A boiler packs in on a Sunday night. The homeowner picks up their phone, types “plumber near me”, and Google shows a map with three firms underneath it. Whoever is in those three is first in line for that call. The industry calls the work of getting into that list local SEO for plumbers. In plain terms, it is making sure that when someone within ten miles of your van searches, your name is one of the three they see.
The good news is that the rules are published, most of what decides it is in your hands, and the Google Business Profile at the centre of it is free.
What people nearby are typing
The searches around “plumber near me” have shifted over the past year, and they tell you what a homeowner wants to see before they ring.
Read those as four questions. Are you qualified? Are you available now? Are you any good? Can I ring you straight away? The firm whose listing answers all four before the homeowner has to ask is the one that gets the call.
The first of those has a regulator behind it. In Gas Safety Week this September, the Health and Safety Executive reported 17 convictions for illegal gas work since the start of 2025, against 3 in 2022/23 and 4 in 2023/24, and told households to check an engineer is on the Gas Safe Register before letting them in (HSE, 14 September 2026). Homeowners are being told to look for proof, and the searches show them looking.
How Google picks the three
Google publishes the answer. Its own help page names three things: relevance, how well your listing matches the search; distance, how far you are from the person searching; and prominence, how well known you are, judged partly on reviews and on links to your website. It also says plainly that there is no way to pay for a better position in that list (Google Business Profile Help).
Each of the three has something you can do about it this week.
Relevance: name the work you actually do
Google can only match you to “boiler repair” if you have told it you do boiler repair. Pick the main category on your Google Business Profile that fits the bulk of your work, then list every service by the name a homeowner would use: boiler installation, boiler servicing, emergency callout, power flushing, unvented cylinders.
Do the same on your website, with a page for each main service. When we rebuilt the site for Direct Plumbing and Heating in Crawley, each service got its own page, written for people in Crawley and across West Sussex.
Distance: tell Google where the van goes
You cannot move your yard closer to every customer, but you can make sure Google knows the patch you cover. Set your service areas on your profile to the towns you really work in, not the whole county. Look at the boiler repair searches rising right now and a lot of them carry a place name: Reading, Guildford, Glasgow. People search by town, so your profile and your site should name the towns you serve.
A page for each town only earns its place if it says something true about working there. A page that swaps one town name for another reads as filler to homeowners and to Google alike.
Prominence: give Google reasons to trust you
This is the one that builds over time. Reviews are the biggest part a small firm controls: ask every happy customer, and reply to every review, good or bad. We covered how to make that a habit in our piece on Google reviews.
Photos count too. Real jobs, real vans, the cylinder you fitted last Tuesday. What to film on a job has a list that works just as well for a phone camera as for video.
Links from local websites help as well: your merchant’s installer list, the local business association, a school or club you sponsor.
Answer the four questions on your listing
Go back to what people are typing, and make sure your profile and your website answer each one without a click.
- Qualified. Put your Gas Safe registration number on your profile description and on every page of your site, and mention any other accreditations you hold. HSE is telling homeowners to check; make it easy.
- Available. Set opening hours that are true. If you do emergency callouts, say so and say when. If you do not work weekends, say that too, so you are not getting calls you cannot take.
- Good. Reviews, photos and a short line on how long you have been trading.
- Easy to ring. A phone number that dials with one tap on a mobile, at the top of every page. “Plumber near me phone number” is rising because people want to skip the form.
Where the profile and the website meet
Your Google Business Profile gets you seen. Your website is where a homeowner goes to decide, and it feeds the prominence Google is measuring. A profile that links to a slow, out of date site loses the job at the last step.
That is how the Direct Plumbing work ran. The site came first, with a page per service and a Call Us Now button in the header of every page. Paid search ads followed three months later and sent people straight to those service pages, with no separate landing pages needed. The business has since taken on a second team member to keep up with the work.
What we do
We set up and tidy Google Business Profiles for plumbing and heating firms, and we build the website behind them, with the service and town pages that put you in front of the jobs within ten miles of the van. If you want to know how you show up today when someone nearby searches, we will look for you.
See how we build websites for trades, read our guide to Google Business Profile, or get in touch.