancers to agencies) to help them with their clients in this regard.

In this case we were approached by a design agency to help with a local plumber client who was struggling to rank in his home town (a major town in the UK) for ‘plumbing’ related keywords. This was a pure local SEO project.

As you may expect, when people need a local tradesman (plumber, electrician, joiner) their first point of call is generally to search on Google. As few people search beyond page #1 it is imperative therefore for a trade (a local business) to be on the first page. Despite being in business for many years the designer’s client wasn’t on page #1, so here’s how we helped.

How We Helped

We first ran an SEO website audit on the existing site to understand any technical and on-page SEO errors such as page speed, page titles and headings, issues with the new Page Experience component of Google’s algorithm, whether content matched what people were looking for, and whether in fact whether the website had all the services and locations on there in the first place.

We also reviewed their profiles such as Google My Business, Bing Places for Business and Facebook, and discovered they had multiple profiles targeting different locations and therefore multiple addresses of which only one was in the town they were actually targeting.

Importantly, we also looked at who ranked already for the keywords people entered into Google for their location to better understand what worked, and what didn’t work.

Having rationalised and updated their profiles, and updated the content and technical SEO on the site, it was ready to relaunch.

Outcome

The site relaunched at the start of June and the outcome was quick and spectacular.

Having languished on page two for several years, within days they moved on to page #1, appeared in the local Map Pack and rank, on average for the seven tracked keywords we follow, at position number five.

For their main keyword ‘plumber [name of town]’ they jumped 12 places from page #2 to page #1 and now rank on average in position number two.