These guides are for plumbing company owners who want to understand what good marketing looks like, even if they never hire us. Each covers one decision that shapes everything else: who to hire, how to cover your service area honestly, and which number to judge it all by. They're written from the work we do in local search, paid search and websites, and they link to official sources where rules come into it.
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Cost per booked job: the one number to run plumbing marketing on
Cost per booked job is total marketing cost for a channel divided by the jobs it put on your schedule. It's the only number that lets you compare Google Ads, Local Services Ads, SEO and reviews fairly.
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How to hire a plumbing marketing agency in Canada
Hire the agency that will measure booked jobs, build everything in your name and say no to shortcuts. This guide gives you the questions to ask, the contract terms to check and the red flags to walk away from.
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Service-area pages that rank without becoming doorway pages
A service-area page earns its place when it tells someone in that town something true and useful they wouldn't get from your home page. If you can't write that, the town belongs in a list, not on its own page.
Cost per booked job: the one number to run on
What it teaches: how to calculate what each booked job costs you, by channel and by job type. It includes a worked example showing why the cheapest-looking channel isn't always the most profitable once gross profit is added.
Who it's for: any owner who has paid for ads or SEO and couldn't tell whether it worked.
What you'll do after reading: start tagging every call as booked, not booked, existing customer or spam. Read the guide.
Service-area pages without doorway risk
What it teaches: how many area pages to build, what makes each one genuinely local, and where Google's spam policies draw the line on doorway pages. It includes a planning worksheet for each candidate town.
Who it's for: owners who serve several towns and want to rank in more of them, or who've been sold "100 city pages" and want to know if that's wise.
What you'll do after reading: list the towns you've done jobs in over the last year and fill in the worksheet for your top five. Read the guide.
How to hire a plumbing marketing agency in Canada
What it teaches: the ten questions to ask in a first meeting, the contract terms to check, and the red flags, such as ranking promises, review gating and agency-owned accounts, that predict a bad experience.
Who it's for: owners comparing agencies, or wondering whether their current one is doing right by them.
What you'll do after reading: check that you have admin access to your domain, profile and ad accounts. Read the guide.
How to use these guides
Read them in this order if you're starting from scratch:
- Cost per booked job first, because it gives you the yardstick.
- Hiring an agency next, so you know what to ask for.
- Service-area pages last, once the basics are tracked and the right people are running them.
If you already work with an agency, use the hiring guide's questions as a health check on the relationship. The answers to "who owns the accounts?" and "how do you measure success?" tell you a lot.
Who writes them
The guides are written by the Plumbing.Agency team and reviewed by Ali Sedighi, MBA, who has 17+ years in digital marketing and built 150+ live HVAC websites. They're dated and updated when platforms or rules change. Where a guide cites a rule or policy, it links the official page and the date we checked it, so you can confirm it yourself.
What the guides deliberately leave out
We keep these focused on marketing decisions, so a few topics sit elsewhere. They don't cover:
- Code, permits or licensing. We link regulators but never interpret their rules. The areas hub links the official bodies in each province and territory.
- Pricing your services or hiring techs. Those are owner-level business questions; plumber.consulting covers them.
- Missed-call text-back and AI texting. Our sister practice plumber.chat specialises in that.
Questions about something you read
Did a guide raise a question about your own company? Call, text or email us. A short text with the guide's name and your question is plenty. You can also see how we apply these ideas on the pricing page and in the results from our HVAC work.
Frequently asked questions
Are these guides free to use?
Yes. Read them, share them with your office manager or use them to check another agency's proposal. No sign-up needed.
Will you add more guides?
Probably, on topics owners keep asking about, such as Local Services Ads readiness and water heater campaign planning. We add a guide only when we have something genuinely useful to say.
Do the guides give legal or code advice?
No. Where a guide mentions a regulator or rule, it links the official source. Questions about your own obligations go to the regulator, your lawyer or your accountant.