Marketing for Plumbers and Plumbing Companies.
Win the call, then the job.

Sunday evening: the wet kitchen floor

The week below is illustrative: seven days of the enquiries a plumbing firm handles. Sunday's starts with a search. In the US, Google's help page calls plumbing an urgent category because consumers often call plumbers for time-sensitive needs, such as a hot water outage.

One place that search can land is a Google Local Services ad. People can call you, message you or book directly from the ad, and you are charged for each valid lead, at a price that varies by location, job type, lead type and bidding mode. Google is moving to a single badge for all advertisers and discontinuing the Money Back Guarantee tied to the old Google Guarantee badge, with reimbursement limited to services booked before 7 December 2025, so a seller still pitching you "Google Guaranteed" is describing the old set-up.

If the listing is yours, Sunday's enquiry arrives as a call or message while you are at the table. Our paid media team runs the Google Ads side, scoped to the job types you want, switched down when nobody is free to attend, and judged on cost per booked job as well as cost per lead. Whether Local Services Ads sit alongside depends on where your trade and area qualify.

Monday: the call you miss under a sink

You are halfway into a vanity unit when the phone buzzes on the van floor. The caller is new, and the next plumber on their list is one tap away. On Local Services Ads, Google says that if you regularly fail to answer calls or respond to messages, your ad ranking may be affected. So on that channel, missing calls regularly can cost twice: the jobs in front of you, and some of the visibility that would have brought the next ones.

The answer is a routine, not a new hire. A reply goes to the missed caller straight away, saying who you are and asking what the job is and where. By the time you are back in the van there is one message waiting that lists the callers in order: the burst pipe first, the dripping tap last. A log of missed calls and ring-backs turns the loss into a number after a month. That small, human-gated workflow is the kind our AI automation work builds, starting with an audit of how your calls are handled today.

Tuesday: the landlord's boiler quote (Great Britain)

A landlord fills in your form for a new boiler in a two-bed flat, having checked you out first. The Health and Safety Executive (HSE) says a gas engineering business must be on the Gas Safe Register to legally do in-scope gas work, and that anyone employed to work on gas appliances in domestic premises must be registered and competent in that area. The back of the engineer's ID card shows the categories of work they may do, such as cookers, boilers and gas fires. Every gas job your website offers should match a category on the card of the engineer who turns up.

The reply decides this one. A form that asks for the boiler's age, the flat's size and the access gets you to a price while the landlord is still comparing; one that asks only for a name and number leaves a gap someone else fills. The landlord also brings a second job: HSE tells those who let property they are responsible, among other things, for an annual gas safety check by a Gas Safe registered engineer on the appliances and flues they provide, so a won install can become a reminder in your diary every twelve months. Our lead generation work builds qualifying forms of that kind, and booked installs are counted apart from emergency call-outs, each with its average job value.

If the landlord asks about a heat pump grant, Ofgem says the Boiler Upgrade Scheme, open in England and Wales, has vouchers that installers who are MCS certified can apply for and redeem, so without MCS the useful reply is a referral.

Wednesday: three tabs, three plumbers (UK)

The customer has your site, a directory profile and a rival's page open side by side. Checkatrade says every trade passes up to 12 checks. Which? Trusted Traders says its traders passed an assessment set by its trading standards professionals. TrustATrader says it checks two years' experience and trade association membership. Those are platform claims, not a regulator's.

On water work, WaterSafe brings together contractors from four approved schemes, and an individual, not the business, becomes an Approved Contractor for a specific scope of work. Its work completed certificate gives the customer a legal defence if the contractor is approved for that scope. So a "WaterSafe approved" line on the van should be true of whoever is on the rota that day, not only of the owner.

A mark you do not hold is a legal risk as well as a lost customer. The CMA's guidance on the DMCC Act lists displaying a trust mark without the necessary authorisation as a banned practice. A separate banned practice covers claiming approval by a public or private body when the claim is false or the terms of that approval are not being complied with, and its worked example is a plumber claiming approval by a trader recommendation platform when they are not. Both apply to practices from 6 April 2025. A customer who clicks a badge and finds no match rings the next tab. Check every badge on your site and profiles against the scheme's own register before a campaign points traffic at them. Our SEO and AI visibility work makes sure each service and area your site claims has a page that matches it, and that every registration it names can be checked.

Thursday: "how much is the call-out?" (UK, with a US note)

The caller wants a number before booking. They may have seen WaterSafe's 2026 cost guide, indicative rather than a survey, which gives UK emergency call-out fees of £60 to £120 and hourly rates of £40 to £70.

CAP's advice, published on the ASA website, is that you should only make a no call-out charge claim if you do not charge for travel time or the initial diagnosis on the first visit and do not make any other charge before work is agreed, whatever it is called. The same advice says diagnostic fees when no work follows are likely to be treated as a call-out charge. In one 2020 ruling (Rightio Ltd), the ASA found "No Call Out Charge" misleading where the advertiser charged for diagnosis time.

The price conversation has to match the ad word for word: the same terms in the ad, on the site and in what whoever answers the phone says. When it does, price is less likely to send the caller to the next plumber. When the "free" visit turns out to have a condition at the door, you lose the job and may face a complaint. In the US the same moment is the service call fee, and stating it before the visit avoids the same surprise at the door.

Friday: a water heater enquiry in Texas

A homeowner in Texas taps your search ad for a water heater replacement. Under the Texas plumbing board's rule 367.10, advertisements by a plumbing company designed to solicit plumbing business must state the licence number of the Responsible Master Plumber (RMP) of record in any media. The rule lists a few exceptions, such as radio ads and phone solicitations, which carry a licensing statement instead, with the number available on request. The Texas Occupations Code adds that anyone who advertises plumbing must secure the services of a responsible master plumber. A change of RMP means every live ad and listing that carries the number changes with it.

The form the homeowner lands on asks three things: gas or electric, tank or tankless, and where the old unit sits. They answer from the garage with a photo of the label. The reply that wins is a call that afternoon with a visit window and those answers already read; the one that loses asks them to start again. Either way, the homeowner has booked someone by the evening. Friday's number is visits booked from water heater enquiries, by source.

Saturday: the finished job and the review

The leak is fixed, the floor is dry and the customer is standing next to the engineer. That is the moment to ask. The text can say it follows today's visit, with a direct link to your Google profile, but it does not tell the customer what to write: a plumber who asks for particular content to be included in a review goes against what Google's Maps policy says merchants should do. Job details such as "the burst pipe under the sink, fixed on Saturday morning" go in a project note on your own profile or site, which gives the next searcher something specific to read. The engineer's phone sends the text before leaving the drive.

Two sets of rules sit behind the request. In the UK, the CMA names fake reviews and misuse of trust marks among banned practices, and in the US the FTC's Q&A on its reviews rule says that paying incentives for 5-star reviews on third-party platforms would violate the rule, even with a disclosure. The request goes to every customer, whatever kind of day the job had, and each new review goes into the monthly report next to the job it came from.

Next Sunday: one change for the week ahead

The monthly report traces each enquiry from its ad or listing, through the reply, to a booked or lost job, against your previous month. Between reports, you pick one change each Sunday for the coming week, taken from where that week's jobs were lost: a question added to the boiler quote form, cover for the phone at the time calls went unanswered, or the call-out wording on the site brought into line with what is said on the phone.

We take on plumbers and plumbing companies in the UK and the US, work across both countries' time zones, and quote in GBP or USD.