Reviews for Plumbers
The review that wins the bathroom was left by a blocked drain at nine on a Sunday
Your cheapest jobs generate your most persuasive proof
A bathroom refit is £1,850. A boiler replacement, £1,670. A shower installation, £840. A leak repair, £235. A blocked drain, £215.
Every plumber we speak to wants more of the top three and treats the bottom two as a nuisance — low value, unsociable hours, interrupts the proper work.
But look at where reviews come from. The person whose kitchen was filling with water at nine on a Sunday and who had someone there by ten is the most grateful customer you will ever have. They write long, emotional, specific reviews. The person whose bathroom you refitted over nine days is pleased, but they are pleased the way you are pleased with a new kitchen — quietly, weeks later, and usually without writing anything.
So your £215 jobs generate the proof that sells your £1,850 jobs. That is the single most useful thing to understand about reviews in this trade, and it changes what you do about it.
Why emergency reviews carry so much weight
A person choosing a plumber for a bathroom is not really assessing tiling. They are assessing risk. They are about to give a stranger a key, nine days and £1,850, and what they want to know is whether this person is reliable when something goes wrong — because in a nine-day job, something will.
An emergency review answers exactly that, from someone who found out the hard way. “Rang at 9pm on a Sunday, here within the hour, stopped the leak, came back Tuesday to do it properly and charged what he said” does more for a bathroom enquiry than any photograph of a finished bathroom.
That is why the answer is not “get more reviews”. It is: capture the ones your worst-timed jobs are already generating, because most of them currently go uncollected.
The ratio
A bathroom is £1,850. Our Seen package is £29 a month — £348 a year. One bathroom covers more than five years.
If a systematic review flow produces two additional bathrooms or boilers a year — which is a low bar for a plumber going from nine reviews to forty — it has paid for the top package several times over.
What we’d actually do
Ask after every job, including the small ones. Especially the small ones. The £215 drain clearance is your best review source and it is the one nobody asks about because it felt trivial.
Ask the next morning, not on the doorstep. At the doorstep they are relieved and want you gone. The next morning they have had a shower and the story has a happy ending.
Ask for the detail that matters. “If you get a minute, it helps if you mention how quickly we got to you.” Response time is the single most persuasive thing you own and it almost never appears unless prompted.
Reply with information. “Glad we got there quickly — for anyone reading this, we keep two slots a day free for emergencies” turns a reply into an advert for the thing you want more of.
Put the emergency reviews on the bathroom page. They are the proof that sells planned work, and leaving them only on Google wastes them.
What good looks like at six months
- A review request going out after every job, automatically, regardless of value
- Three to six new reviews a month, which is realistic given plumbing job volume
- Response times mentioned by name in a meaningful share of them
- Reviews quoted on the bathroom and boiler pages of the site, not just sitting on Google
- Gas Safe registration referenced by customers, which is worth more than claiming it yourself
The mistakes we see most
Only asking after big jobs. Backwards. The big jobs produce polite reviews; the emergencies produce persuasive ones.
Asking on the doorstep. Nobody writes a review standing in a wet kitchen holding a card.
Letting the profile age. Emergency customers pick from the top three results and they look at dates. A profile that has gone quiet reads as a business that has.
Not replying. In a trade where the decision is made in ninety seconds under stress, an active-looking profile converts materially better than a dormant one.
Where this lands in Gaffer
The request fires off the job, so a 9pm callout produces a request at 10am the next morning without you doing anything — which is exactly when you would never have got round to it.
Reviews attach to the customer record, so when that emergency customer comes back eighteen months later wanting a bathroom, you can see they already rate you and price accordingly.
Boiler installs open an annual service schedule at the same time, so the emergency that became a boiler replacement becomes a recurring customer rather than a one-off.
The first ninety days
Weeks 1-2. We turn on an automatic request after every job regardless of value, timed for the following morning. The £215 drain clearance is included deliberately – it is your best review source and the one nobody asks about.
Weeks 3-6. We write the response-time prompt into the emergency requests, because “here within the hour” is the most persuasive sentence you can have on your profile and it never appears unless you ask for it. We also go back to the last twelve months of emergency callouts and ask once.
Weeks 7-12. We pull the strongest emergency reviews onto the bathroom and boiler pages of your site. Those are the pages where a planned customer is deciding, and an emergency review is the proof that closes them.
At ninety days the measure is whether your newest review is always within a fortnight, and whether response time is mentioned by name in a meaningful share of them.
The back catalogue, once
Before the automatic flow changes anything, there is a single larger gain sitting in your job history.
You have attended several hundred jobs in the last two years and asked almost none of those people for a review. A short, honest message – acknowledging it is a while ago and asking only if they were happy – typically converts at one in five or better, because emergency customers remember you far longer than planned ones do.
For a plumber sitting on nine reviews that is a profile rebuilt in a fortnight, and it is the only time this particular lever is available. Everything after it has to run automatically, which is the point of the rest of this page.
Questions plumbers ask
Does it look odd having lots of reviews about small jobs? It looks like a busy plumber. That is exactly the impression you want.
How soon after should I ask? Next morning for emergency work, two or three days after a bathroom once the dust is gone.
What about the ones who are furious about the price? Reply once with the facts, calmly. Emergency callout pricing is defensible when explained and indefensible when argued about.
Do reviews really affect where I rank? Volume, recency and rating all feed the map pack, and the map pack is where emergency work is won. Yes.
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