Do you ever feel frustrated buying leads from another company? Not only do thousands of plumbing businesses purchase their leads from online services, they’re forced to share them with local competitors. That’s a hard pill for any professional to swallow, especially when competition is so fierce! Yet many businesses feel trapped into perpetuating the lead-buying process.

How can you break free of the cycle?

Today, we’re going to explore the process of improving your local search performance and generating your own leads. While we talk with plumbers with all kinds of backgrounds and stories, this strategy can help practically any business develop more traffic and higher quality plumbing leads. Let’s get started!

Interesting Tips for Plumbing Professionals

You need to be active in asking for reviews, especially if you average a 3.5 rating or lower.
Always test your website content with Copyscape to spot copied content.
Service pages tend to perform better than landing pages.
You need quality SEO to allow your PPC campaigns to convert.

The Same Old Story

Most of the plumbing professionals listed online experience some form of lead sales. Some buy leads through large household brands, while others purchase them via Google Ads. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with supplementing business with additional work from these sources. However, depending on these channels as your sole sources can severely limit the quality, scale, and effectiveness of your lead generation.

This also limits your ability to grow the reputation of your brand.

If you want to start growing your own sustainable, affordable leads, you’ll need to invest in the right channels. One of the easiest paths to lead growth is local SEO (search engine optimization), which focuses on making your business more visible to consumers in your service area. While it may require some continued effort on your company’s part, this channel offers a very dependable supply of customers and brand growth.

Why Choose Local SEO Over PPC?

First of all, SEO vs PPC is not an either/or choice. You can easily use both types of search campaigns to generate even stronger performance for your brand. However, SEO proves time and time again that it offers more dependable results than PPC. As a matter of fact, PPC campaigns have a very difficult time converting leads into customers without an organically optimized website to support them. If you click on an ad but the resulting website doesn’t make sense, will you buy from that site?

Organic SEO Still Provides a Much Higher Percentage of Site Traffic.

A website optimized for search will also provide a more pleasant user experience. If you’ve felt the 5-star user experience on a site before, you’ve already felt the effects of local SEO. An optimized website also delivers fresh, insightful content that encourages more meaningful relationships with the associated brand.

To put it simply: SEO is cheaper, more reliable, and contributes directly to your brand’s growth. That’s a winning combination that lead sales and PPC can’t provide. So why not invest in a channel that’s better for your company’s long-term success?

Key Factors in Local SEO

There are four crucial factors when it comes to local SEO:

Content
Web Design
Reviews / Recommendations
Citations

Content and Web Design

Like any other marketing activity, SEO requires a solid foundation. For most, that foundation is a well-crafted website design with structured service pages. While a PPC management company might try to bypass this requirement with short, sales-y landing pages, they typically don’t perform well without service information to back them up.

The best websites combine informative content with streamlined design.

Service pages make it easy for both Google and potential clients to understand exactly what you do. Without them, even people who find your website probably aren’t staying around for too long. Your Google Analytics should confirm this through average time on page and bounce rate.

Most successful web designs use a simple dropdown menu to direct people to their desired services. They also organize content by service category, making it easier to find and digest information in a timely manner. Finally, an optimized design heavily relies on schema coding to make content easily recognizable for Google crawlers.

Reviews and Citations

Among its many goals, Google strives to present the most dependable results to its user base. The search engine examines both information provided by a plumbing company and feedback presented by the community to determine whether that business deserves a spot in page 1 results. That’s where the majority of consumers pick their essential services from.

If local listings provide conflicting information about a plumbing company (such as different addresses or operating hours), it may choose to look to another contractor instead. Likewise, if client reviews indicate the business is not to be trusted, Google will not rank the company well. Reviews and citations work together to determine a plumber’s overall dependability.

Crucial SEO Requirements for Plumbers

Continue asking customers (especially happy ones) for reviews!
Never try to cover up negative feedback.
Gather reviews from a variety of sources, especially Google, Facebook, and Yelp.
Make sure your listings provide the same contact, location, and operational info.
Get citations from as many reputable companies as possible (BBB, Yelp, etc.)
Claim and complete your Google My Business account ASAP

Need Help With Local SEO?

At Plumbing Webmasters, we help hundreds of businesses develop a reliable source of leads through organic, local SEO. Not only do our customers enjoy higher rankings in search, they also earn more traffic and better lead quality! We’d be thrilled to talk with your plumbing company about your future growth plans.

Call (877) 388-9884 anytime for a free consultation.

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