Plumber playbook

What a plumber’s customers look for before they ring, which pages carry it, and the worked site to start from; read building first.

Most of it holds for electricians, heating engineers and other one-person trades that come to the customer’s home.

What their customers are deciding

A plumber’s customer is in one of two moods, and the site has to serve both from the first screen:

• Something is leaking now. They want a phone number, whether anybody answers tonight, and whether the plumber covers their street. Nothing else on the page matters to them.
• A job that can wait: a new tap, a boiler service, a bathroom. They compare two or three plumbers on price, trust and whether they will make a mess.

Trust decides the second one: a real name and face, the registration a customer in the owner’s country checks (Gas Safe in the UK, for example), insurance, a guarantee, and photographs of real jobs. Reviews count too, but only real ones the owner can point at; never write any.

Pages

• Home. The first screen says the trade and the area, shows the phone number as a button and as text, and gives the hours, emergency hours included. Then what they fix, each with a “from” price; how a job goes (call, fixed price, pay when it works); the areas served as a list of place names; recent jobs as pictures with a line each; who they are, with their credentials; and a call-back form. On a phone, a call bar stays at the bottom.
• Prices. Call-out fee, hourly rate, the common jobs with prices, what needs a visit before it can be priced, and the terms: VAT, parts, payment methods, guarantee. Most trade sites leave prices out, which is exactly why this page wins jobs.

A plumber rarely needs a blog, a team page or an “our values” page. One page per big service (boilers, bathrooms) is worth adding later, only when the owner has something specific to say about it.

The call to action is the phone number, as a tel: link in international format (tel:+441614960732). The call-back form is the quieter half of the same action, for somebody who can’t talk right now. It writes to a public enquiries table where the phone number is required and email is optional (vzk/tables).

The worked site

The sites topic carries one: plumber/index and plumber/prices, in the cobalt look, English only, with an enquiries table for call-backs. Its phone number is from a range kept for drama, and its prices are the example owner’s. Replace both with the real owner’s, never with a guess. The same goes for every sentence on it: “a fixed price before I start” and “I call back within the hour” are Dan’s promises, and they go on another site only if that owner makes them.

Its picture slots name an asset key in a field and show a labelled empty frame while the field is blank. Put the key from list_files in the field once the owner has uploaded the picture.

Ask the owner

On top of the brief in building:

• The phone number customers should ring, and who answers it.
• Working hours, emergency hours, and what an emergency call-out costs.
• The call-out fee, the hourly rate, and the prices of the jobs they do most.
• The places they cover, the way their customers name them, and how far out they will go.
• Registrations and insurance they hold, and the guarantee they give.
• Whether they do gas work, and anything they don’t do.
• VAT status, and how customers pay.
• Photographs of real jobs, of themselves, and of the van if it carries the name.

Copy

Write in the customer’s words, not the trade’s: “leak”, “no hot water”, “blocked toilet”, not “remedial works” or “sanitary installations”. First person for a sole trader. Every promise needs its number: “I call back within the hour”, not “fast response”. The meta description carries the trade, the area and the phone number, because that is what a search result shows.

Pictures and look

• The hero is the owner at work, or a finished job they are proud of. Never a stock plumber.
• A job picture shows the work, not the customer: no faces, house numbers or paperwork in frame.
• Before and after pairs work well, taken from the same spot.
• cobalt is the default: plain, bright, and it keeps the phone number the loudest thing on the page. A trade with a brand on the van re-skins it with that colour.