Shane Edwards Plumbing has a new website. Shane and his team have been plumbing in Ballarat since 2010: hot water, gas, drains, leak detection and emergency call-outs at any hour. The new site went live this week. We're proud of it, and of the partnership behind it, because this is the start of the work, not the end of it.
Why: a plumber's website has one job
Nobody browses plumbing websites for fun. The person on Shane's site has a blocked drain, a cold shower or water coming through the ceiling. They're on a phone, they're stressed, and they want two answers: can this business fix it, and how do I get them here?
Shane's previous site was a standard trades template. It covered the basics, but it read like every other plumbing site in town, and it gave Google and AI tools very little to say about him. Shane also told us which work he wants more of: general plumbing and repairs, blocked drains and hot water. So the new site is built around those jobs and around that person on the phone.
What we built
- A page for each job people actually search for. Four areas of work (plumbing, gasfitting, drainage and leak detection), each broken into the jobs underneath: hot water, heat pumps, blocked drains, drain camera inspections, burst pipes, a water bill that has suddenly jumped: nineteen job pages in all.
- The answer first, then the phone number. Every page opens with what to do right now. For a gas smell, the site tells you to ring the gas distributor on your bill first and the plumber once it's safe, because that's what Energy Safe Victoria advises. A plumber who tells you that is one you can trust with the rest.
- Booking in one tap. The phone number is on every screen. The booking form feeds straight into ServiceM8, the job system the team already runs on, and customers can attach a photo of the problem so the right parts come on the first visit.
- Local detail nobody else bothers with. Guides cover who owns the sewer pipe in Ballarat (Central Highlands Water looks after it up to the first inspection shaft on your property) and the 1 March 2027 gas hot water rule, with sources and dates.
- Proof you can check. Shane's licence number sits at the top of every page, with his licences and certificates on their own page, along with a six-year workmanship guarantee and his Master Plumbers membership. There are no testimonials on the site yet, because we don't write them. They'll come from Shane's customers as Google reviews.
How we built it
It started with Shane, not a template. A discovery questionnaire covered what the team does, what it doesn't, where it works and how jobs are priced. Then came research: the local plumbing sites that already rank, the questions Ballarat people type into Google, and the rules that apply to plumbing advertising in Victoria. Plumbing and gasfitting are regulated trades, so every claim on the site has a source. Where we couldn't confirm something, it stayed off the page.
The build itself is WordPress, so Shane's team can make changes themselves later. It's designed for a phone first:
- Text follows the reader's own browser size setting.
- Pages don't jump around while they load. On a slow mobile connection we measured the layout shift drop from 0.25 to 0.02.
- Images were compressed to a fraction of their original weight.
Photos of the team's real jobs are going in as they come through, replacing the placeholders we built with.
Around the site, we moved the site to new hosting without touching the business email. We also brought Shane's Google Business Profile and Facebook page into line with the new site.
Built to be found, by Google and by AI
More people now ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Google's AI answers to recommend a plumber, and those tools favour sources that answer plainly, early and with facts they can check. That's exactly how the site is written. Each page states its answer up front, the guides name and date their sources, and structured data tells search engines the business, its phone number and the area it works in. More on how AI tools choose who to recommend →
There's no "calls up 40%" figure in this post. The site has only just launched, and the honest numbers take a few months. From here we look after the site and keep working on getting Shane found, and we'll judge it on the calls and bookings it brings in.
Run a trade business? Ask your website four questions
- On a phone, is your number visible on every screen without scrolling?
- Does each job you want more of have its own page, in the words your customers use?
- Can someone book you without ringing during business hours?
- Does your site say anything that only your business could say?
If you answered no to any of them, that's work worth doing. It's the same work we did for Shane. We're in Ballarat, we build and host sites for trades across regional Victoria, and we're happy to look at yours first. Run a free website check →
Run a trade business and want to be easier to find?
Web design in Ballarat →