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Digital Marketing Tips for Plumbing Contractors

To keep pace with your competitors, you need to develop an online marketing strategy.

Once upon a time, all plumbing contractors had to do to get clients was to list themselves in the Yellow Pages of the local phone book. For a time, this worked! Back in the day, people actually used the local phone book to find the products or services they needed.

Times, however, have changed. People use land-line telephones and phone books less and less, and everyone now depends on the internet to help them find the services or products they need.

We’ve entered the age of digital marketing, and a plumbing contractor needs to get on the bandwagon or risk getting left behind. The plumbing industry, after all, features some intense competition.

If you want to establish an online presence for your plumbing business, you can use these digital marketing tips to give you a leg up.

Create a website.

In the digital world, websites have become a must for businesses—big and small alike. A website essentially becomes the face of your business online. Search engines will explore it to learn everything they can about your business, then determine what sort of search traffic they should display it to.

Since your website represents your plumbing company on the internet, it must contain all of your contact information to make it easy for potential customers to reach you. Your company’s current physical address, email address, and phone number must remain recent and easy to find on your site. Your website must also have a landing page with a clear, short contact form to help you generate leads.

Make your web design responsive.

More users surf the internet on mobile devices than desktops or laptops these days, and this gap will only widen over the next few years. With more and more people using tablets and smartphones to search for what they need online, you need to opt for a responsive web design, which allows your site to “break” the right way so it looks and performs well on both phones and computers.

Create a blog.

After you create a website, you should go ahead and create a blog to live within it. With a blog, you can create content related to plumbing that your readers and customers will find relevant and useful. You can post anything from tips that will help them prevent plumbing emergencies to videos on how to replace broken pipes.

With the content that you post in your blog, you should aim to position yourself as an expert in the field of plumbing. People will trust you more once you have established yourself as credible through your blog posts.

Think blogging is a waste of your time? Take a look at our next point before you write it off.

SEO

Your website may look great and feature a responsive design, but nobody will read it if you don’t optimize for search engines. When people look for a plumber in your area, they’ll type “Springfield plumber” (or something similar) into a search engine and make their selection based on the results. If you don’t appear, you won’t land the customer. Thus, search engine optimization (SEO) comprises a crucial component of your website’s success. When building your web presence, you need to consider how your site will work for human beings and search engines.

By adding relevant keywords, optimizing page titles, meta tags, image alt tags, and most importantly, creating high-quality content (see previous section), your site has a better chance of getting noticed by Google. Once Google establishes that your site provides what users search for, you will get rewarded with higher rankings in search results, and you can expect increased traffic and more customers seeking plumbing services.

Use social media.

More than two billion people have social media accounts today. Surely, you would want the attention of even the tiniest fraction of that audience. The only way for your plumbing business to do that? Carve out your own space on social media.

Social media offers an excellent way of engaging with current and potential customers. Whatever your social media platform, you get a chance to interact with your audience in a way that allows you to get to know them better. Social media works as an excellent place for you to share content relevant to the plumbing industry, answer queries from readers and followers, and to post plumbing instructional videos or any other content.

Your social media presence will increase awareness for your brand and build trust and loyalty among current and future customers.

All of these things will help your plumbing business get more attention from users on the internet. The plumbing business may be extremely competitive, but your foray into the world of digital marketing puts you on equal footing with your competitors, and will eventually allow you to overtake them in terms of rankings, traffic, and generating leads and conversions.

Victoria Brown is the Content Specialist for Pipetech Plumbing & Rooter, an expert plumbing repair services company in Chandler, Arizona that caters to residential and commercial needs. When not
writing, she enjoys yoga and hiking with her family and friends.