Plumbing Marketing Strategy

Understanding Plumbing Marketing

To survive the current economy, a plumbing company in Canada needs to build a consistent pipeline of client acquisition and retention. With the recession and high interest rates, finding potential customers is getting harder.

Many providers of plumbing services have some sort of marketing campaign in place. However, oftentimes they lack consistency and planning, which are essential to achieve long-standing results.

That’s why your business needs a complex plumbing marketing strategy. It will help you organize your outreach to potential customers and convert them more efficiently.

Luckily, you’ve come to the right place. This guide will help you build and implement your own marketing strategy, boost your lead generation and help grow your business.

Essential elements of your plumbing marketing:

1. Website
2. SEO
3. Content
4. Social media
5. PPC
6. Email marketing

If you are interested in marketing strategies for other contracting businesses, we have a series of guides that can help you:

• Roofing Marketing
• Roofing SEO
• Contractor Marketing
• Contractor SEO
• Construction Marketing
• Construction SEO
• Landscaping Marketing
• Home Remodeling Marketing
• HVAC Marketing

Benefits of building a marketing strategy for your plumbing business:

1. You set clear goals and KPIs and can track performance
2. Your plumbing business has a clear plan and now your next steps
3. You allocate your marketing budget more efficiently

Plumbing Website: Basis of Your Online Marketing Strategies

A website should be the first step of your plumbing marketing strategy. It will help you establish your online presence as well as attract and convert potential customers.

Goals of a website for a plumbing business:

1. Support SEO efforts
2. Inform potential customers about services
3. Establish trust and authority
4. Convert leads
5. Provide all the necessary business information

To attain these goals, a good plumbing website should contain a home page, service pages, service area pages, and a gallery. Additionally, we suggest adding a book appointment widget to assist potential customers in reaching out to your business. Let’s talk more about each of them.

Home Page

The home page is the most important page of your plumbing business. It’s essential to make it presentable, SEO optimized, converting and containing as much essential information as possible. Check out the first screen of the home page in the screenshot below:

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It has an optimized title and first paragraph, a CTA that itself is a keyword, and numerous icons that guarantee high-quality services. It also doesn’t waste space and immediately shows the next section of the page (Basement Waterproofing in Toronto).

Other sections of this page include:

• services provided by the plumbing business
• the reasons to choose this particular company
• dangers of not using their services
• costs of services
• links to most recent projects
• the company’s work process
• links to service area pages
• client testimonials
• contact form

Overall, this page is a summary of the whole website. It has a lot of text (which is good for SEO). It can convert leads to new customers with well-written CTAs. It builds trust using icons and client testimonials.

Service Pages

As a plumbing business, you want your potential customers to learn as much as they can about the services you can provide. That’s why we suggest creating service pages for each service specifically. It will also help your SEO efforts.

Service Area Pages

Create a dedicated page for each large municipality within your service area. It will help your Local search engine optimization and sift out the customers from outside your service area.

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Gallery

Gallery is a nice way to entertain your website visitors and convert them into new customers. Many plumbing businesses only leave the photos. Here’s another approach:

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In the screenshot above, the company shared case studies of the plumbing projects they made for their clients. These are clickable links and each case study has a separate page that you can visit, read and see the photos of the work process.

Contact Widget

Apart from the contact page, we suggest spending some of your marketing budget on a high-quality contact form. There are 2 ways to make such a contact form widget: as a pop-up window and as a separate block on the page. Both ways have their pros and cons. We suggest having both.

Contact widgets are great because your website visitors do not need to load your contact page. They are easy to use and help you convert leads into new customers.

Search Engine Optimization for Your Plumbing Company

Search Engine Optimization is essential to plumbing marketing success. Though it takes months or even years for it to start working efficiently for your business, the results are worth it. SEO enables you to reach your target audience and convert them into plumbing customers.

SEO enables your web pages to organically appear in Google search results page (SERP) when users look for certain keywords. That is provided you picked the keyword correctly, created a dedicated content page and

Keyword Research

Keyword research is finding the right words and phrases to help your potential customers find your website in search engines.

Once you’ve found the keywords you need to create pages and optimize them. We talk about page optimization in one of the next sections.

There are thousands of keywords related to the plumbing industry. However, not all of them are equally good for your goals. Keywords differ in volume, difficulty, and intent.

Volume shows the number of searches per month in search engines. For example, here’s the keyword “plumbing services.” It’s volume is 2.4K meaning there are 2,400 searches a month in Canada alone:

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In addition to the large volume, this keyword has an exceptionally good difficulty of only 28%. It means you will only need to create unique content to get to the top of Google search results. Other keywords might not be as easy.

For example, basement waterproofing has a lower volume but much higher difficulty. Just writing a good content piece isn’t enough. You’ll also need referring websites.

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Both keywords we discussed have commercial intent, meaning people are looking for various companies that sell a certain product or provide a certain service. There are other types of intent.

Informational intent means that people are just looking for some information regarding a certain keyword. These are the most general searches. “Plumber near me” has transactional intent. It means that people are looking to complete a certain transaction.

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Choosing the keywords you need to understand how to distribute them across your website. You will want to have commercial and transactional keywords with high volume for your service pages and service area pages as well as your home page.

Leave informational keywords for other pages and your blog.

Technical SEO

Google has many criteria to rank websites, user experience is one of them. Imagine getting to a website that takes ages to load, especially when you require an emergency plumbing service. That’s when your prospective customers bounce back to the search page.

In another scenario, your potential customer reads a page about pipe installation. They are interested in the prices of the plumbing service and want to read some reviews of your work. Unfortunately, they cannot find any links to other website pages. Once again they bounce back.

Google doesn’t like when users bounce back. That’s why it dominates the search engine market. In fact, it’s so good, that only 6% of users click more than 4 pages during 1 Google search session according to Backlinko user behaviour research. Moreover, 59% of the users visit only one page during the search.

That’s why buggy websites are pushed down in search results and high-performing websites are awarded.

Here’s a short list of things you need to fix to improve your Technical SEO:

1. Improve website architecture

Website architecture is how your pages are organized in relation to each other. Create a comprehensive multi-level hierarchy where your home page is the first level and the remaining pages are organized into categories and subcategories. Your website hierarchy should be reflected in your website menu.

2. Improve your website navigation

To achieve it you need to:

• create a menu
• interlink your web pages
• apply pagination and breadcrumbs

3. Help crawlers

Crawlers “read” your website and index it in Google. You can make their work much easier with several things:

• create robots TXT file
• create sitemap XML
• index pages manually

4. Improve website performance

To achieve it, create a mobile version of your website and work on the website’s download speed. You can increase the speed by using WEBP format for images, decreasing the size of your videos and using faster domain hosts.

5. Control duplicate content

While duplicate content isn’t essentially considered a malicious practice by Google, it can create problems for the rankings of your website’s individual pages. Content cannibalization is when two or more pages of your website begin competing with each other.

To avoid it, remove duplicate content or use canon tags to inform Google which page should be perceived as more important when it comes to similar content.

6. Deal with 404 pages

If you have removed a page that is indexed in Google, it will still remain in search results. A person who clicks on the link will get to your website and see the 404 page. Google punishes such practices. To fix it, you need to assign a redirect from the page before deleting it.

At first, technical SEO will constitute a large portion of your marketing efforts. However, once you’ve optimized the website of your plumbing company, you’ll have only maintenance work to do.

On-Page SEO

Search engines use crawlers to analyze the contents of your texts to understand how to rank the pages of your plumbing website.

Crawlers don’t “read” texts the way humans do. They count the frequency of certain words and phrases in your text. They also look at where these keyphrases are found.

On-page SEO tactics work with individual pages to make sure they are optimized for the chosen focus keyword. To achieve this goal, plumbing businesses need to place keywords in strategic places in the text as well as in HTML tags.

Let’s take a closer look at these places.

Content

The general rule of thumb is to use focus keyword once for every 100 words of your text. Additionally, you should use it in the first paragraph of your content piece.

Headers

The general suggestion for any online content is to structure your text and divide it into smaller digestible sections and subsections. Content for a plumbing company is no exception here. This tactic will help you not only with crawlers but also with humans as it makes reading easier.

Each section and subsection of your content should have a title or a header. Unlike humans, crawlers cannot understand that a certain phrase in your text is a title just because it’s in bold and has a larger font. Instead, you need to apply title tags to specifically mark your headers.

Most modern content management systems (CMS) have the functionality to assign title tags to your headings.

There are 6 header levels. They are usually abbreviated to H followed by the number of the level. The first-level header is the title of your whole content piece, thus you can only have one H1. Headers of the second level divide your page into main topics. Usually, you would use up to 4 levels of headers.

The general SEO recommendation is to have your focus keyword in your H1 and at least one H2.

Metadata

Metadata consists of meta title and meta description. The meta title is similar (or an alternative title of your content piece). The meta description is a short summary of your web page. Both should contain your focus keyword.

Metadata can be seen on the Google search results page:

In the screenshot above you can see the meta title and meta description both containing the keyword plumbing services.

You can add metadata by coding your page in HTML or using a CMS like WordPress.

URL

In the Technical SEO sections, we discussed how your URLs should be human-readable. They should also contain the focus keyword. Shortening your title will be the easiest way to go about it. Just make sure that your full keyword is in your URL.

For example, you have written an article for a long-tail keyword “How much do plumbing services cost.” You should keep it like this /how-much-do-plumbing-services-cost/.

Images

You can code for images to have an alternative text (alt text) that explains what the image is about. It helps people who browse the Internet with images off as well as those who use text-to-speech programs to read content.

Additionally, alt texts are used to find images in Google (see the screenshot below):

You can ease your on-page SEO by acquiring SEO tools like Surfer SEO and any SEO plugin for your chosen CMS. Surfer SEO can help a plumbing business with choosing and placing LSIs. The plugin can help you with placing keywords in title tags.

Off-Page SEO

Google ranks the websites not only by the quality of their content and user experience but also by their “authority.” Search engines determine the authority of your website by several criteria, such as backlinks and brand recognition of your plumbing business.

When discussing keywords, we briefly talked about the backlinks necessary to get to the top of Google search results for keywords with a certain level of difficulty. Though backlinks do not constitute the whole off-page SEO, they are the biggest part of it.

Link building is a series of marketing efforts aimed at acquiring backlinks to your web pages from other reputable websites.

Not all backlinks are good for your plumbing marketing and SEO. Some referring websites can harm your website authority since Google recognizes them as shady. You need to track the malicious backlinks constantly and request Google to disavow them via Google Search Console.

Local SEO

Most plumbing companies are local businesses with a limited service area. If you operate in GTA, you aren’t interested in prospective customers from Vancouver or even from other countries. Instead, you will want to get local customers.

To achieve it, we recommend that you spend some marketing efforts on Local SEO strategy. In a nutshell, you will need to do two things.

First, choose keywords with the names of geographical places where your plumbing business operates. Once you’ve picked keywords for your local SEO, we suggest creating service area pages to help you rank for these keywords.

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The second practice of local SEO is creating a Google Business Profile.

Benefits of Local SEO include:

1. Efficient use of your plumbing marketing budget
2. Reaching your target audience
3. Better conversions
4. Less competition (compared to global searches).

In addition to these, Google Business Profile gives you even more perks:

1. Appearance in Google local search.
2. Spot on Google Maps.
3. Backlinks to your website.
4. Ability to showcase positive customer reviews.

One of the best things about Google Business Profile is that it’s completely free of charge. You will only need to pass the verification from Google and you’re good to go.

A free Google Business Profile will help you feature all the necessary business information for a potential customer on Google Maps. This includes your contact data and opening hours.

Content Marketing Campaign

Content is a powerful digital marketing strategy to promote your business. There are several goals you must achieve with your content:

1. Support SEO strategy
2. Earn the trust of potential clients
3. Showcase your company’s proficiency
4. Convert the leads

To achieve these goals your content must meet the following criteria:

1. Be SEO optimized
2. Provide more information on the topic than other similar blogs
3. Be unique
4. Be engaging and interesting to read
5. Provide catchy visuals
6. Educate your website visitors
7. Contain CTAs
8. Apply storytelling.

Types of Content to Write for Plumbing Marketing

In this section, we will exclusively talk about your blogs:

1. How-to guides
2. Latest trends
3. Material comparisons
4. Plumbing tips and tricks
5. Case studies

PPC Ads to Promote Plumbing Services

One of the most efficient online marketing strategies is pay-per-click advertisement. If you don’t know what PPC is, here’s the breakdown.

It’s an online banner advertising that appears on various websites, search engine, mobile applications, and social media platforms. A business that orders PPC only pays for user clicks on their ad.

5 Steps to Begin Your First PPC

You can start doing PPC in 4 simple steps:

Step 1. Allocate marketing resources

Identify how much you are going to spend on your PPC campaign

Step 2. Choose the provider.

There are different providers the most popular being Google Ads and Facebook Ads. It will impact where your advertisement will be demonstrated. For example, Google Ads will appear in Google and YouTube searches and on various websites. Facebook Ads will get you featured on Meta platforms.

Step 3. Create or choose a landing page

A landing page is the page to which people will get when they click on your banner ad. It can be a page you created specifically for this campaign, your home page or one of the service pages or service area pages. Tip: pick a page with the most enticing keyword.

Step 4. Create a banner

Create a compelling copy and catching visuals for banner ads or just engaging copy if you’re aiming for the top of Google SERP.

Step 5. Launch a campaign and analyze the results

Your first campaign might not be as successful. It’s important to analyze at what stage of the campaign the results were bad.

Check out this ad in the YouTube search:

Benefits of PPC Ads to a Plumbing Business

The main benefit of PPC is it works and has one of the highest ROI of all internet marketing strategies. For example, many people do not scroll down to organic results when using Google. They immediately click on the ads that appear on top of the page.

If you have a new business and you have just created a website and begun your SEO efforts, you won’t get much traffic or high rankings in search. Getting ahead of all the competition and getting most of the traffic for a particular keyword is helpful.

Finally, you can pick the target audience of your campaign depending on their demographics or online behaviour.

Email Marketing Strategy for Plumbing Businesses

Email is one of the efficient marketing channels for a plumbing business. It’s good to warm up leads and reach out to an existing customer to offer new services.

Usually, businesses collect email contact details using the set an appointment widget or when potential customers contact them directly.

5 Things Your Plumbing Business Should Include in the Next Email Campaign

1. Send a special offer or discount announcement.
2. Share a link to your most recent blog post.
3. Invite recipients to follow you on social media.
4. Inform people about the new services you provide.
5. Send them the photos of your recently completed project.

5 Tips to Use Email Marketing Campaigns Efficiently

In this section, we provide you with tips to make the most out of your email marketing.

1. Use the best sending time

According to the meta research by Coschedule, the best sending days are Thursday, Tuesday, and Wednesday and the best sending hours are 10 AM, 8 AM, 9 AM, 1 PM, and 3 PM.

2. Create an email template

Using one template over and over is much easier than recreating it from scratch. You can have several different templates for various campaigns.

3. Segment your target audience

Divide your recipients into several categories by their demographics, types of services or your relations (e.g., existing customers).

4. Use AI for creating content

Unlike SEO texts that should be human-generated to avoid a decrease in rankings, emails can be written by AI. It can be especially helpful to create catchy email subject lines to boost open rates.

5. Don’t be afraid to experiment.

Marketing is often about testing and tweaking. If something doesn’t work, try to do it in a slightly different way. A/B testing is a great way to learn more about your potential and existing customers.

Social Media Marketing Essentials

Social media marketing has been trending for almost a decade now. It can give multiple advantages to the business. Keep in mind, though that you need to be consistent in your posting and often engage with the audience to me it really works.

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We understand that social media might not be everyone’s cup of tea. We met plenty of business owners who didn’t have time or resources to actively post there. At the same time, if your company doesn’t have a page on at least one of the social media platforms, people might get suspicious.

That’s why we suggest at least creating a profile on a mainstream social media platform like Facebook, filling out business info, and adding several posts. You don’t need to write much. Just post some photos writing something along the lines of “Check out our most recent plumbing project.”

Benefits of social media marketing for a plumbing business:

1. Gives backlinks to your website
2. Provides traffic to your website
3. Posts have shared potential
4. You can tag your clients in the posts about your recent projects.

Types of Content to Share in Your Social Media Posts

One of the best content for plumbing social media marketing is a video. People enjoy watching other people work. Few things in life are more satisfying than a view of human labour, especially when the viewer is comfortably lying on the sofa.

Other types of content to share include before and after photos, tips, and links to your blog posts.

Three Plumbing Marketing Ideas to Boost Lead Gen

In this section, we briefly discuss three plumbing marketing ideas that will help you make your lead generation more efficient.

List Your Plumbing Company on Business Directories

Business directories are a great way to find new customers and promote your business online. People trust directories as there’s a common understanding that these websites check the firms they list.

In addition to lead generation, business directories can help you with SEO by providing traffic and backlinks to your website.

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Try Traditional Marketing

Never underestimate the power of traditional marketing strategies. Here are some ways you can promote your plumbing business offline:

• Leverage direct mail marketing.
• Feature your company at local community events.
• Leave information on a community board.
• Prepare handouts and door hangers.

Hire Marketing Agency

Planning and implementing a digital marketing strategy can be very hard for an SMB. Hiring and controlling a marketing team requires time that the owner of a plumbing business doesn’t always have. That’s why many companies on the market hire an agency to run their campaigns.

dNOVO Group provides digital marketing services to plumbing firms and helps them achieve several goals:

1. Increase traffic to the website
2. Grow website conversions
3. Develop plumbing brand
4. Retain clients
5. Grow revenues and business.

Are you ready to grow your plumbing company with an efficient marketing strategy? Book a free one-hour consultation