A water heater quits at nine on a weeknight. The person it quit on opens Google on a phone, looks at the plumbers that come up, and calls one or two. Which plumbers those are was settled long before that search, by details nobody at the company has looked at in years.
Most advice written for plumbing companies is a playbook: pick keywords, build a page for every town, collect links. We did something plainer. We ran the same homepage check on every plumber in one city and counted what came back.
How we picked the sites
On September 21 we searched Google Maps for plumbers in Honolulu. We took the open businesses with a website, five or more reviews, and a rating of 3.5 or better. That came to 16 companies.
Fourteen of the sites let the check run. Two refused the automated request, so they are out of every count here. Every number below is out of 14.
The checks are the ones our free audit runs on a homepage: title tag, description, headings, images, business markup, sitemap, analytics, and Google's PageSpeed test for phones. Here is the count of sites with each problem:
| What we checked | Sites with a problem |
|---|---|
| No analytics, nothing counts visitors | 10 of 14 |
| Title tag runs past where Google cuts it | 10 of 14 |
| Images missing alt text | 9 of 14 |
| Description missing or cut off | 7 of 14 |
| Main heading missing or duplicated | 6 of 14 |
| Phone speed score under 50 | 4 of 14 |
| Sitemap missing or silent for a year | 3 of 14 |
None of this is about the plumbing. A company can clear drains in this town for twenty years and still have a homepage Google cannot read properly.
Ten of the fourteen are not counting visitors
Ten of the 14 homepages carry no Google Analytics and no Tag Manager. Nothing on those pages counts who arrived, where from, or what happened next.
That is a worse share than the solar installers we checked a month earlier, where 8 of 15 had nothing. Different trade, same blind spot.
Analytics is free, and adding it changes nothing a visitor sees. Without it, the phone is the only meter, and whether last month was better than the one before is a guess.
One title tag ran to 694 characters
The title tag is the blue headline a searcher clicks in a result. All 14 sites have one, but 10 run longer than 60 characters, about where Google cuts a title to fit the screen.
The shortest we found is 24 characters. The longest is 694, which usually means menu or icon text leaked into the tag, so what a searcher sees is the first line of a jumble.
The description is the line under the headline. One site has none, so Google picks text off the page and shows that. Of the 13 that have one, 6 run past 160 characters, where it gets cut, and the longest is 333. Both lines are text somebody types once.
Nearly half the photos are blank to Google
The 14 homepages carry 437 images between them. 191 have no alt text, the short caption Google reads in place of a photo it cannot see. That is 44 percent.
Nine of the 14 sites have at least one blank image. The worst single homepage holds 161 images, and 81 of them say nothing to search.
A plumber's own job photos, the repipe, the clean install under a sink, are often the most convincing thing on the site. Without the caption, each one is a blank square to Google.
Headings, markup, and old dates
Two sites have no main heading, the single H1 that tells Google what the page is about. Four have more than one. Eight have exactly one, which is what Google expects.
Business markup is the code that states plumber, this address, these hours, in the format Google reads. Here the trade does well: only one site has none.
One site has no sitemap, the file that lists which pages exist so Google can find them. Among the rest, the newest date inside ranges from January 2025 to September 2026, and two sites have told Google about nothing new since last year or earlier. Two footers still show an old year: 2019 and 2024.
A median speed of 62, and a perfect score that is not
On Google's phone speed test the 14 sites scored from 36 to 99, with a median of 62. Four land under 50, the range Google's tool marks in red as poor. Most visitors arrive on a phone, often standing in a wet kitchen.
The spread is the useful part. Two sites scored 96 and 99, so a fast plumbing site in this city is clearly possible, while the slowest pair, at 36 and 37, load as if the customer has time to spare.
Seven of the sites run on WordPress, with one each on Squarespace, Duda, and Webflow. Nothing exotic. These are ordinary builders with ordinary fixes.
One number deserves a warning label. Google's own SEO check in the same tool gave 8 of the 14 sites a perfect 100, and every one of the 8 still has problems from this list, because that check does not look at analytics, alt text on every image, or business markup. A 100 there is not a clean bill of health.
What to do with this
Run the same check on your own site at the homepage check; the results show on screen and no email is asked for. If you want the whole thing looked at, every page, the Google listing, the reviews, the speed, and the competitors, there is the free audit, or a call.