The SiteRoot team6 min read
Someone in Reservoir walks into the laundry at ten past six with a coffee and stands in an inch of water. They are not reading anybody's about page. They are going to ring three plumbers before half past, and the first one who picks up and says a time gets the job.
That is the whole brief for a plumbing website, and it is narrower than most people think. It has to answer two questions fast, and it has to make you checkable by somebody who has never heard of you. Everything else on the site is either serving those two jobs or it is decoration.
The two questions every caller has already asked
By the time someone rings you, they have decided two things off your website.
Can you come, and when. Today, tonight, first thing tomorrow. A plumbing problem has a clock on it that most trades do not have, because water keeps moving and the person standing in it is counting minutes. If your site does not say your hours and whether you take after hours callouts, you have made them ring to find out, and they will ring somebody else first.
Roughly what is this going to cost. Not the final number. Nobody sane quotes a blocked drain sight unseen. But a callout fee, a from price, or even one plain sentence saying you give the price before you start, removes the fear that they are about to be taken for a ride at 6am. That fear is the actual reason people ring three plumbers instead of one.
Answer both of those in the top half of the home page, before any scrolling, and the rest of the site has an easier job.
Your website is really two businesses
Most plumbers run two operations under one ABN, and the sites that work treat them as two.
There is the emergency side: blocked drains, burst pipes, hot water gone cold, a toilet that will not stop. It is bought on a phone, in a hurry, on availability and price, by somebody who has never met you. It needs speed, a tappable number, your hours and your callout position.
Then there is the planned side: a bathroom renovation, a kitchen, replacing the pipework in a 1940s weatherboard, a full hot water changeover. That gets bought slowly, on a laptop, often by two people talking it over on a Sunday, and it turns on photos of finished work and on whether you seem like somebody who turns up again on the third day.
One page cannot do both well. A home page written entirely for 6am panic loses the renovation. A home page that opens with a styled bathroom shot and the word craftsmanship loses the callout. Give each side its own page and let the home page point clearly at both.
The pages that earn their keep
People do not search for plumbers. They search for the problem they have got. So you want a page per problem, in the words they would say out loud.
- Blocked drains. Say what you do about tree roots and whether you have a camera, because that is the next question.
- Hot water. Repairs and replacements, the brands you work on, and whether you carry common units. The brand stamped on the tank is very often exactly what somebody types.
- Burst pipes and leak detection, including the wet patch in the hallway with no obvious source.
- Gas, only if you hold it, because it is a separate class of work and the person searching for it knows that.
- Taps, toilets and small jobs. The tap washer that becomes the bathroom renovation two years later.
- Bathroom and kitchen renovations. This is the page that needs real photographs.
Six pages that each answer one question properly beat one services page with twenty five items listed on it. They are also six pages you can send to a customer who asks.
The suburb list nobody writes down
Ask a plumber where they work and you get a shape: north of the river, out as far as Craigieburn, not past Frankston. Ask their website and it usually says servicing Melbourne and surrounding areas, which tells nobody anything.
Write the actual suburbs. Fifteen or twenty of them, the ones you genuinely go to, on a page or in the footer. That does two things at once. Somebody in Pascoe Vale sees their own suburb and stops wondering. And search engines get told in plain words where you work, instead of guessing it from your phone number.
If you charge differently past a certain distance, say that too. It is a more honest page than a map with a circle drawn on it.
Your licence, and the certificate the customer gets
Plumbing is licensed work in every state, and a customer who has been burnt before knows to ask. Put your licence or registration number in the footer of every page. It costs you nothing and it turns a stranger into a business with a number attached to it.
Depending on the state and the type of work, a licensed plumber also issues a compliance certificate for the job. If you do that as a matter of course, say so in one sentence. Owners with resale or an insurer anywhere in the picture care about that sentence more than they care about your logo.
What you are actually required to display is your regulator's business, not ours. This is about what a customer looks for.
What a plumbing site does not need
A few things worth not spending a Sunday on.
- A gallery of stock photos of chrome taps. It reads as a business with no photos of its own, which is exactly what it is.
- A blog. If you are going to write one thing, make the blocked drains page better.
- A quote calculator. Plumbing does not quote off a form, and a number that turns out to be wrong is worse than no number.
- A logo you paid A$900 for before you had a website at all.
Where SiteRoot comes into it
We build the site from what you tell us about the work, which for a plumber means the pages above rather than a template with your name dropped into it. A build takes about 15 minutes and it is free to do, so you see the site before you decide anything, and it is A$16.50 a month including GST if you keep it. priority-plumbing.siteroot.com.au is one we built and published.
Your number is a tap to call link on every page, so at 6am it is one touch instead of a number to memorise. The enquiry form emails you at your own address, so a Sunday night message is sitting in your inbox on Monday morning rather than in a portal you would never open. Photos load as the visitor scrolls to them, which matters when the visitor is on one bar of reception in a driveway. Your trade, your suburbs, your hours and your contact details go onto the site in the form search engines read, including the business category they publish for plumbers specifically, and the same facts sit in a plain file that AI assistants can read directly. We watch that the site stays up and that its certificate has not lapsed.
What none of that does is decide where you appear in a search result. Anybody promising you that is selling something they do not control. What a good plumbing site does is win the moment after the tap, which is the part that is actually yours.
