"Plumber near me" gets 90,500 searches a month on Google UK and "heating engineer near me" 9,900, with an ad click on the first costing £8.09. In June 2026 "air conditioning installation" reached 60,500 searches, four times its monthly average. On these searches the first thing a homeowner sees is a row of directories: Checkatrade, TrustATrader, Yell, Rated People, Bark. Checkatrade alone ranks for 187,698 UK keywords, with about 2.5 million estimated organic visits a month according to DataForSEO.
A heating engineer won't beat the directories on generic searches: the wins are on searches that contain a service, a brand and a town, and they have to be won twice a year with different pages, one set for winter and one for summer.
Below are the search calendar, what boiler and air con brands are worth, what's actually on the first page in Manchester and London, and why a price on the page brings better customers.
Boilers and air conditioning are two markets with two calendars
Anyone who installs and repairs heating and cooling works across two opposite seasons, and the searches show it clearly. "Boiler service" averages 14,800 searches a month, climbs to 27,100 in September and October and drops to 8,100 in May. "Air conditioning installation" runs the other way: 14,800 on average, 60,500 in June, 3,600 in December.
The table lists the most useful service searches for an installer, with the peak and low months of the last twelve and the average cost of a click. You can check the same curve on Google Trends by comparing five years.
| Keyword | Average searches/month | Peak | Low | Average CPC |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| boiler service | 14,800 | 27,100 (Sep, Oct) | 8,100 (May) | £8.68 |
| boiler repair | 5,400 | 9,900 (Oct) | 2,400 (Jun, Jul) | £9.99 |
| heating engineer near me | 9,900 | 18,100 (Oct) | 4,400 (May-Jul) | £3.45 |
| emergency boiler repair | 1,900 | 4,400 (Dec, Jan) | 480 (Jul) | £13.54 |
| air conditioning installation | 14,800 | 60,500 (Jun) | 3,600 (Dec) | £3.17 |
| air conditioning installers near me | 8,100 | 33,100 (Jun) | 1,300 (Dec) | £3.00 |
| air conditioning service | 5,400 | 9,900 (Jun) | 2,400 (Feb) | £3.31 |
| air conditioning engineer | 880 | 1,600 (Jun) | 480 (Apr) | £3.35 |
Two details change the plan for the year. First, summer demand explodes within a few weeks. "Air conditioning installation" goes from 5,400 searches in April to 22,200 in May and 60,500 in June, and "air conditioning installers near me" from 2,900 to 33,100 over the same months. So the page needs to be indexed and ranking by March, not when the phone starts ringing. Second, emergency work is expensive to buy. A click on "emergency boiler repair" costs £13.54, more than four times "air conditioning installation", because someone whose boiler has packed up in December calls the first person who answers.
For a firm that does both, it pays to have two separate groups of pages, each with its own season, and to change what you put first on the homepage and on your Google Business Profile when the month changes: posts, photos and featured services.
Boiler brands add up to more than half of "boiler service"
Plenty of people don't search for "heating engineer". They search for the brand on the boiler. "Vaillant boiler service" gets 2,900 searches a month and reaches 4,400 between September and November. "Baxi boiler service" gets 1,900, "Ideal boiler service" 1,300 at £2.05 a click, and Worcester Bosch is searched two ways, "worcester boiler service" (1,300) and "worcester bosch boiler service" (1,000). Repairs follow the same pattern on a smaller scale: "vaillant boiler repair" gets 590 searches at £6.44 a click.
Added together, service searches for four boiler brands come to 8,400 a month, more than half of the 14,800 for "boiler service". Air conditioning works differently: "daikin air conditioning" and "mitsubishi air conditioning" get 9,900 each, but "daikin air conditioning service" gets 90 and the Mitsubishi equivalent 50. Those are people shopping for a unit, so on air con the brand belongs on the installation page. Installers already do it: in London, South London Heating's snippet reads "Mitsubishi and Daikin systems fitted by F-Gas qualified engineers".
The right move is one page for each brand you can actually repair, with the town, the models you work on, parts and, if you have it, proof that you're on the manufacturer's accredited installer scheme. The wrong move is adding the brand to your Google Business Profile name when it isn't part of your trading name. Google Business Profile guidelines say "Your name should reflect your business' real-world name", and one report from a competitor is enough to get it changed.
In Manchester and London, under 100 reviews can get you into the map
We read the first page for "boiler service manchester" on a smartphone, with the location set to Manchester, on 10 October 2026. In order:
- a "Find results on" row with five directories: TrustATrader, Checkatrade, Yell, Rated People and a Facebook group;
- the local pack with A+R Central Heating (4.9 stars, 1,600 reviews), Didsbury Boiler Service (5.0 and 85) and Manchester Plumbing and Heating in Sale (5.0 and 293);
- a block of four questions, starting with "How much is it to have your boiler serviced?" and "Which is better, HomeServe or British Gas?";
- TrustATrader as the first organic result, then 24|7 Home Rescue with "Same-Day Booking" in the title;
- then real firms' sites (JB Heating with 4.8 stars from 1,751 reviews in the snippet, Lacey Plumbing & Heating with a boiler servicing page for Manchester, Boilerable, MCR Gas), mixed in with Checkatrade twice, "£82 to £148" for Middleton and "£86 to £162" for emergency repairs, a Facebook community group post and TrustATrader again.
On "air conditioning installation london" the map has three listings: London Air Con with 4.9 stars and 36 reviews, Be Cool Refrigeration & Air-conditioning with 4.8 and 171, and Thermacool Services with 4.7 and 47. Below come an AI Overview, a Reddit thread from July 2026 asking for installer recommendations, Checkatrade as the first organic result with "£607 to £1,255" in the snippet and Airtasker with prices "from £50".
So the bar for getting into the local pack in a big UK city, in this trade, is lower than you'd expect: 85 reviews for boiler servicing in Manchester and 36 for air con in London, with ratings from 4.7 up. The leader in Manchester, though, has 1,600. The mechanism is the same everywhere: firms that ask for a review after every job they close build them up in one season, and firms that wait for reviews to arrive on their own stay stuck for years.
How to create a direct link for asking customers for a Google review: a video by Mariah Magazine, just under four minutes.
A price on the page filters your customers
On the national results for "boiler service cost" there's an AI Overview at the top, and all eight organic results put a figure in the snippet. Most belong to small heating firms: A&C Heating and Plumbing in London ("between £70 and £130"), Plumbusters in Kent ("£75 at the budget end up to £120"), Hewer in Gloucester ("between £60 and £150"), Emergency Repairs London ("£80–£130"). The related questions on both city searches start from cost: "How much is it to have your boiler serviced?" in Manchester, "How much does it cost to install an aircon unit in the UK?" in London.
The volumes confirm it. "Boiler service cost" gets 5,400 searches on average and 8,100 in September and October, "new boiler cost" 8,100 with a peak of 12,100, "air conditioning installation cost" 5,400 on average and 27,100 in June, "heat pump installation cost" 1,900. These searches come from people who have already decided to spend and are choosing who gets the job.
A service page that answers well contains four things: a realistic price range, what's included (removing the old unit, brackets, length of pipe run, Gas Safe registration for boilers and F-Gas certification for air conditioning), response times and the area covered. A homeowner who reads "from £800 for a single bedroom" and was hoping to spend a few hundred pounds doesn't call, and the engineer doesn't lose a visit to a quote that was never going to close.
Heat pumps need a section of their own. "Air source heat pump" gets 33,100 searches a month, many of them from people still working things out: running costs, the grant, whether it will work with the radiators they already have. That's where a blog with technical content written by people who install them can sit on page one next to the manufacturers, and each article becomes a way into the "heat pump installation [town]" page. "Heat pump installation" gets 2,900 searches nationally at £13.04 a click.
Recommended reading: our guide to local SEO, with the factors that decide who gets into the map. If you also take on full renovations, SEO for construction companies is worth reading.
Frequently asked questions
It depends on the town and how many areas you want to cover. For a firm working across one county, the first stage covers the Google Business Profile, pages for each service and each brand, and collecting reviews; a comparison of real market prices is in our guide to what SEO costs.
By March. "Air conditioning installation" goes from 5,400 searches in April to 22,200 in May and 60,500 in June: a new page needs a few weeks to rank.
Only if it's part of your real trading name. Google Business Profile guidelines don't allow unnecessary information in the name, such as keywords or services; the brand goes on your website pages, in the profile description and in the profile's services.
There's no fixed number. In Manchester, in October 2026, the listing with the fewest reviews in the local pack for "boiler service manchester" had 85; in London, for air conditioning installation, 36.
They can bring in enquiries in the first few months, but your competitors get the same enquiries. Checkatrade ranks for about 187,700 keywords in the UK: use it while you build your own pages and profile, not instead of them.
Where to start
Take the job sheets for your last fifty callouts and count the boiler and air con brands you worked on. The top three are your first three brand pages. Then search on your phone for "[brand] boiler service [your town]" for each one and note who appears in the map and how many reviews they have: that's the number to beat before next season.
If you'd like us to do this with you, starting from the search volumes in your area, get in touch or see how we work on SEO for local businesses.
