Plumber marketing in Utah, run by a guy who used to be the plumber

Somebody with water on the floor isn’t shopping around. They tap the first company that looks real and has a number they can call. You don’t need to win the whole internet. You need to win the zip codes around your shop.

After they tap, one of three things happens:

• Nobody answers. They call the next plumber on the list.
• Somebody takes a message and calls back hours later. By then, odds are somebody else already took the job.
• Somebody answers and books it. That’s the only one that pays.

Most agencies only care about step one: make the phone ring. I care about all three. If my ads make the phone ring and nobody picks up, all I did was make your missed-call problem more expensive.

Utah hands plumbers a rush that most marketing plans ignore. In January 2023, Sandy City alone answered about 40 frozen-pipe calls in a single day.

You can see a cold snap coming days out on the forecast. That makes it one of the few rushes you can plan for. Here’s what I’d do with it:

• Raise budgets on frozen-pipe and burst-pipe searches before the cold hits, not after your phones are already jammed.
• Write ads that use the customer’s words: frozen pipe, burst pipe, no water.
• Match the ad schedule to the hours someone is really picking up.
• Pull the extra budget back when it warms up.

And if your board is already full, I’d rather turn the ads down than have you pay for calls you can’t take.

No hot water is urgent, but it isn’t a flood. The person calling usually wants one answer first: fix it or replace it? That’s a different conversation than a burst pipe. It deserves its own ad and its own page. The page should answer repair-or-replace straight, say which kinds you install (tank, tankless, whatever you really do), and get them on the phone.

I’d track water heater jobs on their own, too. You want to know what each replacement cost you to land, separate from the drain calls. If you lump them together, you can’t tell which ads are paying for themselves.

For most plumbing shops, the first dollar goes to Local Services Ads. “Plumbers” is an eligible LSA category in the U.S. The “Drain expert” category is limited to California and Florida, so it isn’t an option here. You pay when a customer gets in touch through the ad, not per click. The badge on those ads is called Google Verified.

Here’s the order I’d build it in for a plumber:

1. Local Services Ads for emergency calls in the zip codes closest to your shop.
2. Google Ads search campaigns for the jobs you want more of, like water heaters or repipes, each with its own ad.
3. Your Google Business Profile, cleaned up with your real service area, and a review request after every job.
4. Missed-call text back and review requests, which I’d set up for you in a tool you own, so a call you couldn’t answer still gets a quick reply.

One Utah-specific thing. A consumer guide for Salt Lake homeowners tells them to check a plumber’s DOPL license before hiring. So your license number belongs on your site and your profile where people can see it. It costs nothing, and it answers their question before they ask it.

One of the accounts I run is a plumbing company in Salt Lake County. I rebuilt their website and I run their Google Ads. I don’t name clients on this site, but the work is real.

If you work the valley, the Salt Lake County page covers what competition looks like there.