Local SEO Case Studies > Independent Plumbers, London/Essex
Working in partnership with their agency, we delivered a local SEO campaign that helped an independent local firm of plumbers to dominate their local search results for ‘plumber’.
We asked the plumbing firm’s owner to share his experience of working with us, and here’s what he had to say. Note that this was a white label local SEO campaign, so the company owner and their marketing & web agency have requested that we keep their details anonymous.
What can you tell us about your local business?
We’re a small, local firm of plumbers working within a 15-mile radius of our location on the borders of London and Essex.
We offer our customers a complete range of plumbing, heating and gas-related services including boiler repair and installation, home renovation, bathroom refurbishment and more.
Our business needs to generate calls and enquiries from new customers actively looking for the plumbing services that we can provide.
What challenges were you facing before working with us?
We’ve worked hard over the years to build a really loyal customer base which keeps us reasonably busy, but we wanted to expand. A lot of our business already comes via referrals, but to really grow we needed a stronger pipeline of new customer enquiries.
We were ranking well on Google for brand-related searches - where people already knew our business name - and also for a handful of service-related keyword searches but only where our location was also included in the search keywords.
Rather than spend all our money on Google Ads, we were keen to explore local search engine optimisation.
How were you doing before we worked together?
Our on-site SEO was generally pretty good, our social media presence was also positive, and we had a strong local reputation with a good number of largely very positive reviews, however our website had a low authority.
You also identified that we had several live local directory citations, but some of these had inconsistencies while several others were missing or unclaimed.
We also had a well-maintained Google Business Profile, but unfortunately it wasn’t ranking for ‘plumber’ for anyone searching within our local area.
This all meant we knew we were missing out on opportunities to fill up our schedule.
How did we work together to improve local SEO for your plumbing business?
LocalMark’s review of our plumbers’ local SEO performance revealed several immediate opportunities for improvement.
Your initial recommendations included a few minor localised on-site SEO optimisations, which our web agency quickly implemented. You also worked with our agency to configure our web analytics and search console so we could all see what was driving our enquiries.
You then supported us with a local SEO programme working with us to optimise our Google Business Profile, executing a local citation-building campaign, recommending strategies to help generate even more reviews for our business, and provided plenty of ongoing insight, guidance and support with developing our website content.
What local SEO results have you seen since working with us?
In less than 6 months of working with LocalMark on our local SEO campaign, our local plumbers is dominating Google's local pack results (on desktop and mobile) and Google Maps in the local area for 'plumber', 'underfloor heating installation', 'boiler installation' and 'plumber for home renovations'. We’re also seeing some promising results in the organic rankings for Google and Bing.
As a result of our combined efforts, we now rank 4th in Google Organic results for ‘plumber’, with only Checkatrade, Trustatrader and Wikipedia ahead of us. That’s a fantastic result for a keyword with more than 60k searches locally each month.
Impressive Local SEO results for one local plumber in London/Essex borders
…And what does that mean for the business?
Our long term investment in local SEO is definitely working for us more than paid search.
Our Google Business profile is viewed on search or maps 11,000 times each month. Approximately 65% of these found us as a direct result of searching for plumbing-related services as opposed to our brand - meaning they’re all potential new customers - and these generate around 60 website visits and 35 calls from prospective new customers each and every month.
In fact more than 40% of all our visitor traffic and around 65% of all our calls, emails and web form enquiries now come from organic searches by local customers on Google and Bing.
Ready to talk local SEO?
We’re the trusted local SEO partner to dozens of local businesses across the UK. To explore how we can help you increase your businesses visibility on Google, and attract more local customers, arrange a free consultation with one of our local SEO experts today.