This is NOT a Pimlico Plumbers Review per se, it’s a review of the Pimlico Plumbers website from a search engine optimisation and branding perspective.
Basically a business website review which will be of interest to the London based Pimlico Plumbers, their competitors (other London plumbers) and those interested in learning SEO.
Trustpilot Pimlico Plumbers Reviews
But first, for visitors looking for actual Pimlico Plumber reviews I suggest you checkout Pimlico on review websites like Trustpilot.
You can see from the screenshot from January 2020, Pimlico have closing on 5,000 Trustpilot reviews with an overall excellent rating.
- Excellent – 83%
- Great – 11%
- Average – 1%
- Poor – 1%
- Bad – 4%
Now I’ve got that out of the way, the main reason for the Pimlico Plumbers website review is part of an advanced plumber SEO test, I’m in the process of creating a new full SEO webdesign service for plumbers and electricians, I need plumbing relevant content to test with.
Before completely reinventing my SEO business I need to know if I can rank content on a new website for Pimlico Plumbers Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs): not much point starting an SEO website design service which doesn’t work. This article is on a new sub-domain (created January 2020), Google treats sub-domains like newly registered websites, I’m using a sub-domain rather than a new domain because I’m cheap.
Who are Pimlico Plumbers
Pimlico Plumbers Ltd (company number 02012715) are a London based plumbing business established in 1979 by the current managing director Charlie Mullins. Their last financial statement for the year ending May 2018 shows a profit just shy of £3.4M from a turnover of almost £43.4M: that’s a lot of blocked London toilets!
A solid profitable UK business employing over 440 workers.
Pimlico Plumbers SERPs
I’m being a little cheeky with the title tag of this article, really should be something like “Pimlico Plumbers Website SEO Review”, BUT I really want to test the difficulty of the “Pimlico Plumbers Reviews” SERPs, so what the hell hey.
I’m targeting Pimlicos SERPs, they are likely to be some of the harder brand relevant UK plumbing SERPs to acquire since Pimlico is a well known brand. Top 10 keyphrases below.
Keyword – Search Volume
- Pimlico Plumbers – 14800
- Pimlico Plumbers Owner – 720
- Pimlico Plumbers Brexit – 590
- Pimlico Plumbers Jobs – 590
- Pimlico Plumbers Reviews – 390
- Pimlico Plumbers Apprenticeship – 210
- Pimlico Plumbers Case – 210
- Pimlico Plumbers Rates – 210
- Pimlico Plumbers V Smith – 210
- Pimlico Plumbers 1 Sail St Lambeth London SE11 6NQ UK – 140
To target these and other Pimlico SERPs I’d ideally create at least a dozen articles, but this is just a plumber SEO test, so we will see what we can achieve with one WordPress Post and a handful of WordPress Image Attachment Pages.
From a competitor London Plumber perspective there’s enough Google traffic here to run a successful business IF you can convince potential Pimlico customers to use your service.
Let’s get to the website review.
Pimlico Plumbers Website SEO Review
I started the Pimlico website review on January 26th 2020, one of the first things I noticed after visiting the Pimlico site was the main top Pimlico Plumbers logo still had the 2019 date! See the Pimlico website screenshot from January 26th 2020.
Considering this is a business with over 440 employees, you’d think one of them might have noticed the wrong date and informed the boss or something. It’s a 10 minute task to boot up Paintshop Pro or similar, load the logo template file, change the date from 1979-2019 to 1979-2020 (I suppose we should change years in service from 40 to to 41 as well) and upload the new image via FTP.
It has no impact on SEO or how the website works, but brand wise I think it’s important. That image should have been updated on January 1st, it suggests the person responsible doesn’t care, someone dropped the ball.
Let’s look at some real SEO issues.
A quick scan over the homepage and layout wise it’s not too bad, most of the basic elements are there. The phone number is clear and above the fold, the address is shown, we have an about page and contact page, there’s a search feature, link to services, link to rates etc… there’s no Google maps integration and it’s not clear where in the UK Pimlico cover.
London Plumbers
The main business area covered is lacking, might sound obvious, but if you want a webpage to rank in Google for London Plumbers, actually include the phrase London Plumbers multiple times. I’ve used the phrase London Plumbers more times in this one paragraph than the entire Pimlico homepage does!
- As text (shown in a browser) the phrase London Plumbers isn’t used once!
- In the HTML source code the phrase London Plumbers isn’t used once!
- As text the keyword London is used 3 times, of which Google uses 3 as a ranking factor!
- In the HTML source code the keyword London is used 9 times, of which Google uses 4 as a ranking factor!
- As text the keyword Plumbers is used 3 times, of which Google uses 3 as a ranking factor!
- In the HTML source code the keyword Plumbers is used 36 times, of which Google uses 3 as a ranking factor!
Think about that for a moment, what would happen if the Pimlico homepage was actually optimised for this phrase like I’ve optimised this webpage to rank for SERPs related to Pimlico Plumbers Reviews?
Pimlico clearly lack employees with basic SEO copyrighting skills, there’s very little onpage SEO.
What Does the Pimlico Homepage Target?
Based on the links in the top menu these are the important services offered by Pimlico and in the order below:
Pimlico Plumbers Services
- Plumbing
- Heating
- Drains
- Bathrooms
- Electrics
- Appliances
- Carpentry
- Air Con
- Roofing
- Building
- Commercial
Based on the images, they also care a lot about selling extended warranties on Ideal and Vaillant boilers.
You can learn a lot about a businesses priorities by what they have on the homepage and how it’s organised.
In onpage SEO terms the SEO isn’t great, the onpage keyword targeting is poor.
Below is the homepage title tag:
<title>Pimlico | London's Leading Service & Maintenance Company | 1 Hour Response | 24/7/365 | Pimlico Plumbers</title>
SEO wise this is a poorly structured title tag, title tags should ideally target one main SERP whilst providing enough information for visitors to want to click a Google search result.
Search Google for Pimlico Plumbers and look at the title of the first result (it’s Pimlico Plumbers homepage). Google doesn’t always use a webpages title tag (see the title tag above) and here Google has chosen it’s own title.
Pimlico Plumbers: Pimlico | London’s Leading Service…
Does that title scream click me, I’ll provide what you are looking for?
Google have taken the brand name Pimlico Plumbers and appended it to the START of the actual title tag and since Google truncates long titles, it’s cut the title after London’s Leading Service.
The result is a poor Google title, for starters “London’s Leading Service” isn’t a SERP worth targeting on the homepage (has no traffic) and isn’t specific enough to mean anything. “London’s Leading Service” could cover anything from escorts, financial services, food delivery, property maintenance services etc…
This part of the title tag “& Maintenance Company | 1 Hour Response | 24/7/365” is pointless, Google doesn’t show it on SERPs and you have to hoverover the title tag area in a browser window (Firefox or Chrome) to even see it as a hoverover browser title.
After looking through the site I think I get it, Pimlico see themselves like an emergency service similar to the police, fire and ambulance services. ‘Pimlico, London’s 4th Emergency Service’, I wonder if they have seen the AA’s “The 4th Emergency Service” branding campaign and liked it?
A much better homepage title tag would be something like:
<title>Pimlico Plumbers: 24 Hour London Emergency Plumbers</title>
Or if they are smart an even better title tag is:
<title>Pimlico Plumbers London</title>
The reason this is better is they don’t really need to do much for Pimlico SERPs, it’s their brand name, but the keywords Plumbers and London are competitive.
In simple terms if you want to rank for a competitive SERP like Plumbers London the best title tag for the homepage is “Plumbers London”, BUT it makes sense to include the brand name, so “Pimlico Plumbers London” is probably the best homepage title tag.
Currently Pimlico rank number 3 in Google organic search results for “Plumbers London”, by changing the title tag from the current mess of around 12 words to “Pimlico Plumbers London”, just 3 keywords, means each keyword receives 4 times the current title tag SEO benefit.
This single change could push the Pimlico homepage from number 3 to number 1 in Google and it probably won’t cost any other SERPs. Ideally current homepage SERPs would be analysed first, see what traffic the homepage currently generates related to the current homepage title tag and if it’s valuable and worth maintaining.
Other please ‘click me, I’m a great result’ information can be covered by the meta description tag. The current Pimlico homepage meta description tag is keyword list like, not ideal:
<meta name="description" content="Pimlico. Emergency Plumbers London. 24 Hours a Day, 7 Days a Week, 365 Days a Year. Plumbers, Heating Engineers, Electricians, Roofers, Carpenters, and Builders all over London.">
It’s too long and truncated by Google to:
Pimlico. Emergency Plumbers London. 24 Hours a Day, 7 Days a Week, 365 Days a Year. Plumbers, Heating Engineers, Electricians, Roofers, Carpenters, and …
Needs work to turn it more into a compelling ad vs the current keyword list and dates they are open. There’s shorter ways to say you are open all the time.
Pimlico Plumbers hasn’t claimed their Google knowledge panel.
The data is out of date. They have over 440 employees and turnover in 2018 was over £40M.
Work in progress….
David Law
Website - SEO Gold
