93% of Plumbing Company Websites Have No Plumber Schema Markup

Water is coming through the kitchen ceiling. The homeowner grabs a phone, searches for an emergency plumber, and calls one of the first companies Google shows. Plumbing calls are often urgent, and the searcher rarely scrolls far: the company that search engines understand best has the best chance of being that first call.

Search engines rely on a few basic signals to understand what a page is about: a page title, a short description, a main heading, a secure connection and schema markup, code that states in machine-readable terms that this is a plumbing company, which area it serves, its hours and its phone number. They cost almost nothing to add and help Google's results and its AI answers describe the company correctly.

Almost no plumbers use the most specific one. 93.4% of plumbing company websites don't use Plumber schema, the type made for their trade. On the other basics plumbing websites do better than most: 30.5% miss at least one of the four on their homepage, the fourth lowest rate of 15 industries, and the most common gap is a missing meta description.

In September 2026 we took 586 plumbing company websites listed on US Google Business Profiles and checked each homepage for four basics: a title tag, the page name shown as the blue link in search results; a meta description, the summary Google can show under that link; at least one H1 heading, the main headline on the page; and HTTPS, the secure connection shown by the padlock in a browser. A site fails the basic check if its homepage misses any of the four.

We also recorded whether the homepage title was too long to show in full on Google, whether any page on the site could not be added to Google's index, whether the site had an XML sitemap, the file that lists a site's pages for search engines, and which schema types each site used. Schema markup is code that states in machine-readable terms what a business is, where it is and what it does. We ran the same checks on websites in 15 industries, from accounting to HVAC, so each plumbing figure can be compared with the 15-industry average.

Schema.org, the shared vocabulary Google and other search engines read, has a type made for plumbing companies: Plumber. It lets a company state its name, service area, phone number and hours, including emergency hours, in a form search engines can use directly. Only 6.6% of plumbing company websites use it, about one in fifteen.

26.5% of plumbing company websites have no schema at all, below the 32.9% average across 15 industries, so most plumbers that add schema stop at the generic types a website builder or SEO plugin adds automatically. The most common are WebSite (on 58% of plumbing company websites), PostalAddress (32%), WebPage (31%) and SearchAction (30%). 29.7% use any local business type, the family of schema types that marks a site as a business with a location.

That is below the 37.9% average across 15 industries and the fourth lowest rate of the 15. The most common gap is a missing meta description, on 20.5% of plumbing company homepages, followed by a missing H1 heading on 18.3%. Both are below the industry averages of 23% and 24.5%.

One check runs the other way: 2.7% of plumbing company websites still don't use HTTPS, above the 2.2% average. A site without HTTPS shows a "not secure" warning in most browsers, which is enough to send an anxious homeowner back to the search results. 18.6% of plumbing company homepages have a title too long to show in full, 15% of plumbing websites have no XML sitemap, and 14.2% have at least one page Google cannot add to its index.

Across the 15 industries, the share of websites failing at least one basic check runs from 26% for HVAC companies to 53.1% for accounting firms. Plumbing companies, at 30.5%, sit just behind HVAC, roofing and dental, the other local service trades.

WordPress runs 43.3% of plumbing company websites, and plumbing sites on WordPress fail the basic checks 26.4% of the time, below the 30.5% for plumbing websites overall. WordPress SEO plugins fill in titles, descriptions and sitemaps by default, which likely helps.

Add Plumber schema to your homepage and service area pages with your company name, phone number, service area and hours, including emergency hours. It is the biggest gap on plumbing websites, fewer than one plumber in ten has it, and it helps Google and AI answers describe your company correctly when someone searches for a plumber nearby.

Then give each service page, such as drain cleaning, water heater repair and emergency plumbing, its own title with your city, a meta description and one H1. Make sure your site loads on HTTPS, your phone number is a tap-to-call link on every page, and your Google Business Profile links to the matching service page rather than only the homepage. Our plumber seo work starts with exactly these checks.

Embed this research

Cite this study