A Step-by-Step SEO Audit You Can Run on Your Plumbing Website This Week

An SEO audit is a structured review of why your website ranks where it does — and what's preventing it from ranking higher. For plumbing businesses, the audit has four distinct layers, and they need to be evaluated in order because a technical problem will mask content improvements, and a content gap will limit the value of any link-building you do.

The Four Audit Layers

• Technical health: Can Google crawl, index, and render your site correctly? Issues here affect every other layer.
• Local presence: Is your Google Business Profile complete and accurate? Are your business details consistent across the major directories plumbers appear in (Yelp, Angi, HomeAdvisor, BBB)?
• Content coverage: Do you have dedicated pages for every service you offer and every city or neighborhood you serve? Generic pages don't rank for specific searches.
• Competitive positioning: What are the plumbers outranking you doing that you aren't? This tells you what the market rewards.

Most plumbing business owners who attempt a DIY audit stop at technical — they run a speed test, see a passing score, and assume everything is fine. Technical is the foundation, but it's rarely the whole story for a local service business. The bigger opportunities are usually in local listing accuracy and service page gaps, which are easier to fix and faster to show results.

This guide walks through each layer in a practical sequence. You don't need to hire anyone to complete this audit — but the output will tell you clearly whether you're dealing with problems you can fix yourself or issues that warrant bringing in a specialist.

Technical SEO for a local plumbing website is not the same as technical SEO for an e-commerce site with thousands of pages. Your site is probably 10-30 pages. The technical issues that matter are a shorter list.

Start With Google Search Console

If you haven't connected your site to Google Search Console, do that first — it's free and it's the most direct signal you have from Google itself. Once connected, check:

• Coverage report: Are any pages excluded or marked as errors? 'Submitted URL not indexed' is a red flag.
• Core Web Vitals: Google flags pages that fail its speed and usability thresholds. Poor scores here are a ranking disadvantage, especially on mobile.
• Manual actions: If you have a manual penalty from Google, nothing else you do will move the needle until it's resolved.

Mobile and Page Speed

Most plumbing searches happen on a phone — someone's standing in a flooded basement or watching a pipe drip. Your site needs to load fast and work cleanly on mobile. Use Google's PageSpeed Insights tool (free) and aim for a score above 70 on mobile. Scores below 50 are worth addressing before anything else.

What You Can Safely Ignore

Tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs will generate hundreds of 'issues' — missing H2 tags, image alt text on decorative images, minor redirect chains. For a small plumbing site, most of these are noise. Focus on issues flagged as errors, not warnings. Don't spend two weeks fixing alt text when your Google Business Profile is incomplete.

If your site was recently migrated to a new domain or rebuilt on a new CMS, that's a special case. Migrations commonly introduce redirect problems that cause significant ranking drops. If you've seen a traffic drop that coincides with a site rebuild, that's likely the cause and warrants a closer technical review.

For most plumbing businesses, local SEO is where the biggest ranking use lives. The Map Pack (the three-business box that appears in local Google searches) drives a substantial share of plumbing leads. Getting into and staying in that pack is a distinct discipline from standard website SEO.

Audit Your Google Business Profile

Log into your Google Business Profile and review the following:

• Business name: It should match exactly what's on your website and invoices — no keyword stuffing like 'Joe's Plumbing | Best Plumber in Houston'.
• Primary category: 'Plumber' is the correct primary category for most plumbing businesses. Secondary categories can include 'Drainage service', 'Water heater installation service', etc.
• Service area: Make sure your listed service area reflects the cities and neighborhoods you actually want to rank in.
• Photos: Profiles with current, real job photos consistently outperform those with stock images. In our experience, this is one of the most underdone elements.
• Review count and recency: When did you last receive a review? A pattern of recent reviews signals to Google that your business is active.

NAP Consistency Check

NAP stands for Name, Address, Phone — and inconsistency across directories confuses Google about which version of your business information is correct. Search your business name on Google and review how it appears on Yelp, Angi, HomeAdvisor, the BBB, and your local Chamber of Commerce listing. Phone number formats, suite numbers, and abbreviations (St. vs Street) all count as inconsistencies.

A tool like Moz Local or BrightLocal can automate this check across dozens of directories. Either fix listings manually or use a citation management service — both work, the manual approach just takes longer.

This is the layer most plumbing websites fail hardest. A single 'Services' page that lists everything you offer — drain cleaning, water heaters, leak detection, repiping, emergency plumbing — will not rank for any of those terms individually. Google wants a dedicated page for each significant service, and ideally a dedicated page for each city or major neighborhood you serve.

Run a Service Page Inventory

List every service your business offers. Then list every page on your website. Match them up. For every service that doesn't have its own page, you have a content gap. Common missing pages we see on plumbing sites include:

• Water heater installation vs. water heater repair (these are different searches)
• Sewer line repair and replacement
• Hydro jetting
• Gas line services
• Backflow testing and prevention
• Emergency plumbing (this search has high commercial intent and deserves its own page)

Location Page Audit

If you serve multiple cities, each city needs its own page. 'Plumber in [City]' is a distinct search from your homepage. A location page needs to be genuinely useful — service descriptions specific to that area, local landmarks or context where relevant, a local phone number if you have one, and ideally some reviews from customers in that area.

Thin location pages (pages that are essentially copies of each other with the city name swapped) can do more harm than good. If you can't write meaningfully differentiated content for a location, consider whether a properly optimized Google Business Profile service area entry is sufficient for now, and save the dedicated page for your highest-priority markets.

Assess Existing Page Quality

For pages that exist, review: Does each page have a clear, keyword-relevant title tag and H1? Is there enough content for Google to understand what the page is about — generally at least 300 words of useful information? Does the page include a clear call to action (phone number, contact form)?

The plumbers ranking above you in your market aren't there by accident. Competitor analysis tells you what the market is currently rewarding — and gives you a concrete improvement roadmap rather than a generic SEO checklist.

Identify Your Real Competitors

Search Google for your two or three most important services in your primary city (e.g., 'emergency plumber [city]', 'water heater installation [city]'). The businesses ranking in the Map Pack and the top five organic results are your actual SEO competitors — not necessarily the businesses you think of as competitors in the market.

What to Compare

For each top-ranking competitor, note:

• Review count and rating: How many Google reviews do they have? How recent are the most recent reviews? This is often the single biggest gap for challengers.
• Number of indexed pages: Search 'site:[competitordomain].com' in Google to get a rough page count. A competitor with 60 pages versus your 12 has content coverage you don't.
• Backlink profile: Use a free tool like Ahrefs' free backlink checker or Moz's Link Explorer to see which sites link to your competitors. Local news coverage, chamber memberships, and supplier pages are common link sources for plumbing businesses.
• Google Business Profile completeness: Look at their photos, post frequency, service descriptions, and Q&A section.

You're not trying to copy competitors — you're identifying the gap between your current state and what the market requires to rank. In some markets, the gap is small and addressable in a few months. In competitive metros, the gap may be significant enough that doing this work without professional support will extend your timeline considerably.

Once you've completed all four layers, you'll have a clear picture of your site's actual SEO health — and a prioritized list of what to fix first.

Not every audit finding requires hiring an agency. Some issues are genuinely straightforward to fix yourself. Others — particularly technical problems from site migrations, manual penalties, or competitive markets where you're starting from near zero — are better handled by someone who does this full time.

DIY-Friendly Fixes

• Updating your Google Business Profile categories, photos, and service descriptions
• Correcting NAP inconsistencies across major directories
• Adding or improving individual service pages where you already have a working website
• Setting up Google Search Console and reviewing the Coverage and Performance reports
• Requesting reviews from recent customers through a simple follow-up system

Red Flags That Signal You Need Professional Help

• Manual penalty in Search Console: These require a structured reconsideration request after fixing the underlying issue. Getting this wrong extends your penalty period.
• Traffic drop after a site migration or redesign: Redirect chains, missing pages, and canonical errors from migrations are technical problems that compound quickly.
• Highly competitive market with established players: In dense metro areas, the gap between where you are and where you need to be may require sustained, strategic effort — link acquisition, PR, content production — that's hard to do part-time while running a plumbing business.
• Negative SEO or suspicious link patterns: If a competitor (or a bad past vendor) has pointed spammy links at your site, cleaning that up requires disavow work and ongoing monitoring.

The audit itself is something most business owners can complete. Acting on what it reveals — especially the technical and competitive layers — is where a professional will save you time and prevent mistakes. If your audit reveals significant gaps across multiple layers, a professional assessment will give you a sequenced plan rather than a pile of to-dos. You can let experts audit and fix your plumbing SEO if the findings are beyond what makes sense to tackle alone.