Content Marketing for Plumbers
Write for the week before the emergency, not the night of it
Two halves, and content only reaches one of them
A bathroom refit is £1,850. A boiler replacement, £1,670. A shower installation, £840. A leak repair, £235. A blocked drain, £215.
At nine on a Sunday evening with water coming through a ceiling, nobody is reading anything. They search, they ring the first three results, and they book whoever answers. That is a speed-and-visibility problem and content plays almost no part in the moment itself.
But there is a week before that moment, and a much longer period before a boiler is replaced or a bathroom is refitted, and that is where content earns its keep for a plumber.
The trick is knowing which questions belong to which half — and writing for the planned half while quietly building the trust that gets you rung in the emergency.
The two content jobs
The planned purchase. A bathroom is £1,850 and a boiler is £1,670, and both are researched for weeks. What does a bathroom refit actually cost, how long is it out of action, do I need to move the soil pipe, combi or system, what size boiler, is a power flush necessary, what warranty do I get. These are real, high-volume searches with genuine buying intent behind them.
The pre-emergency. Where is my stopcock, why is my boiler losing pressure, why is the water hammering, is a slow drain worth worrying about. Nobody rings a plumber over these. They search, they read, and if the page that helped them was yours, your name is the one they have when it becomes an emergency three months later.
That second category is the one plumbers dismiss and it is the cheapest trust you will ever buy. It costs a page to answer, it gets shared in local groups, and it puts you in someone’s head before the crisis rather than during it.
The ratio
A bathroom is £1,850. Our Seen package is £29 a month — £348 a year. One bathroom covers more than five years.
A boiler cost guide that brings two additional replacements a year is £3,340 of work from a page written once. Content is the only thing we do that keeps returning after it is finished, which is what makes it worth the patience it demands.
What we’d actually write
A boiler replacement guide, published in August. Combi versus system, sizing, what the install actually involves, what it costs, and what the warranty depends on. Boiler decisions are made in the first cold week, and the reading happens in the weeks before it. Published in October it has missed the year.
A bathroom cost and process page. What it costs, how long you are without a bathroom, what changes the price. Bathrooms are researched slowly and this page does the qualifying for you.
The pre-emergency set. Stopcock, losing pressure, no hot water, slow drain, frozen condensate in winter. Short, genuinely useful, written for someone slightly panicking.
A “what an emergency callout costs” page. Nobody publishes this and everybody wonders. Being straight about out-of-hours pricing before the call removes the argument afterwards and wins the customers who are checking.
Gas Safe, explained rather than displayed. Registration is around £310 a year and legally mandatory for gas work. Telling people how to check the register is genuinely useful and quietly removes every unregistered competitor from consideration.
What good looks like at twelve months
- A boiler guide live from August every year, refreshed annually
- A bathroom page that arrives ahead of the enquiry, so callers already know the range
- Six to ten short pre-emergency pages that get found and shared locally
- Emergency pricing published, which converts the people currently ringing round for a number
- Enquiries mentioning something they read, which is the signal it is working
The mistakes we see most
Writing emergency content for the emergency. They are not reading. Write it for the calm week beforehand.
Publishing the boiler guide in November. The decision is already being made. August or it has missed.
Hiding callout rates. The customer will find a number from somebody. Better it is yours with your explanation attached.
Thin content on everything. Two hundred words on “why choose us” is worth nothing. One proper page on boiler sizing is worth a great deal.
The first ninety days
Weeks 1–4. Whichever seasonal guide is next — boilers if we are heading into autumn, bathrooms if not — written properly with your numbers.
Weeks 5–8. The pre-emergency set, six or eight short pages. Quick to produce, and they are what gets shared in local community groups.
Weeks 9–12. Emergency pricing published, plus the Gas Safe explainer, and the whole thing linked so somebody reading about losing pressure finds the boiler guide.
At ninety days the measure is whether people are arriving at your site before they need you rather than only at the moment they do.
Where this lands in Gaffer
Enquiries arrive as opportunities with the page attached, so you know whether you are speaking to a bathroom reader or somebody whose boiler has just died.
Quote templates for bathrooms, boilers and showers hold the real numbers, so the cost pages stay honest and get flagged when your prices move rather than silently ageing.
And a boiler install opens an annual service schedule, so a customer who found you through a guide becomes a customer who comes back every year without anybody remembering to chase them.
Write about the boilers you are actually accredited to fit
There is a search you are almost certainly ignoring, and it is the one closest to a purchase.
People do not search “boiler” for long. Within a week of starting they are searching brands and models — a specific combi against another, a ten-year warranty against a five, whether a particular range is worth the difference. Those searches are answered by the manufacturers, by review sites, and by nobody who could fit the thing.
You have an advantage there that is genuinely hard to copy: accredited installer status. Fitting a manufacturer’s boiler as an accredited installer typically extends the warranty well beyond the standard term, and that difference is worth real money to a customer who is choosing between two quotes. Most plumbers mention it in passing on the phone, if at all.
Put it in writing instead. A page per brand you are accredited for, explaining what the accreditation requires of you, what warranty length it unlocks, what registration you handle on the customer’s behalf, and what would void it. Add the honest comparison — which range suits a three-bed with one bathroom, where the extra outlay is justified and where it is not.
It is a small number of pages, it dates slowly, and it catches people at the point where they have stopped wondering whether to replace and started wondering what to buy. That is the most valuable week in the whole boiler cycle, and it is currently being spent on somebody else’s website.
Questions plumbers ask
Does content help with emergency work at all? Indirectly and substantially — the pre-emergency pages put your name in someone’s head before the crisis. In the moment itself, your Google profile and answer rate do the work.
How long are these pages? The seasonal guides, properly long. The pre-emergency ones, three hundred words and genuinely useful.
Should I publish emergency callout prices? Yes. It is the single most searched and least answered question in your trade.
I’m not a writer. You are not writing. You answer the questions you already answer daily on the phone, and we turn them into the pages.
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