Keywords for a plumbing and heating business are the phrases households, landlords and small firms type into Google when they need a boiler, an air conditioning unit or a plumbing system installed, repaired or checked.
They almost never contain the words "plumbing and heating". And they move with the calendar more than in any other sector we've measured.
Two numbers to set the scene. "Air conditioning installation" got 60,500 searches in the UK in June 2026, against 3,600 in December 2025: about seventeen times fewer. A click on "emergency plumber" costs £16.27 on Google Ads, one on "plumber" £5.26.
The lists you find online under titles like "the top 100 HVAC keywords" are American, and they don't help much if you fit boilers in Leeds or air con in Kent. Here are the UK figures, with volumes, seasonality and cost per click, and how to turn them into pages. It's the same work we did on keywords for manufacturers, applied to boilers and air conditioning.
How we collected the data
On 10 October 2026 we pulled from Google Ads, through DataForSEO's Search Volume API, the volumes for 80 searches about boilers, air conditioning, heat pumps and plumbing. Market: United Kingdom, English. For each one we have the average monthly volume, the twelve months from September 2025 to August 2026 and the suggested cost per click. The API returns CPCs in US dollars: we converted them to pounds at the Bank of England rate of 8 October 2026 ($1.3226 = £1). These are the same estimates shown in the Google Ads Keyword Planner.
All 80 searches returned a volume, but some barely register: "is a boiler service a legal requirement" gets 30 a month, "hvac keywords" 10.
One detail that changes how you read the numbers: Google groups very similar variants together. "Plumber" and "plumbing" return exactly the same series (60,500 on average), as do "plumber near me" and "plumbers near me" (90,500). When two phrases have the same twelve numbers, count them once. Both air conditioning searches also show a spike in October 2025 that we can't explain (74,000 for "air conditioning repair", 27,100 for "installation"): with one year of data we treat it as an anomaly.
For the comparison with the United States we pulled ten equivalent searches with the same method, on the US market.
The searches that bring in work, with the numbers
The table lists the searches made by people looking for someone to come to the house, sorted by average monthly volume. Next to each one is the highest month of the past year and the cost per click.
| Search | Monthly average | Highest month | CPC (£) |
|---|---|---|---|
| plumber near me | 90,500 | 110,000 (Sep-Oct 2025, Jan and Mar 2026) | 6.12 |
| plumber / plumbing | 60,500 | 90,500 (Oct 2025) | 5.26 |
| drain unblocking | 27,100 | 33,100 (Jan and Mar 2026) | 4.56 |
| boiler service | 14,800 | 27,100 (Sep-Oct 2025) | 6.56 |
| air conditioning installation | 14,800 | 60,500 (Jun 2026) | 2.40 |
| emergency plumber | 12,100 | 33,100 (Oct 2025) | 16.27 |
| new boiler | 9,900 | 14,800 (Nov 2025, Jan 2026) | 12.57 |
| emergency plumber near me | 9,900 | 22,200 (Oct 2025) | 16.01 |
| heating engineer near me | 9,900 | 18,100 (Oct 2025) | 2.61 |
| boiler service near me | 9,900 | 18,100 (Sep-Oct 2025) | 5.01 |
| air conditioning repair | 9,900 | 74,000 (Oct 2025) | 2.42 |
| gas engineer near me | 8,100 | 12,100 (Sep-Oct 2025, Jan 2026) | 4.04 |
| air conditioning installers near me | 8,100 | 33,100 (Jun 2026) | 2.27 |
| boiler repair near me | 6,600 | 14,800 (Oct 2025) | 6.59 |
| boiler replacement | 5,400 | 8,100 (Sep-Oct 2025) | 15.67 |
| boiler repair | 5,400 | 9,900 (Oct 2025) | 7.55 |
| blocked drain | 5,400 | 8,100 (Sep 2025) | 9.88 |
| air conditioning service | 5,400 | 9,900 (Jun 2026) | 2.50 |
| boiler installation | 4,400 | 8,100 (Sep 2025) | 14.80 |
| heat pump installation | 2,900 | 4,400 (Sep-Oct 2025, Mar 2026) | 9.86 |
| emergency boiler repair | 1,900 | 4,400 (Dec 2025, Jan 2026) | 10.24 |
| air conditioning cleaning | 1,900 | 3,600 (Jul 2026) | 0.38 |
| air source heat pump installation | 1,600 | 4,400 (Sep 2025) | 5.89 |
| 24 hour plumber | 1,000 | 2,900 (Jun 2026) | 15.98 |
Three things stand out. "Plumber near me" (90,500) gets more searches than "plumber" on its own (60,500): in the UK the local form is the main one. "Near me" also works for boilers, which isn't true everywhere: "boiler service near me" gets 9,900 searches, "boiler repair near me" 6,600, "heating engineer near me" almost three times as many as "heating engineer" (3,600). The third thing is the cost per click, which deserves a section of its own.
The calendar: air con is searched in June, boilers in October
In manufacturing, seasonality is a gentle curve with a summer dip. In plumbing and heating there are two opposite seasons that hand over to each other, and the ratio between the highest and lowest month reaches values we haven't seen in other sectors.
| Search | Lowest month | Highest month | Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| air conditioner | 6,600 (Oct and Dec 2025) | 823,000 (Jun 2026) | 125 times |
| air conditioning installation | 3,600 (Dec 2025) | 60,500 (Jun 2026) | 16.8 times |
| air con regas | 1,900 (Dec 2025) | 90,500 (May-Jun 2026) | 47.6 times |
| air conditioning installers near me | 1,300 (Dec 2025) | 33,100 (Jun 2026) | 25.5 times |
| air conditioner leaking water | 140 (Nov 2025 - Feb 2026) | 2,900 (Jun 2026) | 20.7 times |
| boiler service | 8,100 (May 2026) | 27,100 (Sep-Oct 2025) | 3.3 times |
| boiler repair | 2,400 (Jun-Jul 2026) | 9,900 (Oct 2025) | 4.1 times |
| boiler leaking water | 1,300 (Jul-Aug 2026) | 8,100 (Jan 2026) | 6.2 times |
| radiator not heating up | 110 (Jul 2026) | 9,900 (Nov 2025) | 90 times |
| emergency plumber | 6,600 (May 2026) | 33,100 (Oct 2025) | 5 times |
| plumber | 49,500 (several months) | 90,500 (Oct 2025) | 1.8 times |
The boiler curve follows the first cold weather. "Boiler service" is already at 14,800 in August and reaches 27,100 in September and October; "boiler repair" peaks in October with 9,900; "radiator not heating up" goes from 110 searches in July to 9,900 in November. For landlords there's a fixed date as well: under the Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998 the gas safety check is annual, and the HSE says tenants must get a copy of the record within 28 days of the check.
The most curious figure is the emergency one. "Emergency plumber" peaked in October 2025 (33,100) and bottomed out in May. The link with heating coming back on is plausible, but one year of data isn't enough to say so.
For a business the consequence is practical. Air conditioning pages need to be live and already ranking by March, when searches start climbing ("air conditioning installation" gets 5,400 in March and April, 22,200 in May). Writing them in June means arriving after the peak. The same goes for boilers, with pages ready by the end of summer. Google Trends lets you check whether the pattern repeats from one year to the next.
What the cost per click tells you
The cost per click suggested by Google Ads measures how much advertisers are willing to pay for a search. It's an indirect clue, but usually a reliable one, to how often that search brings in paying customers.
"Emergency plumber" costs £16.27, "plumber" £5.26: about three times as much. "24 hour plumber" reaches £15.98 with just 1,000 searches a month, a textbook long tail keyword worth more than its volume suggests. The people typing these phrases have water on the floor and call the first number they find.
At the other end, "air conditioner" costs £0.34 and "air conditioning" £0.49, on huge volumes. A CPC that low on volumes that high is typical of product searches: someone typing "air conditioner" in June usually wants to buy one, and "portable air conditioner" alone hit 1.22 million searches that month. Those are searches for an e-commerce site more than for an installer. Boilers work differently in the UK: "new boiler" costs £12.57 a click and "boiler replacement" £15.67, and on page one for "new boiler" the AI Overview quotes installed prices (£2,474 to £3,100 for a like-for-like swap, according to E.ON Next) next to energy suppliers and installers. Here the installer is the one competing for the sale.
Maintenance searches sit in the middle and for many businesses they're the most profitable: "boiler repair" £7.55, "boiler service" £6.56, "gas engineer near me" £4.04. They bring customers who come back every year.
In the UK, "HVAC" is searched by the trade, not by householders
The acronym HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) gets 27,100 searches a month in the UK, "hvac systems" 3,600. The curve stays between 18,100 and 33,100 all year, with no summer peak like air conditioning: it behaves like a professional search, not a household one. On page one, after the definitions from Wikipedia and RS Components, Google asks "What is HVAC technician salary in the UK?".
Householders type "boiler", "air conditioning", "plumber". A website that talks about "HVAC solutions" or "building services" uses the language of suppliers and consultants. That's fine if you work on warehouses and offices and there's a facilities manager on the other side. If you work in people's homes, it's a wasted word in the title tag.
"Plumbing and heating" also needs handling with care. It's the phrase on many vans, but it gets 1,600 searches a month and describes a type of business more than a need. Before building a page on it, search it from a phone in your area and look at what kind of results Google shows.
London searches for a plumber more than Manchester
City names carry different weight depending on the service. For plumbers they count: "plumber london" gets 5,400 searches a month, "plumber manchester" 4,400, "plumber birmingham" 2,900. CPC follows a different order: £7.32 in London, £2.79 in Birmingham, £2.26 in Manchester. But all three together are worth less than a seventh of "plumber near me".
For air conditioning and boilers the city matters even less. "Air conditioning installation london" and "boiler service london" get 1,300 searches each, "boiler service manchester" 480 and "air conditioning installation manchester" 140. People looking for these services type "near me" or nothing at all, and Google uses the phone's location.
Either way the game is played in the local pack, the block with the map. Google says it ranks those results on relevance, distance and prominence. You can't choose distance. Relevance depends on the categories and services in your Google Business Profile and on the pages of your site; prominence comes largely from reviews. The guide to local SEO explains how to work on each of the three.
The questions people ask before they pick up the phone
Some searches don't ask for a job to be done, they ask for information. These are the phrases a business can be found for before the customer decides who to call.
| Question | Monthly average | Highest month | CPC (£) |
|---|---|---|---|
| gas safety certificate | 9,900 | 14,800 (Sep 2025) | 4.35 |
| boiler leaking water | 4,400 | 8,100 (Jan 2026) | 4.62 |
| radiator not heating up | 3,600 | 9,900 (Nov 2025) | 2.65 |
| boiler pressure low | 2,900 | 5,400 (Nov 2025, Jan 2026) | 2.15 |
| landlord gas safety certificate | 1,900 | 2,900 (Sep 2025) | 4.53 |
| boiler not working | 1,000 | 2,400 (Jan 2026) | 6.97 |
| how often should a boiler be serviced | 720 | 880 (Oct-Nov 2025, Jan 2026) | 11.11 |
| air conditioner leaking water | 720 | 2,900 (Jun 2026) | 0.72 |
| heat pump vs gas boiler | 590 | 880 (Oct 2025, Jan 2026) | 2.50 |
| best heat pump | 590 | 1,000 (Sep 2025) | 5.32 |
In the UK these questions aren't cheap. "Boiler leaking water" costs £4.62 a click, "boiler not working" £6.97, "how often should a boiler be serviced" £11.11: heating firms and boiler cover providers are already buying them. The cheap ones are the air conditioning questions, such as "air conditioner leaking water" at £0.72, where there's little advertising at the top of the page. Either way, someone with a boiler dripping in January is one phone call away from becoming a customer, if the page that answers them also has a number to call.
Questions about legal duties (gas safety certificate, CP12, landlord checks) deserve a page each, with a reference to the Gas Safety (Installation and Use) Regulations 1998 and to the HSE guidance. The same goes for grants, which drive high volumes in this sector: "warm homes plan" gets 8,100 searches a month (49,500 in January 2026), "boiler upgrade scheme" 4,400 (with peaks of 6,600 in November 2025 and January 2026), "eco4" 3,600. The rules change often, and the Boiler Upgrade Scheme run by Ofgem covers heat pumps, not gas boilers, so these are pages to keep up to date with the review date in view.
And in the United States?
The lists that come up when you search for "HVAC keywords" are American. seo.com's collects more than a hundred phrases in four groups, HVAC Webmasters' starts with "hvac" and "ac repair". We pulled ten equivalent searches with the same method. The US figures in this table don't apply to the UK: they're there to show what you lose by copying.
| US search | US average | US CPC (£) | UK equivalent | UK average | UK CPC (£) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| plumber near me | 823,000 | 29.83 | plumber near me | 90,500 | 6.12 |
| emergency plumber | 74,000 | 57.75 | emergency plumber | 12,100 | 16.27 |
| ac repair | 368,000 | 35.13 | air conditioning repair | 9,900 | 2.42 |
| ac installation | 49,500 | 19.23 | air conditioning installation | 14,800 | 2.40 |
| heat pump installation | 22,200 | 18.30 | heat pump installation | 2,900 | 9.86 |
| hvac | 450,000 | 15.11 | hvac | 27,100 | 0.60 |
| ac not cooling | 6,600 | 11.80 | air con not cooling | 260 | n/a |
Two differences matter if you work in the UK. The first is the balance between repair and installation. In the US "ac repair" gets seven and a half times the searches of "ac installation" (368,000 against 49,500). In the UK it's the other way round: "air conditioning installation" gets 14,800 searches, "air conditioning repair" 9,900, and that's with October's unexplained spike included. An American list puts repairs at the top; the UK data says start with installations. And where the US talks about "ac" and "furnace", British customers say "air con" and "boiler".
The second is cost. A click on "emergency plumber" in the US costs £57.75, three and a half times the UK figure. Tactics designed for a market where a click costs as much as a restaurant meal don't transfer as they are.
There is one similarity: in the US "furnace repair" (repairing a forced-air heating system) goes from 60,500 searches in June 2026 to 450,000 in January 2026. Extreme seasonality, in other words, is a feature of the sector on both sides of the Atlantic.
The six keyword families and the right page for each
Lined up, the searches fall into six families. Each one needs a different type of page. The mistake we see most often is a single "Services" page trying to answer all of them.
- Emergencies ("emergency plumber", "emergency boiler repair", "24 hour plumber"). A short page, a tap-to-call number at the top, areas covered and real hours. This is the family with the highest CPC, and it's usually worth running a Google Ads campaign alongside it.
- Installations ("air conditioning installation", "heat pump installation", "boiler replacement"). One page per type of appliance, with the brands you fit, lead times, what's included in the price and photos of finished jobs.
- Routine maintenance ("boiler service", "air conditioning service", "air con regas"). One page per service with the recommended frequency and a simple way to book.
- Faults and symptoms ("boiler pressure low", "air conditioner leaking water", "radiator not heating up"). Articles that answer the question and say clearly when you need an engineer.
- Legal duties and grants ("gas safety certificate", "landlord gas safety certificate", "boiler upgrade scheme"). Information pages to update when the rules change.
- Local searches ("plumber london", "air conditioning installers near me"). A well-kept Business Profile and one page for each town you really work in, with different content each time, not the same page with the name swapped.
To decide whether two phrases can share a page, check whether Google shows the same results for both, which is what keyword clustering does. The format of the page is decided by search intent: for "air conditioner leaking water" Google wants an answer, for "air conditioning installation" it wants someone who does the job.
How to build the list for your own area
No tool knows what a business hears on the phone every day. The method we use starts there.
- Note the words customers used in the last twenty calls. They're often different from the ones on your price list: people say "the boiler keeps losing pressure", not that they need a system inspection.
- Open Google Search Console and compare queries month by month: you'll see which searches already reach your site and in which season.
- Check volumes with Keyword Planner or one of the keyword research tools, looking at all twelve months and not just the average.
- Search each phrase on Google from your own town and note what comes up: local pack, ads, articles, directories.
- Assign each phrase to one of the six families and to a specific page on the site.
The third step is the one most often skipped. The yearly average for "air con regas" is 27,100, but in December 2025 searches were at 1,900 and in May and June 2026 at 90,500. An average like that doesn't describe any real month, and anyone using it for their sums gets it wrong twice a year.
It's the same approach, local data before tools and one page per intent, that took Macropix from position 88 to 2 on Google Italy, in a very different sector.
The mistakes that cost the most
- Copying American lists. They put repairs at the top and use "HVAC", "ac" and "furnace", words that carry little weight with UK householders.
- Writing pages in the wrong season. In June the air conditioning page should already be among the top results, not sitting in drafts.
- Buying "air conditioner" and "portable air conditioner" in ads. Lots of clicks at a few pence, few quotes. Phrases with "installation" and "near me" pay off better.
- Duplicating the same page for twenty towns. Changing only the town name produces near-identical pages that rarely rank.
- Ignoring pages on legal duties. "Gas safety certificate" gets 9,900 searches a month at £4.35 a click: someone is finding customers there, and it may not be a competitor.
Frequently asked questions about keywords for plumbing and heating businesses
It depends on the main service. For air conditioning installers it's "air conditioning installation", with 14,800 searches a month in the UK and 60,500 in June. For boiler work it's "boiler service" (14,800) and "boiler repair" (5,400). For emergencies it's "emergency plumber" (12,100), one of the phrases with the highest cost per click: £16.27.
Between May and July, with the peak in June. "Air conditioning installation" went from 3,600 searches in December 2025 to 60,500 in June 2026. Pages should be published in winter, so they have time to rank before demand rises.
Not if your customers are households. In the UK "hvac" gets 27,100 searches a month with no summer peak, and page one is full of definitions and salary questions, which is typical of professional searches. Householders type "boiler", "air conditioning" or "plumber".
Yes, for the towns you really work in and only if each page has its own content. For plumbers the city name carries some weight ("plumber london" gets 5,400 searches a month), but "plumber near me" gets 90,500. For boilers and air con the city matters much less: "boiler service manchester" gets 480.
It depends on the type of work. For emergencies Google Ads brings in calls straight away, but a click can cost over £16 ("emergency plumber"). For installations and servicing, SEO builds traffic that comes back every season. In most cases it pays to use both.
Each season is prepared in the opposite one
There's one thing the trade rarely says. In June, an air conditioning installer's problem isn't searches: with 60,500 people a month looking for an installation, the limit is being able to answer them all. Air conditioning pages should be written in November, when those searches are at their lowest and hardly any competitor is thinking about them. Boiler pages should be written in May.
A business that uses one service's quiet months to prepare the other's season reaches the peak with pages already ranking and reviews already collected. If you'd like a plan built on the data for your area, it's the work we do in our SEO consulting projects, often alongside Google Ads campaigns to cover emergencies.
