For Plumbing Companies
Nobody shops around for a plumber at 11pm.
Emergency work is the least price-sensitive revenue you have, and it goes to whoever appears first with enough reviews to look safe. That decision takes about eight seconds and happens almost entirely in the map pack, before anyone scrolls to a website.
Book a callWhat this usually looks like
- You show up in your own town and vanish two towns over
- Twelve reviews against a competitor with three hundred
- Your profile says Plumber and lists none of the jobs you actually take
- One Services page covering drains, water heaters, repipes and gas lines
- After-hours calls go to voicemail, which for emergency work is the same as not ranking
- You appear across the whole service area, not just the postcode you are registered in
- Review requests fire automatically after every completed job
- Every service listed and described the way customers search for it
- A page per service and per town, each able to rank on its own
- Emergency enquiries routed so they are answered, not collected
How customers actually search
Emergency searches are short, urgent and local. Planned work is researched, and the two need different pages.
- emergency plumber near me
- burst pipe [city]
- water heater replacement [city]
- how much does repiping cost
- drain cleaning [town]
- tankless water heater installation [city]
What we would do
The pieces that fit.
Google Business Profile
$497 setup · $149/mo
This is the whole game for emergency plumbing. Categories covering every job you take, service areas per town, and review requests that fire after each job — because review count is what decides an 11pm call.
See what's includedSEO Website
$2,997 setup · $349/mo
Where the planned, higher-margin work is won. Someone researching a repipe or a tankless install reads before they call, and a page per service plus per town is what gets found.
See what's includedSocial Media + Ads
$500 setup · $497/mo
Worth it for seasonal pushes and planned work. Not for emergencies — nobody with a burst pipe is on Instagram.
See what's includedReviews are the lever here
If you take one thing: get the review flow running. In plumbing, review count and recency move the map pack more than anything on your website. A site with no reviews behind it will not out-rank a competitor with three hundred, no matter how good the pages are.
Common questions.
We rank in our town but nowhere else. Why?+
Google ranks the map pack largely on proximity to the searcher, so your registered address anchors you. Setting service areas properly helps, but the real fix is signals in those towns — reviews mentioning them, and a page for each one. It is slower than flipping a setting, and it is the only thing that works.
How many reviews do we actually need?+
Enough to not look risky next to whoever is above you. Look at the top three in your map pack and aim there. Recency matters as much as volume — thirty reviews from this year beats two hundred from 2019.
Are Google Ads better than this for emergencies?+
Ads buy the top slot immediately and stop the day you stop paying. The map pack is free and compounds. Most plumbers should fix the profile first, then decide whether ads are worth it on top.
Want to know where you actually stand?
Book a call and we will look at your profile, your site, and who is outranking you — then tell you which piece is worth doing first. No pitch.
Book a call