Local SEO for plumbers: into the three, in the suburbs you drive to.

Somebody with a burst pipe searches, sees three businesses on a map, and rings one of them. The list of websites underneath is barely looked at, because the problem is happening now and the map has phone buttons on it.

This is more true for plumbing than for almost any other trade. A person choosing a builder reads websites for a fortnight. A person standing in water gives it about fifteen seconds and taps the first number.

So a plumber's ranking problem is a map problem, not a website problem. A beautiful site sitting at position eight in the ordinary results is being seen by almost nobody who needs a plumber urgently.

The map results also change with where the searcher is standing, which is the thing most plumbers have never been shown. You can be first from your own workshop and invisible three suburbs over, and nothing on your screen would tell you.

A plumber works at the customer's address, not their own, which makes them what Google calls a service area business. That single fact changes what should be on the profile and what will get it suspended.

The address is the part that goes wrong most often. A plumber running from home who lists that address publicly is breaking the rules if customers do not come there, and hiding it correctly is a setting rather than a workaround.

The service area itself is the setting most plumbers never touch, and it is the one that decides which suburbs can see you at all. Set too wide it dilutes, set too narrow it excludes the suburbs you want.

What actually matters on a plumbing profile

• The categories, in the right order.

  Plumber first. The secondary ones decide whether you appear for drainage, hot water and gas, which are separate searches.

• The service area, set honestly.

  The suburbs you will genuinely drive to, not the whole of the region. Overreach makes you weaker everywhere.

• Hours that say what you actually do.

  If you take calls at night, the profile has to say so, because after hours availability is what the urgent searcher is filtering on.

Three plumbers appear on the map and the searcher knows nothing about any of them. The rating, the number of reviews and how recent they are is the only information available, and it decides the call.

Recency is weighted more heavily than plumbers expect. A business with 200 reviews where the last one is eighteen months old reads as a business that has stopped, both to Google and to the person reading.

What the reviews say matters too, and specifically whether they name the work. A review that says the hot water was replaced the same day is doing something a five star with no words cannot.

This is the cheapest lever a plumber has and the one most often left alone, because asking feels awkward at the end of a job when somebody has just paid a bill.

Getting the profile right, getting consistent about reviews, and having a page on your own site for each service and each suburb that matters. In that order, because the first two are cheap and the third is slow.

The order matters more than the list does. Plumbers routinely start by paying for a website rebuild while the profile has the wrong categories and no reviews for a year, which is spending the expensive money first.

The suburb pages are the slow half and they only work if they are real. A page about hot water in one suburb that is the same page with the name swapped is the thing Google is specifically built to ignore.

The order worth doing it in

• Fix the profile first.

  Categories, service area, hours and photos. It is free and it moves things within weeks.

• Then make the asking automatic.

  Every job, same message, same timing, without anybody having to remember at the end of a long day.

• Then build the pages.

  One per service and one per suburb that actually earns its place, written from the work rather than from a template.