Case study · Plumbers · UK
Plumber Case Study UK: +110% Leads
How a 6-van plumbing business in Glasgow grew calls and enquiries 110% and cut cost per lead 36% in 6 months with Local SEO, Business Listings and Email Marketing.
Illustrative case study: the business is anonymised and the figures are modelled on typical results for this market.
Plumbers · UK
Plumbing
A 6-van plumbing business based in Glasgow, serving the wider Glasgow area and focused on bathroom fitting and plumbing, plus leak detection and burst pipes. Before working with us, 63% of enquiries came through Checkatrade and similar paid platforms, where the same lead often went to three or four competitors. The goal was more exclusive calls and enquiries, a lower cost per booked job and a pipeline the owner controls.
Results After 6 Months
Leads per month
+110%
Cost per lead
-36%
Marketing-sourced revenue
+123%
Return on marketing spend
5.7x
The challenge
Where the business was stuck
- Emergency jobs go to whoever answers first, so missed calls after 5pm quietly hand revenue to competitors.
- Lead marketplaces sell the same enquiry to three or four plumbers, which drives prices down and win rates with them.
- Low-value tap and toilet jobs fill the diary while hot water, re-pipe and bathroom work, the jobs that pay, go elsewhere.
- Peak season (frozen and burst pipe callouts spike from december to february, while bathroom enquiries rise in january and early spring) was not being planned for, so budget ran out when demand was highest.
The approach
Three services, one goal
We focused on Local SEO & Google Maps, Business Listings & Citations and Email Marketing, the three channels with the best cost per booked job for plumbing businesses in Glasgow. Every call, form and chat was tracked to a booked outcome from week one, so every decision was based on revenue, not clicks.
What we did
The technical work behind the numbers, service by service.
Service 1
Local SEO & Google Maps
- Rebuilt the Google Business Profile: primary category corrected, 3 secondary categories added, 14 services with descriptions and a service area matched to the real travel radius.
- Published 18 suburb and area pages across the wider Glasgow area, each with local job photos, travel times and area-specific FAQs.
- Launched a review request flow by SMS after every completed job, lifting review velocity from 3 to 13 new reviews a month.
- Tracked rankings on a 9x9 geo-grid around the office to see Maps visibility street by street, not just from one location.
Service 2
Business Listings & Citations
- Claimed and completed profiles on Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect and 39 local and industry directories.
- Cleaned name, address and phone details everywhere, removing 3 duplicate listings that were splitting reviews and confusing Google.
- Added services, photos, opening hours, licence numbers and booking links to every profile, with UTM tags to track leads by source.
- Set up monthly listing monitoring so incorrect edits by users or aggregators are caught and fixed within days.
Service 3
Email Marketing
- Set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC on the sending domain and warmed it up, taking inbox placement from 67% to 95%.
- Segmented 3,500 past customers and quote recipients by job type, area and last service date.
- Built 5 automated flows: welcome, quote nurture, post-job review request, annual service reminder and win-back.
- Sent a monthly campaign with seasonal offers for bathroom fitting and plumbing and related work, A/B testing subject lines and send times.
The numbers
Before and after
| Metric | Before | Month 6 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Calls and enquiries per month | 60 | 126 | +110% |
| Cost per lead | £49 | £32 | -36% |
| Cost per booked job | £118 | £72 | -39% |
| Lead-to-job rate | 41% | 44% | +3 pts |
| Website conversion rate | 2.6% | 3.6% | +36% |
| Marketing-sourced revenue / month | £15k | £33k | +123% |
| Share of leads from paid directories | 63% | 12% | -51 pts |
| Keywords in the Maps top 3 | 1 | 14 | +13 |
| Listings with consistent details | 17 | 42 | all fixed |
| Email open rate | 18% | 50% | +32 pts |
Lead growth
Calls and enquiries per month
Marketing-sourced revenue went from £15k to £33k a month, measured from booked booked jobs in the CRM.
Optimisations That Moved The Numbers
- 01
Adding 3 secondary Google Business Profile categories lifted discovery searches by 39% in six weeks.
- 02
Area pages for Leeds moved the business from outside the top 20 to position 2 in the Maps pack for its main service there.
- 03
Fixing duplicates and inconsistent details lifted Google Business Profile views by 29%.
- 04
Email flows now bring in £3.5k of repeat and referral work a month from customers who were already on the books.
The 6-month timeline
From tracking to scale.
Weeks 1 to 2
Audit, tracking and baseline
Call tracking, conversion tracking, CRM connection and a full audit covering Local SEO, Business Listings and Email Marketing.
Weeks 3 to 6
Build and launch
Local SEO, Business Listings and Email Marketing live for bathroom fitting and plumbing, plus leak detection and burst pipes.
Months 2 to 4
Optimise
Weekly search term, call and landing page reviews. Budget and effort moved to the jobs that close.
Months 5 to 6
Scale
Expansion into Leeds and nearby areas, plus new services with proven demand.
Illustrative case study: the business is anonymised and the figures are modelled on typical results for this market. Your results depend on your market, budget, capacity and follow-up. We share realistic forecasts in your free audit.
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