Web Design for Plumbers
Plumbers business websites tend to be small (not many webpages) and poorly built, I suspect it’s down to the owners (plumbers) not fully appreciating the true value of a website in generating phone calls.
Hiring a plumber is almost always going to involve a phone call: something goes wrong like a boiler breaks down and the owner finds a plumber to call to come out to fix the problem.
Most plumbers don’t sell anything important online, so for most plumbers websites an ecommerce solution (an online shop) isn’t required as part of a web design package. What a plumbing business wants is the potential customer to pick up the phone ASAP and call them, that’s pretty much it, so a bells and whistles big website doesn’t make much sense.
Plumbers see their websites as an advert to persuade potential customers to pick up the damn phone and their sales team will convert the lead to a customer. Therefore a basic 5 page business web design: Homepage, About, Contact, Services Page (where the plumbers services are listed) and a Company News or Image Gallery Page is all a plumber really needs.
If you are a plumber and you read the above whilst nodding along in agreement, I’m afraid you don’t understand how Google SEO works and how important a reasonable sized website is to your plumbing business. Google doesn’t know what areas you cover or which plumbing services you offer until you’ve put that information online in a format Google can find, spider and RANK.
Gronkys Plumbers London
Let’s say I’m talking directly to Gronkys Plumbers London (a fictitious London plumbing business). They have 10 employees and cover all of London and offer all the basic plumbing services, what they want is the phone to ring off the hook 24/7 and their amazing sales team will look after the rest.
We know Gronkys Plumbers has 10 employees, covers all of London and all the basic plumbing services. That should be easy enough to cover on a 5 page website. The Plumbing Services page can include a list of what “basic plumbing services” are and the area of cover, London. Easy :-)
Firstly, if you think Gronkys only covers one area (London), you are WRONG when it comes to a business website and Google. Potential customer might know when on Gronkys website it says “we cover all of London” that includes the City of London, Lambeth, Harrow, Wandsworth etc… but Google doesn’t know that. You and I know when I wrote etc… that’s the other London boroughs I didn’t bother to type out, but Google doesn’t know that, how could it?
Google doesn’t have our knowledge of London in a way that it would know etc… also means Tower Hamlets, Sutton and 20+ other London boroughs. To ‘inform’ Google of the London areas covered they ALL need to be listed:
London Boroughs
- City of London (not a London borough)
- City of Westminster
- Kensington and Chelsea
- Hammersmith and Fulham
- Wandsworth
- Lambeth
- Southwark
- Tower Hamlets
- Hackney
- Islington
- Camden
- Brent
- Ealing
- Hounslow
- Richmond upon Thames
- Kingston upon Thames
- Merton
- Sutton
- Croydon
- Bromley
- Lewisham
- Greenwich
- Bexley
- Havering
- Barking and Dagenham
- Redbridge
- Newham
- Waltham Forest
- Haringey
- Enfield
- Barnet
- Harrow
- Hillingdon
Now we have all the areas covered by Gronkys Plumbers London, except we don’t. Not all potential customers will search Google for a plumber in their borough, some will search by London district: Abbey Wood, Acton, Addington and the dozens of other London areas, other customers will search by postcode: SW1, SW2, SE1, SE2…!
Yes, our fictitious Gronkys Plumbers London could have a single services page listing the 32 boroughs of London, the City of London, the dozens of London districts and all the postcodes covered and that’s BEFORE covering ALL the plumbing services offered.
We already have a mess of a webpage which isn’t user friendly AND as important Google will all but ignore.
The webpage you are on now is targeting the search phrase Web Design for Plumbers. If simply adding a list of London Boroughs, Districts and Postcodes was enough for Google to rank a webpage for all those area, then this webpage should be found for all these and more:
- Web Design for Plumbers London
- Web Design City of London
- Plumbers City of Westminster
- Web Design Chelsea
- Plumbers Hammersmith and Fulham
- Web Design Abbey Wood
- Web Design Plumbers Acton
- Web Design Plumbers
- Web Design for Plumbers SW1
- Web Design SW2
Google doesn’t work that way, if I wanted to rank in Google for the above search phrases I’ll need multiple webpages targeting them. At best a webpage can target a few search phrases effectively.
Back to Gronkys Plumbers, they might need dozens of webpages covering various areas covered AND the plumbing services covered. They might need a single webpage just to target Fixed Price Boiler Repair London and cover SOME (not all) of the London areas I listed earlier. Plus another webpage targeting Vaillant Boiler Repair East London listing some areas listed above which are within the East London area.
Gronkys can’t squeeze all the areas covered and all the London areas covered in a handful of webpages, it takes a long-term SEO content strategy to cover as many areas and plumbing services offered as possible. Unless Gronkys has a team of experienced content writers with SEO expertise who can create hundreds of targeted webpages overnight, it’s a process of researching what to target (which search phrases have value) and then build and SEO market that content.
What I want you to take away from this is to generate a lot of free targeted Google traffic to a plumbers website requires a decent amount of content targeted at specific customers needs, so your website choice should be a web design which can be built on overtime: start small, aim for big.
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