Plumbing Keywords: The UK List, With Volumes and Value

Every plumbing keyword list I could find online is the same twenty phrases with no numbers attached. This one has the numbers, and a note on what each search is actually worth.

All figures below are UK Google Ads data pulled on 8 September 2026, quoting the most recent complete month (July 2026). I’ve flagged where a term swings hard with the seasons, because in this trade most of them do.

If you want the strategy that sits behind the list, my full guide to SEO for plumbers covers how the pages fit together. This page is the raw material.

The plumbing keyword list

Keyword	UK searches a month	Top-of-page bid	January volume
plumbers near me	90,500	£13.59	110,000
drain unblocking	22,200	£19.78	33,100
emergency plumber	9,900	£35.41	12,100
boiler service	9,900	£18.72	22,200
gas engineer	6,600	£15.04	9,900
new boiler	4,400	£17.76	14,800
blocked drain	3,600	£25.45	6,600
boiler repair	2,400	£17.27	6,600
boiler installation	2,400	£24.96	5,400
leak detection	2,400	£48.84	2,900
shower installation	1,000	£8.21	1,300
power flush	880	£8.63	3,600
bathroom fitting	720	£7.01	1,300
combi boiler installation	720	£24.96	1,900
toilet repair	720	£12.42	880
radiator installation	590	£7.52	1,300
burst pipe	480	£17.20	1,900
underfloor heating installation	480	£6.67	1,300
central heating installation	320	£6.97	1,300
tap replacement	320	£5.21	390

“Top-of-page bid” is the high end of what advertisers currently pay for one click on that search. It is the closest public proxy there is for what a plumbing business thinks that enquiry is worth.

The nine times spread

Leak detection: £48.84 a click. Tap replacement: £5.21.

Both are plumbing. One is a specialist call-out with kit most firms do not own, often paid for by an insurer. The other is twenty minutes and a washer.

That gap is the single most useful thing in the table, because it is entirely within your control. You choose which pages you build, and the pages you build decide which of those two jobs Google sends you.

Most plumbers never make the choice. They have a homepage, a Services page and a Contact page, and they take whatever comes.

The winter cluster and the flat cluster

Look down the January column and the trade splits in two.

The winter cluster swings hard. “New boiler” more than triples from 4,400 in July to 14,800 in January. “Power flush” goes from 880 to 3,600, “burst pipe” from 480 to 1,900, “central heating installation” from 320 to 1,300. Boilers, heating and frozen pipes: all of it arrives at once when the weather turns.

The flat cluster barely notices. “Drain unblocking” moves from 22,200 to 33,100, which is a rise but not a cliff. “Tap replacement” sits at 320 in July and 390 in January. “Leak detection” and “toilet repair” hold steady all year.

That matters for how you sequence the work. Rankings take three to six months, so a boiler page started in November has missed the season it was built for. Start the winter pages in summer.

And if you need work in July, the drain and leak pages are the ones that pay in the quiet months. Most plumbers build the boiler page first because winter is when they feel the need, which is exactly the wrong order.

The near-me terms are not a page

“Plumbers near me” at 90,500 searches a month is the biggest number on this list by a mile, and you cannot win it with a page.

That search returns a map pack: three businesses shown under a map, pulled from Google Business Profiles. Nothing on your website decides who appears there. Writing a page called “plumbers near me” is a waste of an afternoon.

What decides it is a finished profile with the right primary category, service areas that match where you actually go, real photos of your own work, and reviews arriving steadily rather than in one old burst.

The same is true of “emergency plumber” for most searchers, since Google reads local intent into it whether or not the person typed a town.

The keywords that deserve their own page

Six pages cover most of the money in that table.

1. Emergency plumber. £35.41 a click tells you what the market thinks an emergency enquiry is worth. Put your response time and your call-out charge on it, plainly.
2. Drain unblocking and blocked drains. 25,800 searches a month between them, and it holds up in summer. Cover both phrases on one page; people use them interchangeably.
3. Boiler installation and new boilers. “New boiler” is what customers type, “boiler installation” is what you call it. The page needs both, plus a real price range.
4. Leak detection. The highest-value click in the trade. If you own the kit, this page earns more per visitor than anything else you will write.
5. Boiler service and repair. Lower value per job, but the way you get a customer for the next fifteen years. Say what a service includes and what it costs.
6. Bathroom fitting. Long sales cycle, big job value. Needs photographs of your own bathrooms rather than manufacturer stock shots.

Each page wants a genuine answer to what it costs, what it involves and how long it takes. Those are the specifics that get lifted into AI answers, and the pages that just say “call for a free quote” get skipped.

The ones I would leave

Not everything in a keyword list is worth chasing.

“Tap replacement” at £5.21 a click and 320 searches is the cheapest work in the trade to win and the cheapest to do. Cover it in a line on your general plumbing page and move on.

“Underfloor heating installation” looks tempting at 480 searches, but that market is dominated by the system manufacturers and the flooring trade. You will spend months on it for enquiries that mostly want a product, not a plumber.

And avoid the generic single words. “Plumber” and “plumbing” carry enormous volume and almost no intent. Somebody typing “plumbing” might be a homeowner with a leak, a student doing coursework or a merchant looking for stock.

Turning the list into pages

Take the six pages above and check which ones you already have. Not mentions on a Services page, actual pages with their own URL.

Most plumbers I audit have none of them. That is the gap, and it is why a plumbing website with fifteen services listed on one page loses to a competitor who wrote 800 words about drains.

Then add your town to each one, properly rather than by find-and-replace. My guide to location page SEO covers how to do that without producing fifteen thin copies of the same page, and the plumber website SEO fixes post covers what else tends to be broken on the site itself.

One more thing worth weighing against all of this. Directory platforms sell plumbing leads at £5 to £35 a shot, shared with three to five other trades, and I track every published price in the UK trade lead cost tracker. My guide to plumbing leads in the UK runs the cost-per-won-job maths on all five platforms. A leak detection page you write once, that ranks for years, competes with a £48.84 click and an ongoing subscription. That is the trade you are actually making.

Want to know which of these keywords you already rank for? I audit trade businesses’ local visibility for free: a grid showing where you sit across your area, who is above you, and the three changes worth making first. See where you rank and I’ll run yours.