Article summary
Found on Google, Lost on the Quote
A summary of Gal Gazit's article on why most heating firms are built for the customer who panics and invisible to the customer who plans.
Read the full article on Together We CountThe two customers every heating firm serves
Every heating firm hears from two very different customers in the same month. One has a boiler that has stopped working and wants an engineer within hours. The other has spent around three weeks deciding to replace a boiler, perhaps looking at a heat pump too, comparing firms and working out what they are willing to pay. The second call is worth far more, yet most firms build their marketing around the first.
Why the researching customer cannot find you
A homeowner in research mode looks for installation pricing, a plain explanation of grants, photographs of finished work and reviews that read like proof. Many heating websites were built years ago to answer one question, who can fix my boiler today. A firm whose reviews describe the actual job gets found by the researcher, and firms with generic praise get skipped without ever knowing it.
AI search raises the stakes
Homeowners now ask AI tools which local heating firm to use and receive a single recommendation, assembled from Google Business Profiles, reviews and website content. A firm that is invisible to a person doing research is invisible to the AI doing it on their behalf, so the two problems now compound each other.
What happened when one firm fixed it
Flow Plus Plumbing, a family run firm in north London, rebuilt its Google Business Profile around installation work, replaced generic reviews with ones that named the job and rewrote its website for the researching customer. In the first fortnight its profile clicks rose by 183 per cent, impressions rose by 202 per cent and it received four qualified installation enquiries, all of them installation work rather than breakdowns.
Being ready when the phone rings
Getting found is half the job. The article also looks at how quickly firms respond, drawing on a 2011 Harvard Business Review study of 2,241 companies which found that firms replying within an hour were far more likely to qualify a lead. That research covered business sales rather than homeowners buying boilers, so the useful part is the direction, which matches what firm owners describe.
Key takeaways
- Market to the homeowner who researches as well as the one who panics
- Make your Google Business Profile and your reviews describe installation work
- Reply to every enquiry quickly
What it looks like in practice
Flow Plus Plumbing is a family run Gas Safe firm in north London. In its first month working with us it received 17 homeowner enquiries and booked 10 jobs, and the owner had their first leads within 24 hours. Every area is different, so we start by looking at how homeowners search for boiler installers in your patch.
See how this would work for your firm
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