One plumber in forty is on TikTok. Five in forty show a Checkatrade badge. Almost every one of them is on Facebook.
Most guides to digital marketing for plumbers list the channels and leave you to guess which ones matter. We took a different route: we looked at what 40 UK plumbing businesses are actually doing, then worked out where the gaps are. Some of the answers surprised us, and one of them contradicts the thing everybody says about plumbers and Checkatrade.
Four things, in rough order of how much work they do for a plumbing business: search, your website, social, and paid. Search and the website we have covered in detail already. This post is about the other two, and about where the real gaps sit once you can see what everyone else is doing.
On 2 August 2026 we rendered 40 UK plumber homepages in a mobile browser and recorded which channels each one links to or embeds. Same sample as our UK plumber website audit, collected from Google searches across nine cities.
Google Business Profile signals account for 32% of local pack ranking weight, the largest single category, according to Whitespark’s Local Search Ranking Factors survey published in November 2025. Reviews are second at 20%. On-page signals from your website are third at 15%. Between them that is more than two thirds of what decides whether you appear in the map.
Our website audit found the technical half of that is largely done. 100% of the sites were mobile-ready, 86% had schema markup, 95% offered one-tap contact. What was missing was the commercial half: only 49% showed a review, 30% mentioned price, and 14% showed a Gas Safe number.
So if you are deciding where to start, start there rather than here. Our local SEO for plumbers guide covers the map pack and our website design for plumbers guide covers the site itself. Social and paid are the layer on top, and they work better once the foundation holds.
82% of the plumbers we checked link to at least one social account, with a median of two platforms. Facebook leads at 80%, then Instagram at 38%, Twitter or X at 32%, LinkedIn at 25% and YouTube at 20%. TikTok appears on exactly one site out of forty.
Facebook is the default. TikTok is a single business out of forty.
Is TikTok worth your time as a plumber? Nobody can tell you from this data alone, and one site is too small a number to draw a conclusion from. What it does tell you is that the channel is uncontested by your competitors, which is a different and more useful fact.
The work also suits it. Plumbing is visual, it has before and after, and it has the small satisfying reveal of a problem being solved. That is the native format of the platform rather than something you would have to force.
This is the finding that surprised us most. Only 20% of the sites displayed any trade directory badge, and Checkatrade, the one everybody assumes plumbers live on, appeared on just 12%. Yell was on 8%. Rated People, MyBuilder and TrustATrader were each on a single site.
| Directory shown on the homepage | Sites | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Checkatrade | 5 | 12% |
| Yell | 3 | 8% |
| Rated People | 1 | 2% |
| MyBuilder | 1 | 2% |
| TrustATrader | 1 | 2% |
| Any of the above | 8 | 20% |
One caveat worth stating: a plumber can be a paying Checkatrade member without linking to it from their homepage. So this measures how visibly plumbers lean on directories, not how many belong to one.
Read it that way and it is still interesting. The businesses ranking on page one of Google for plumbing searches mostly do not put a directory badge on their own site. Whatever they are doing to win work, showing a Checkatrade logo is not the centre of it.
58% of the sites have a blog or news section. Only 15% ask for an email address anywhere on the homepage, and only 35% show a review widget. One site in forty has a live chat widget, and two have an online booking tool.
More than half publish content. One in seven does anything to keep a reader.
That pairing is the clearest waste in the whole dataset. Writing a blog post takes an hour or two. Adding a signup box takes ten minutes. Doing the first without the second means every visitor you earn leaves with no way for you to reach them again.
Not every plumbing business needs an email list. Emergency work is not a nurture-sequence business. But bathroom installs, boiler replacements and landlord contracts all involve people who research for weeks, and those are the jobs worth having.
Based on what carries ranking weight and what the sample shows is missing, this is the order we would work in.
32% of local pack ranking weight, the largest single category (Whitespark, November 2025). Free, and mostly a matter of filling fields in properly. Nothing else on this list returns as much for as little.
20% of ranking weight, and only 35% of the sites we checked show a review widget. This is the one item that helps your ranking and your conversion rate at the same time.
Your Gas Safe number, your reviews and a price. In our website audit, not one of 43 sites had all three. Fixing that puts you ahead of every competitor we looked at, and it costs nothing.
The median plumber is on two. Being on two badly is worse than being on one well. Facebook if your customers are older and local, Instagram or TikTok if the work photographs well and you want reach beyond people who already know you.
We couldn’t measure ad spend from a webpage, so we have no data on this one and won’t pretend otherwise. What we would say is that paying for clicks to a page with no reviews, no credentials and no price is buying traffic you are not equipped to convert.
Want This Done Rather Than Explained?
AI Takes Axion handles digital marketing for plumbers across the UK. Google Business Profile, reviews, the website, and the local SEO that ties them together. We start with whatever is costing you the most work, and we tell you which of these levers we are pulling.
See Our Plumber SEO Service →What does digital marketing for plumbers actually involve?
Four things: your Google Business Profile and local search, your website, social media, and paid advertising. Google Business Profile signals alone account for 32% of local pack ranking weight (Whitespark, November 2025), which is why it comes first for most plumbing businesses.
Which social media platform is best for a plumber?
80% of the UK plumbers we checked link to Facebook, 38% to Instagram and just 2% to TikTok. Facebook is where your competitors are. TikTok is where they aren’t, and plumbing work suits video. Pick one and do it properly rather than opening accounts everywhere.
Is Checkatrade worth it for plumbers?
We can’t answer that from website data, but we can say that only 12% of the plumbers ranking on page one of Google display a Checkatrade badge, and 80% show no trade directory at all. Membership may still pay for itself in direct enquiries. It clearly isn’t how these businesses win search visibility.
Should a plumber bother with a blog?
58% of the sites we checked have one, so it is already common. The gap is what happens next: only 15% ask for an email address. If you are going to write, add a signup box at the same time, or you are earning readers and then losing them.
The plumbers ranking on page one are not doing anything exotic. Most are on Facebook, half have a blog, and four in five don’t show a directory badge. There is no secret channel they have all found.
Which means the openings are the ordinary ones. Get the Google Business Profile right, collect reviews and put them on the page, show your Gas Safe number and a price, and pick one social platform you will actually keep up with. That is a fortnight of work, most of it free, and it would put you ahead of the forty businesses we looked at.
For the detail behind each of those, start with our SEO for plumbers guide, then the local SEO guide for the map pack and the website audit for what your competitors are missing.
Sources and method
AI Takes AxionAI-powered systems that help service businesses capture more leads, convert faster, and scale without the overhead.
