Local SEO
Ranking for the searches that end in a booked job, suburb by suburb, instead of vague terms that look good in a report and pay nothing.
- Suburb and service pages
- Technical and speed fixes
- Local listings and links
Local marketing for plumbing businesses
Be the plumber they ring first.
When a cylinder bursts at 7pm, nobody scrolls to page two. They tap the first plumber on the map and ring them. My job is to make that plumber you, and to show you the numbers that prove it happened.
- Run by an ex-plumber
- You own every account
- No lock-in contract
- Reports you can actually read
01
Competitor
City Plumbing & Gas
02
You, after
Your plumbing business
03
Competitor
Rapid Drainage Co
17
You, before
Your plumbing business
Illustration, not a client result. Three spots in the map pack. That is the whole game.
3
Spots in the Google map pack. Fourth place is invisible on a phone.
1
Page of reporting a month, in plain English. Not forty pages of impressions.
90
Days before you judge SEO fairly. Anyone promising faster is guessing.
0
Lock-in contracts, setup traps or jargon in your monthly report.
What I actually do
Five things move the needle for a plumber.
Not twenty. Five. Everything else is somebody padding a retainer. Most plumbers need two or three of these, not all of them, and I will tell you which.
Google Business Profile
The single most under used asset a plumber owns. Categories, service areas, photos and posts, set up properly and kept alive.
- Full profile rebuild
- Service area targeting
- Monthly posts and photos
Google Ads
For emergency work and new territories where SEO has not landed yet. Ads buy you visibility the day they switch on. The booked jobs build from there.
- Emergency intent keywords
- Tight suburb radius
- Wasted spend stripped weekly
Review systems
A text that goes out when the job is signed off, so reviews arrive while the customer is still happy and not three weeks later when they have forgotten.
- Automated ask after each job
- Reply templates that sound human
- Bad review response plan
Tracking and reporting
Call tracking and form tracking wired up first, before a cent goes anywhere else. If we cannot count it, we cannot tell whether any of this worked.
- Call and form tracking
- One page monthly report
- Cost per booked job
Reporting
If I cannot show you it worked, I have not done my job.
Most plumbers have been burned by an agency that sent a forty page PDF full of impressions and bounce rates and never once mentioned phone calls. You get one page. Calls, forms, where they came from, and what each booked job cost you.
Tracking goes in during week one. That way month three has something honest to compare against, instead of a story.
Monthly summary · example
Sample data
Calls tracked84 +22
Form enquiries31 +9
Map pack views4.1k +38%
Cost per enquiry$26 -31%
Top suburbBedminster
Top job typeHot water
Illustrative figures only. Your first report sets your real baseline.
How it works
Four steps, and you know where you stand at each one.
No discovery phase that lasts a month. No strategy deck. I look at what you have, fix what is broken, then build on it and send you the numbers.
Look at the actual numbers
Your profile, your rankings, your competitors, your current enquiries. Free, and you get the findings whether you hire me or not.
Week one
Wire up tracking
Call tracking and form tracking first, always. Everything after this is measurable, so nobody has to take anybody's word for it.
Week one
Fix the cheap wins
Business profile, review flow, the pages that nearly rank. The work that pays back fastest, done before anything slower starts.
Weeks two to four
Build and report monthly
New suburb pages, links, ads if we are running them. One page of numbers on the first of the month and a ten minute call if you want one.
Month two onward
Pricing
Every price up front. Cancel any month.
Local SEO
One van, one town. Getting found where you actually work.
fromNZ$600/ month
No setup fee
- Google Business Profile managed
- Review system set up and running
- Call and form tracking
- One page monthly report
- Small edits to your website as needed
Local SEO, full plan
Two to five vans, chasing more of the work you actually want.
fromNZ$750/ month
Or NZ$150/hr if you would rather just buy hours
- Everything in Local SEO
- Ranking suburb by suburb, not just your town
- New service and location pages
- Monthly call and cost per booked job
- No lock-in, cancel any month
SEO and Google Ads
You want the phone going now as well as in six months.
fromNZ$1,350/ month
+ NZ$300 one-off ads setup, plus your ad budget
- Everything in the full plan
- Google Ads built and managed
- A flat fee, never a cut of your spend
- Emergency and after hours targeting
- Wasted spend stripped out weekly
Prices exclude VAT, added where your country requires it. All five currencies are charged as shown. Your ad budget is always separate and paid direct to Google, so you can see every cent. Want to be named when somebody asks ChatGPT or Perplexity for a plumber? That is an add-on from NZ$600/mo. An audit of up to 5 pages is free, a full one is from NZ$1,200. Need the website built rather than marketed? That is a separate job from NZ$900 one-off at webdesignforplumbers.digital.
Straight talk
I would rather turn you down than waste your money.
Marketing cannot fix a business that is not ready for more work. If any of the right hand column is you, say so on the call and I will tell you what to sort out first.
Good fit
- You answer the phone, or somebody does
- You have capacity for more jobs, or you are hiring
- You do good work and customers say so
- You can give this three months before deciding
- You would rather hear the truth than a nice story
Bad fit, for now
- Calls go to voicemail and stay there
- You are already booked out and happy
- You want a guaranteed number of leads in writing
- Your reviews are poor and the reason is the work
- You need results in three weeks or the business folds
FAQs
The questions plumbers actually ask.
If yours is not here, ask it on the call. I will give you a straight answer even if it costs me the job.
How long before I see more work?
Google Ads buy you visibility the day they switch on, and enquiries usually start arriving inside the first fortnight. SEO is slower. Expect small movement by month two, a fair read by month three, and the real compounding from month six. Anyone who promises you booked jobs in week one is selling you something.
Do I need a new website first?
Not always. If your site loads fast, says what you do and where, and has a phone number people can tap, it is good enough to start. If it is slow or ten years old, it will hold everything else back and I will say so in the first week rather than quietly billing you for six months.
Website builds are a separate job on a separate site, webdesignforplumbers.digital, so you are never paying a marketing retainer for a build.
Will you work with other plumbers in my area?
Possibly, and I would rather say so than sell you a scarcity story. There is far more plumbing work in any town than one business can take, so locking an area to a single client mostly benefits the agency selling it. What I will not do is take on more than I can handle properly. If I am too busy to give your account the attention it needs, I will tell you that instead of taking the money.
Can you guarantee a number of leads?
No, and be careful of anyone who does. I can guarantee the work gets done, the tracking is honest, and you see the same numbers I see. What I cannot control is how many cylinders burst in your suburb this month.
What am I locked into?
Nothing. Monthly, cancel whenever. If you leave, the Google Business Profile, the ad account, the tracking and the pages are all yours and stay in your name. I do not hold accounts hostage.
Who actually does the work?
Me. Stu Clark, EightySix Digital, based in Christchurch. I used to be on the tools, which is why this site is about plumbers and not about every trade under the sun. You deal with one person, not an account manager relaying messages.
How much ad budget do I need?
It depends entirely on your town and how many plumbers are bidding in it. I will give you a realistic floor for your area on the first call, and you pay Google direct so you can see every cent that goes out.
From the blog
Straight answers, no jargon.
Written for plumbers rather than marketers. If a post needs a glossary to get through, it has failed. See all posts.
What is a service area business, and how should a plumber set one up?
Most plumbers should be a service area business rather than a shopfront. What that means, how to set it up without quietly breaking your rankings, and the mistake that makes you disappear.
How do I reply to a bad review as a plumber?
You will get one eventually. What to write, what never to write, and why the reply is not really aimed at the person who left it.
What is generative engine optimisation, and is it a real thing?
Getting named when somebody asks ChatGPT for a plumber. What actually decides it, why it works nothing like ranking, and how much of it is being oversold.
Get started
Start with a free audit of your own town.
Tell me where you work and what you want more of. I will audit up to five pages, look at your profile, your rankings and your nearest competitors, and send you what I find. Free, no deck, no pitch you have to sit through.