SEO for plumbers

Yes. Google lets service-area businesses hide their street address and list the towns or counties they serve instead. Most plumbers should be set up this way. You still need a real address to verify the profile, and Google may ask for a video showing your truck, your tools and your business documents. You just don’t display the address to customers.

What you can’t do is list a mailbox store or a virtual office as your address. Google suspends profiles for that, and getting a suspended profile back is slow. If you have a shop customers visit, show the address. If you drive to every job, hide it and list the areas you actually cover, not every town within a two-hour drive.

There’s no set number. What matters is how you compare to the other plumbers in your map results, and whether the reviews keep coming. A profile with a burst of reviews two years ago and nothing since looks like a business that slowed down. A few new reviews every month looks like one that’s busy.

The easiest system is a text with your review link, sent the same day the job is done, while the customer still remembers you saved their basement. I write the text. Your techs send it from their phones. Ask them to mention the job and the town, like “replaced our water heater in Sterling Heights.” That helps more than “great service.” Answer every review with a short reply, especially the bad ones, because the next customer reads your reply too.

The jobs you want more of and can make money on. For most plumbers that’s water heaters, drain and sewer work, sump pumps and emergency service, but your list depends on your trucks and your crew. If you’d rather not do small drain calls, don’t build a page for them.

Each page names the job the way customers say it, covers what usually causes the problem, what affects the price, whether you handle it as an emergency, and the towns you cover. A tap-to-call button sits at the top. One page per job, not one page that lists twenty services, because Google ranks a page for what it’s clearly about.

Manager access to your Google Business Profile. Photos from real jobs, taken on a phone before you pack up: the old water heater and the new one, a clean install, your truck. The towns where most of your calls come from and the jobs you want more of. Your Michigan plumbing license number, which comes from LARA, so I can put it on the site. Honest hours, including when you take emergency calls. And a tech on every job who will send the review text before leaving the driveway. Everything else runs by phone, video and email.