SEO for Plumbers.

A burst pipe is the least patient search on the internet.

Nobody compares three plumbers at eleven at night with water coming through the ceiling. They open Google on a phone, tap the first number that looks local and answers, and everyone else in the results might as well not exist. That single fact should shape everything you spend on getting found.

We’re a family-run agency in Heathfield and we’ve been doing this since 1997. We work with trades across East Sussex, so most of what we know about SEO for plumbers came from watching where the calls actually come from. For Troy’s Trees and Hedge Services in Eastbourne, a tree surgery, grounds maintenance and fencing business, the new site and the SEO behind it produced an 87% increase in traffic over the following year and a steady 25 leads and enquiries a month.

An emergency search is won in the map pack, not on your website.

For ’emergency plumber’ with a town attached, Google shows three businesses on a map above the ordinary results. On a phone that’s nearly the whole first screen. Ranking seventh in the normal listings means being below the fold on the search that matters most.

So the first job isn’t your website, it’s your Google Business Profile. That’s unglamorous, and it isn’t what most agencies want to sell you, because there’s no monthly retainer in it. It’s still true.

Your opening hours are a ranking decision.

Here’s a detail that catches out most trades. Google appears to favour businesses that are open when somebody is searching. If your profile says nine to five and the pipe bursts at ten at night, you can be the best plumber in Sussex and still not show up.

If you genuinely take emergency calls out of hours, your profile has to say so properly, with the hours set rather than mentioned in a description. If you genuinely don’t, then chasing emergency searches is the wrong plan, and your money is better spent on the planned work: bathroom installations, boiler replacements, landlord safety certificates. Both are respectable strategies. Pretending isn’t, because someone will ring at midnight.

A page for each job, a page for each town.

One page listing everything you do can’t rank for any of it. Somebody searching ‘boiler replacement cost’ and somebody searching ‘blocked drain Uckfield’ need different pages, because they’re different jobs at different prices with different urgency.

The same goes for the towns you cover, with one caution. A page per town is only worth building where you’ve got something real to say: the jobs you actually do there, the housing stock, the estates with the old pipework, a customer you can name. Twenty pages made by swapping the town name in and out is a pattern Google has enforced against for years, and it’s the most common thing sold to trades as local SEO.

Reviews are the part you cannot shortcut.

In a trade where you’re asking to be let into somebody’s home, reviews do more work than any copy on your website. They also carry more legal risk than most people realise, so it’s worth being precise.

Since April 2025 it’s been unlawful in the UK to publish fake reviews, or incentivised ones that aren’t clearly labelled, with penalties reaching 10% of turnover. Separately, Google gave the Competition and Markets Authority binding undertakings in January 2025: UK businesses caught using fake reviews get a visible warning notice on their profile, lose the ability to receive new reviews, and repeat offenders can have every review deleted for six months or more. A warning label on your profile would do far more damage than a poor ranking ever could.

So no incentives, no discount in exchange for a review, nothing from staff or family. Just asking every satisfied customer at the right moment, which is the day the job finishes, not three weeks later.