Plumbing Quick Audit: More Calls in Your Town

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FREE QUICK AUDIT FOR PLUMBERS

Find out what’s costing you plumbing calls. In about five minutes.

A former Yahoo search engineer looks at your Google profile, your ads and your tracking, and tells you where the calls are leaking and what to fix first. No pitch, and the report is yours to keep either way.

Get my free audit

Two minutes with Dennis:

40+ states served  ·  thousands of Quick Audits run  ·  Nike & Domino’s among the brands we’ve helped

Is this for you?

We built this for one kind of person: the plumber who does great work and just wants to know if their marketing is pulling its weight. Quick gut-check.

This is for you if…

You own or run a plumbing business with real customers and real reviews.

You’re in a spot Google’s Local Services Ads cover.

You’re spending on marketing and want to know what that money is doing.

You’d rather own your marketing than keep renting it from an agency.

It’s probably not for you if…

You’re an agency or freelancer looking for ideas to resell.

You’re pre-revenue or just getting the truck on the road.

You just want a free strategy call with no real data behind it.

Why so many plumbers get burned by agencies

Chances are you’ve been through this once or twice already. An agency reels you in with a slick pitch, then hands the real work to someone in the back you never meet. A lot of them quietly pass it to yet another agency. (Search “white label agency” sometime. It’s a rabbit hole.)

The old setup, where an account manager just buys your ads, doesn’t cut it anymore. Google, Facebook and YouTube reward whoever can read the data and feed the right signals back. Someone who only knows how to “run ads” can’t do that. The way out is to own your marketing. It’s less complicated than they want you to believe, and you understand your customers better than they do anyway.

The longer version:

We diagnose before we prescribe

If a marketer starts recommending things before they’ve looked at your numbers, walk away. That’s guesswork, and you’re the one who pays for it. A full SEO audit is like an MRI; the Quick Audit is the physical exam. It catches the urgent stuff fast and tells you in plain English what’s healthy, what’s broken, and what to deal with first.

How you actually rank on Google and Google Maps

Most “SEO” sold to plumbers is guesswork with a nice invoice attached. What Google really weighs in the local pack comes down to three things: how relevant you are, how close you are, and how well known you are.

Relevance is whether your profile and your pages clearly say you do plumbing, and where. The page Google trusts for “plumber in Easton” has to be genuinely about plumbing in Easton, not a copy of your Bethlehem page with the town swapped.

Distance you can’t fake, but you can stretch it with real service-area pages, reviews that mention those towns, and links from other local businesses. When your rankings fall off a cliff a few miles from the shop, that’s a missing local signal, not bad luck.

Prominence is where most plumbers have the most room to grow: reviews (how many, how recent, and whether you answer them), your name, address and phone matching everywhere, and real proof of the work, photos and video of your crew on the job. Do good work, get customers talking, put it everywhere, and back the winners with a little ad spend. That’s the whole game, and it runs with Google’s own guidelines instead of against them. It’s also the thinking behind the Maps Visibility component inside the Home Service Growth System. If the audit shows we can help, the one public done-for-you offer is the $3,500/month Home Service Growth System—not a separate Maps package.

Dennis walks through it here:

What we check

Not a generic six-pack. For Plumbing, we Google “plumber your city”, confirm the category Google expects, and score Get Found → Get Chosen → Get Booked. Structural leaks stay hidden until someone looks under the hood.

The Plumbing exam — not the generic six-pack

Get Found → Get Chosen → Get Booked, scored for a plumbing company.

Get Found

36 pts of the 100

GBP primary is Plumber. Drain service and water heater belong as additional, not as a replacement primary.

In the map pack for “plumber {city}”. A competitor with two reviews can still be in it — that is the floor.

Hours include nights/weekends if you actually run emergency. Closed Sunday on GBP while the truck runs is a lie Google will rank against.

Get Chosen

32 pts of the 100

Reviews that mention drain, water heater, or a street name — not “professional and courteous.”

Photos of the van, the water heater, the crawlspace — not Unsplash bathrooms.

Town pages for every city you dispatch, because plumbing dies two towns over.

Get Booked

32 pts of the 100

Click-to-call is the booking system. A “let’s work together” form is a leak.

After-hours call path is tracked. Emergency LSA with a voicemail box is wasted spend.

Housecall Pro / ServiceTitan on the public site in week 9, not week 1 — after the pack.

Money keyword we actually Google: plumber your city

Categories we expect: Plumber, Drain service, Water heater repair service, Sewer cleaning service (LSA-eligible)

What a generic audit misses on this trade

! Spam SEO invoices (directory farms) show up as DR 0 + 30 junk referring domains. Do not buy more.

! Same-metro namesakes: a “Magic Wand” problem. Disambiguate the legal name in the GBP title.

! LSA is the channel. Ranking blog posts about “history of plumbing” is not Get Found.

Scoring: Found 36 / Chosen 32 / Booked 32. A skipped check is UNKNOWN, not a zero. Agents load this pack from Audit-Factory config/local_verticals.json.

Get Chosen

32 pts of the 100

Reviews that mention drain, water heater, or a street name — not “professional and courteous.”

Photos of the van, the water heater, the crawlspace — not Unsplash bathrooms.

Town pages for every city you dispatch, because plumbing dies two towns over.

Get Booked

32 pts of the 100

Click-to-call is the booking system. A “let’s work together” form is a leak.

After-hours call path is tracked. Emergency LSA with a voicemail box is wasted spend.

Housecall Pro / ServiceTitan on the public site in week 9, not week 1 — after the pack.

Money keyword we actually Google: plumber your city

Categories we expect: Plumber, Drain service, Water heater repair service, Sewer cleaning service (LSA-eligible)

What a generic audit misses on this trade

! Spam SEO invoices (directory farms) show up as DR 0 + 30 junk referring domains. Do not buy more.

! Same-metro namesakes: a “Magic Wand” problem. Disambiguate the legal name in the GBP title.

! LSA is the channel. Ranking blog posts about “history of plumbing” is not Get Found.

Scoring: Found 36 / Chosen 32 / Booked 32. A skipped check is UNKNOWN, not a zero. Agents load this pack from Audit-Factory config/local_verticals.json.

What the Quick Audit gives you

Two things, both yours to keep: a clear read on what’s going on, and a plan for what to do about it.

A written Snapshot Report across Get Found, Get Chosen, and Get Booked — the Plumbing exam — with findings for your business.

A prioritized action plan that ranks the fixes by impact, so you know what to touch first.

A competitive snapshot showing where you sit next to the other plumbers in your market.

A 30-minute walkthrough where we go through it with you, so nothing’s a mystery.

To set expectations: the Quick Audit is the analysis and the plan. It does not include doing the work. You can run with the plan yourself, or bring us in to implement it, which is a separate step.

Here’s what you actually get to hold

Not a vague “strategy session.” A real written report. This is the shape of it:

QUICK AUDIT · SNAPSHOT REPORT

Prepared for: Your Plumbing Co., Easton PA

Google Business Profile: claimed, 4.9 stars. Strong.

Reviews: 200+, but coming in slower lately.

Call tracking: not connected. Calls can’t be tied to a source.

Google Ads: paying for clicks that aren’t converting.

Website: thin location pages, missing real job photos.

Action plan: 7 fixes, ranked by what puts money in the door first.

Sample shown. Want a real one, start to finish? Read a full plumbing audit here.

What one of these actually turns up

Take Andy Davis at Pilot Plumbing & Drain, up in Portland and Vancouver. He came to us paying real money for “SEO.”

BEFORE

$5,690 a month, for SEO that was fake.

Fake blog backlinks about wine, TikTok and marriage. His rankings had vanished just a few miles from the shop. We showed him the garbage he was paying for, and how to take his marketing back.

That’s the kind of breakdown most owners never get to see of their own marketing. It’s the whole point of the audit.

WHAT WE KEEP FINDING WITH PLUMBERS

80%   of Plumbing Pros’ calls came from their Google profile and referrals, not paid ads.

$5,690/mo   one plumber was paying for SEO that turned out to be fake.

200+   five-star reviews a top plumber had, that his website wasn’t turning into rankings.

a few miles   is all it took for another plumber’s rankings to vanish outside his home turf.

What Sal Sciorta has to say

Sal runs Plumbing Pros in Easton, PA. After we worked through his audit and started fixing the basics, the change wasn’t subtle.

“It seems like the Google algorithm will just throw you a ton of jobs, almost I can’t handle the work because I don’t have enough workers. A lot of those leads, maybe like one in five, I had to turn down because they wanted immediate service and I was booked two days out. That was my big wake-up call. The work is there.”

Sal Sciorta, owner of Plumbing Pros

Here’s Sal in his own words:

We come from inside the trades

This isn’t theory from an agency that’s never turned a wrench or stood on a job site. Dennis works with Roger Wakefield, the plumber a big chunk of YouTube learns from, and with Joe Crisara, whose service-sales training contractors across the country swear by. He’s gone on Tommy Mello’s Home Service Expert podcast, the biggest show in home services, and interviewed HVAC and home-service leaders on the floor of the AHR Expo. And he’s sat down with, audited, and shared a meal with plumbers like Sal Sciorta.

Why this isn’t just another agency

Most agencies execute first and diagnose later, if at all. We start with the boring structural questions. Is your tracking telling the truth? Can you trace a call back to its source? Are your ads built around real plumbing intent? Is your proof showing up where homeowners look? Get those wrong and spending more just burns money faster. Diagnosis comes first, every recommendation ties back to something you can measure, and you leave knowing what’s working, what isn’t, and what to fix first.

How the Plumbing audit works

  1. Step 1. You submit the towns the van actually covers.
  2. Step 2. We Google “plumber {city}” and “emergency plumber {city}” and read GBP hours against reality.
  3. Step 3. You get Found → Chosen → Booked, with emergency hours and town-page leaks called out.
  4. Then your call. Run the plan yourself, or bring us in. The exam is not the implementation.

Have these ready for the Plumbing walkthrough

Google Business Profile login

Local Services Ads (Plumber)

The phone that rings after 6pm

List of cities you will actually dispatch to

Get my free Plumbing audit

Not a plumber? See every trade we cover.

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