Plumbing & Trades

Home-service trades is one of the highest-intent local-search verticals on the planet. Someone searching "plumber near me" or "emergency HVAC repair" at 11pm is not browsing — they are about to call whichever business shows up first, looks trustworthy, and answers the phone. The plumbers, electricians, and HVAC contractors who dominate the map pack in their service area capture this traffic almost without trying. The ones who do not, lose it to whoever does — usually a national franchise with deeper pockets and a smaller margin.

Why trades are different from a generic local business

• Emergency calls dominate the funnel — A meaningful share of trade revenue comes from emergency or urgent jobs. The website needs to make "call now" the obvious first action, with a phone number large and visible above the fold on mobile, not buried in a contact page two taps away.
• Google Local Services Ads (LSA) is the most important paid channel — LSA is pay-per-lead (not pay-per-click), Google-verified, and appears above regular Google Ads. For most trades, LSA delivers cheaper leads than traditional Google Ads — but only after Google\'s verification gauntlet (background checks, license verification, insurance), which most agencies do not bother to help clients through.
• Service-area SEO is the entire game — A plumber serving 30 towns within a 25-mile radius needs a dedicated, indexed, real-content landing page for each significant town. Most plumbing websites have one "Service Areas" page listing all the towns alphabetically — Google ignores those. Real per-town pages with local content, photos, and reviews are what rank.
• Trust signals decide conversion — License numbers (and verifying they are current), insurance, bonded status, years in business, BBB rating, real photos of the team and trucks, and a deep review profile. These are the conversion levers — not the brand colours or the hero photography.
• Recurring service plans are where the margin lives — Annual furnace tune-ups, drain-cleaning subscriptions, HVAC maintenance contracts. The website should funnel one-off emergency calls toward annual plans wherever possible. Most trade websites do not even mention these — the agency built a site, not a sales tool.

What we build for trade businesses

• Click-to-call-first websites — Big phone numbers, prominent "call now" buttons, mobile-optimized everything. Most trade traffic is mobile and urgent. Sites that make calling easy convert; sites that hide it behind a form do not.
• Per-town service-area landing pages — One page per town you serve, with real local content (typical home sizes, common service requests in that area, local landmarks, neighborhood-specific testimonials). These are the SEO foundation that puts you in the map pack across your entire service radius.
• Service-specific landing pages — Separate dedicated pages for each major service (water heater install, drain cleaning, sewer line repair, AC install, furnace replacement). Long-tail SEO equity built page by page.
• Google Local Services Ads setup and management — We help you through Google\'s verification process (background check, license verification, insurance documentation), set up the ad campaigns, and manage bidding monthly. LSA is the single highest-leverage paid channel for trades; we do the work most agencies skip.
• Review automation — Post-job SMS to the customer with one-tap path to leave a Google review. Most trade businesses sit at 30-80 reviews; with proper automation, you climb to 300-600 in 12-18 months, which moves map-pack rankings on its own.
• Recurring-plan upsell funnels — One-off service call → automated follow-up offering a maintenance plan. The plumbing or HVAC business that gets 10-15% of one-off customers onto annual plans has materially different unit economics than one that does not.

What this looks like in practice

A typical trades engagement runs three phases. First 30 days: audit the current site, GBP, and review profile. Start Google Local Services verification (this takes 3-6 weeks on Google\'s end, so we initiate it early). Months 2-4: launch the new site (or fix the existing one), build out 10-30 per-town service-area pages, get GBP onto a weekly cadence with photos and posts, wire up review automation and recurring-plan funnels. Months 4+: service-area pages start ranking, LSA goes live and starts delivering leads at cost, organic traffic and call volume climb steadily, and the cost-per-job drops as the website becomes the primary acquisition channel.

Who this fits

• Plumbing companies (residential, commercial, or mixed) doing $500K-$10M annual revenue
• Electrical contractors and electricians serving residential or light commercial
• HVAC contractors (install, service, or both) with year-round (not just seasonal) operations
• Multi-trade home-service operators (e.g., plumbing + HVAC under one brand)
• New trade businesses launching and wanting to skip the years of slow organic ramp

If you are a plumber, electrician, or HVAC contractor and feel like the phone could be ringing more, the consultation is free and we will tell you straight whether the issue is the website, the SEO, the LSA setup, or something deeper in the lead-handling process.