Google listing fields a plumber gets wrong

Getting found 6 min read

The Google listing fields that decide whether a homeowner with water on the floor taps your number, and the ones a one-van plumbing shop gets wrong.

Somebody two streets over has water coming through a ceiling. They type three words into a phone, look at what comes back, and tap a number. All of that takes about half a minute, and most of what decides it sits inside a listing you set up once, in ten minutes, some years ago.

The general shape of that listing is covered elsewhere in this manual. What follows is the plumbing version, because a van and a home address break the fields in ways a shop with a counter never runs into.

Service area, not a pin on your house

Google offers two shapes. A place people come to, with an address on the map, or a service area, where you go to them and the address stays hidden.

If nobody walks into your premises, you want the second one. Leaving the home address showing puts a pin on your kitchen and sends the occasional stranger to your front door on a Sunday.

The other half of this goes wrong just as often. A service area drawn to cover every town within an hour is a service area you do not really serve. You end up quoting jobs you do not want to drive to, and the ones you do want look exactly the same in the list. Nobody outside Google knows precisely how the area is weighed, so set it to the places you would get in the van for today, and change it when that changes.

The category is a list you pick from, not words you write

Your primary category is one entry from Google's own list. You cannot invent one, and the closest match is usually not the phrase you would use for yourself.

The usual mistake is a category chosen when the work was different, rather than the wrong one on day one. A plumber who started out doing general maintenance and set the listing up as a handyman, or one who now does mostly drains and never went back to look. The primary should describe where the money actually comes from this year.

Secondary categories are free and worth adding where they are honest: drainage, water heaters, whatever narrower entry matches work you really take. Adding categories for work you do not do is how you get a Tuesday full of calls you have to turn down.

Write the services in the words a wet floor uses

The services list is a set of lines you fill in yourself, and most plumbing listings either leave it empty or put one line in that says domestic and commercial plumbing services.

Nobody types that. They type burst pipe, no hot water, blocked toilet, leaking water heater, tap dripping, frozen pipe, where is my stopcock. Write those, in those words, one per line, and let the plain ones sit next to the technical ones.

The list is also the cheapest place to say what you do not take. Gas work, septic systems, sprinkler lines, whatever is not yours. A short no in writing saves a phone call that was never going to end in a job.

Open now has to mean a phone gets answered

Hours on a plumbing listing are a filter more than a description of when the office is staffed, and being inside it is what puts you in front of somebody at nine at night.

Which means the hours have to match what actually happens to a call at that hour. Setting the listing to open twenty-four hours is a commitment to somebody picking up at three in the morning, not an advertisement. If the honest answer is that nights go to voicemail, say so and write a voicemail message worth leaving. The whole chain from search to booked job is worth walking once, and the hours are the first link in it.

Where your license number goes

If your trade is licensed where you work, the number is one of the few things a cautious homeowner looks for before they let a stranger into the house.

Google has no field called license number, so it goes in the places you control that are next to it. The description, one line of it. The services list, if that reads naturally. Your own website, on the page the listing links to, near the phone number rather than buried in a footer. Insurance is worth a line in the same place.

It is one number in plain text, and it answers a question the more careful half of your callers are already asking themselves.

The questions box, where a stranger can answer for you

Listings have a questions section, and anybody can answer the questions in it. A question about weekend rates can sit there for a year with an answer from somebody who has never met you.

Read it once a month. Answer anything sitting unanswered, in one or two sentences, in your own words. You are also allowed to put up the common questions yourself and answer them, which is the tidiest use of the whole thing: do you charge for a service call, do you work weekends, which towns do you cover, how soon can somebody get out.

Photographs of a van, a person and a finished job

The photographs on a plumbing listing are usually whatever came with a template. A chrome kitchen nobody in the business has ever stood in.

Three shots do more than thirty. The van with your name on it, because it tells somebody who is pulling up outside. You, or whoever knocks on the door. A finished job, taken after the mess was cleared, ideally next to the before. Phone photographs are fine, as long as the light is decent and the frame is not half floor.

A short checklist

• Address hidden and service areas set to where you would drive today
• Primary category matching the work you do now, not the work you started with
• Services written in the words people type, including the jobs you refuse
• Hours that match what happens to a call at that hour, voicemail included
• License and insurance details in the description and on your own site
• The questions box read once a month and answered in your own words
• A photograph of the van, of a person, and of a finished job
• The website link pointing at a page that still loads on a phone

Questions people ask

Should my home address show on my plumbing listing

Not if customers never come to it. Set the listing up as a service area business and let Google hold the address without displaying it.

How wide should my service area be

As wide as you would actually drive on a normal working day. A wider area does not get you more of the work you want, it gets you more of the calls you turn down.

Can I list drains and plumbing as separate categories

Yes. One primary category and a few honest secondary ones is the usual shape. Add only categories covering work you would take tomorrow.

Somebody answered a question on my listing and got it wrong

Add your own answer underneath, in plain words. You cannot delete a stranger's answer, but you can put the correct one next to it and make yours the useful one.

Do I need to put my license number on Google

There is no field for it, and no requirement. It still belongs in your description and on your website, because a homeowner deciding between two vans is looking for exactly that kind of detail.

Is a listing enough on its own without a website

For a while, yes, and plenty of plumbers run on one. What it cannot do is answer the four or five questions a nervous homeowner has before they call, or survive somebody else deciding to change the rules of a platform you do not own.