Gal Gazit from Plumbing & Heating Growth, looks at the actionable ways that heating engineers can win more boiler installs:
Every heating firm is really serving two different customers, and most only market to one of them. The first is the Friday evening emergency, no heat or no hot water, worth perhaps eighty pounds, who calls whoever answers first and forgets the name by Monday. The second is the homeowner planning a boiler replacement, worth three and a half thousand pounds or more, who spends two or three weeks reading, comparing and deciding before they contact anyone at all.
Almost every pound most firms spend on marketing is built for the first customer. The van signage, the twenty four hour promise, the paid search on emergency terms, all of it is optimised for speed because speed is what an emergency caller actually needs. The second customer, worth forty times as much, is mostly left to work things out on their own.
That matters more than it used to, because a growing share of that second customer’s decision now happens online and locally. The Boiler Upgrade Scheme has put heat pumps and boiler replacement firmly on homeowners’ minds, and the firms winning that work are rarely the ones spending the most on advertising. They are simply the ones who show up when a homeowner searches for a local installer, and who look credible once they’re found.
A Google Business Profile that only lists a phone number and a five star rating answers the emergency caller’s question, who can get here fastest, but it says little to the replacement buyer weighing up a five figure decision. What that buyer is really looking for is proof: reviews that mention installation work specifically rather than a generic callout, photos of finished jobs, and a sense of how the whole process works from quote to completion.
The firms doing this well are often similar in size and budget to their competitors. They’ve simply pointed their existing online presence at the customer who is planning rather than panicking. One north London firm, Flow Plus Plumbing, rebuilt a single page around installation work specifically, built around the questions a replacement buyer actually asks rather than a general list of services. Google Business Profile clicks rose 880 percent, impressions rose 1,226 percent, and the firm had four qualified installation enquiries in the first fortnight after the page went live. The underlying work stayed the same. What changed was that a buyer already searching locally could finally find proof of it before they picked up the phone.
Good local search fundamentals still matter most: a complete Google Business Profile, consistent details across directories, and reviews that actually get asked for. What sits on top of those fundamentals is often what decides whether a firm wins the eighty pound callout or the three and a half thousand pound installation, and for most firms that outcome is still down to luck rather than design.
