Local SEO vs MyBuilder, Checkatrade and Rated People for Plumbers
This is owning your visibility against renting it, where the arithmetic works better than the argument. For plumbers the numbers are sharper than in any other trade, because emergency leads are the most contested and most heavily shared category on these platforms.
What The Platforms Actually Are
Three different products get discussed as though they were one thing. They charge in three different ways. That difference matters more than which is better.
Checkatrade operates as a vetted directory. Trades pay to be listed and customers contact directly. Membership is the core charge, with per lead fees in many trades on top.
MyBuilder operates on job postings. A customer describes a job, interested trades respond, then a fee applies when a customer shortlists you and contact details are exchanged. No membership.
Rated People matches jobs to nearby trades, on a subscription with credits alongside.
Why we are not quoting prices. We cannot attribute them. Neither can anybody else, so no comparison is possible without a quotation from each. Any page presenting confident figures is presenting somebody's estimate as fact.
Checkatrade in particular does not publish pricing openly, so a trade wanting to know what it costs goes through a sales conversation. Figures circulating online are third party estimates varying by trade, region and package.
Why Plumbers Use Them
These are legitimate businesses and a great many plumbers do well on them. Anybody telling you otherwise is selling you something, as you would know from your own experience.
Work from day one. The advantage that matters most. Search work cannot match it. Join Monday, quote Wednesday.
No waiting period. Search visibility accumulates over quarters. A platform produces immediately, which for a business needing work now is not small.
No website required. A trade with no site and no interest in acquiring one still gets enquiries.
Somebody else does the finding. The platform spends the advertising money and brings the customer. You buy the outcome rather than build the machine.
Vetting as a credential. For a business with no history, being listed somewhere that vets members provides credibility that would take years.
And one specific to your trade. A platform can be switched off.
Plumbing demand swings with the weather more than any trade in this programme. A business overwhelmed in January and quiet in June can spend less in the quiet month. Search visibility does not work that way, since you cannot rank harder in February.
The Arithmetic
Most trades know what they spend. Very few know what a won job costs them. The gap is usually larger than expected.
Four inputs, all of which you already have.
What you pay for a lead. Including membership divided across the leads it produced, since a fixed fee is part of every lead's cost.
How many you quote for. Not how many arrive. How many you pursue.
How many you win. Your own conversion rate, which most trades estimate high until they count.
Whether the lead was shared. The input that changes everything, since a lead sold to four trades is a one in four proposition before you speak.
The calculation. Total spend divided by jobs won. Not leads received. Jobs won.
A worked example, illustrative only. Every figure is an assumption demonstrating the method rather than a claim about any platform or a prediction about your business.
Assume twenty leads at £20 across a month, which is £400. Assume you pursue fifteen and win three, a one in five conversion on what you pursued. That is £133 per won job against an advertised lead price of £20.
The number that matters is the second one. It is nearly seven times the first. Whether that is good depends entirely on what those three jobs were worth, which is why this is a method rather than a verdict.
Emergency Leads Are The Sharpest Case
Emergency work is the most contested category on these platforms. It is where the arithmetic in block three turns most sharply against a plumber.
The mechanism. Sharing is built into these products rather than being an occasional outcome.
A posted job attracts several interested trades and a matched lead is offered to more than one business. The customer is buying choice, which necessarily means the same enquiry reaching several plumbers.
Run that through the calculation. A lead shared with four trades is a one in four proposition before anybody speaks, so the cost per won job is four times the lead price before your own conversion rate is applied at all.
Apply a conversion rate on top and the multiplier compounds rather than replacing it. That is arithmetic rather than an accusation.
Then the part specific to emergency work. The customer is not comparing.
As set out in our guide on emergency plumbing, somebody standing in water rings the first business that answers. So on an emergency lead sold to four trades, the deciding factor is frequently who picked up first, not who quoted best.
You are therefore paying to enter a race decided in seconds by whoever happened to be free.
Why that matters here. This is the one category where owning the visibility is structurally better rather than merely cheaper, since a customer who finds you directly rings you rather than four of you.
What You Own At The End
Take the same monthly figure forward three years down each route. The jobs may be comparable. What you hold at the end is not.
After three years on a platform. You have paid for jobs and done them. The arrangement sits exactly where it did on day one. Stop paying next month and next month produces nothing.
After three years of search work. A website that exists, a profile with standing, reviews attached to your business, plus positions that took time to build.
Now the qualification, since this argument is routinely oversold.
Rankings are not owned the way a van is. They move. Competitors invest and results pages change, so a business that stops maintaining visibility loses ground rather than holding it. Anybody promising a permanent asset is overstating it.
What is true is narrower and still decisive. Search visibility decays slowly while platform access stops immediately. A business pausing search work still gets enquiries in month three. One pausing a platform gets nothing on day two.
The Review Problem
Reviews earned on a platform stay on the platform. Almost every trade using one underestimates that, since it looks like a technicality until the day it matters.
What it means in practice. Five years of good work, rated by pleased customers, producing a rating you are proud of. Then you leave, at which point none of it comes with you.
Not the score, not the reviews, not the count. You start from nothing elsewhere, having built it for a company you no longer pay.
Why this determines whether anybody leaves. A trade with a strong rating is not merely paying for leads. They are paying to keep access to their own reputation, which is far harder to walk away from and is simply how the arrangement works.
Why your own profile behaves differently. A review on your Google Business Profile is attached to your business. It appears when somebody searches your name, contributes to how you rank in map results, then stays with you regardless of who you pay.
What to do if you are on a platform now. Ask for reviews in both places. One extra sentence, so five years of goodwill accumulates somewhere you keep rather than only somewhere you rent.
Competing Against Yourself
Here is a figure from our own pull of 10,003 UK plumbing keywords in July 2026. It is the most useful number on this page.
In that July 2026 pull, terms carrying a platform name accounted for 25 terms and 11,420 searches a month, being 0.8% of workable demand.
So roughly one search in a hundred and twenty names a platform. The rest are looking for a plumber.
What that tells you. Platform value does not come from customers seeking them by name. It comes from platform pages appearing for generic searches, meaning plumber plus a town, above the trades who serve it. The customer wanted a plumber. They found a platform.
A legitimate model, worth understanding rather than resenting. The platform earned that position by investing in it. The trade did not.
The awkward case is the customer who would have found you anyway, because you already rank for that town, so you paid for an introduction to somebody heading for you regardless.
How to tell whether that is happening. Search the terms you want from a location in your patch rather than your yard, then check whether the enquiries you buy come from towns where you already appear. Where those overlap you are paying twice.
When The Platforms Are The Right Answer
Four situations where we would tell you to use one. We mean it.
A new business with no history. No reviews, no rankings and a need for work now. Search work is a bet on next year, a platform an answer this week. Start there and build the other alongside.
Filling a quiet spell. The tap opens and closes, which matters more here than in any other trade, since a plumbing year has genuine troughs.
Testing a new service or area. Before committing to pages and coverage, a few leads tell you whether the demand converts at a price you can live with. Cheap research, which we would recommend.
A plumber with no interest in running a website. Some would rather pay somebody to hand them enquiries. A legitimate way to run a business, with nothing to argue with.
What the four share. Speed, flexibility or simplicity worth more than accumulation.
If two describe your situation, a platform is right for now. Block three is something to revisit in a year rather than a reason to change anything today.
When They Stop Making Sense
Four things to look for. Any two together is usually the point at which the arrangement stopped working for you rather than with you.
The cost per won job is rising. Not the lead price, which may be unchanged. The block three figure, tracked over time. It moves quietly, since each lead still looks reasonably priced.
Leads are shared more widely. More trades responding to the same job means a lower chance on each, which per block four hits emergency work hardest.
The customers are price led. Several trades quoting against each other produces customers optimising on price, which is a different customer from somebody who found you and rang.
Nothing is accumulating. Year three costs the same as year one and produces the same, since none of the spend built anything that keeps working.
What to do, which is not necessarily to leave. All four are reasons to start building the other side rather than to cancel this afternoon, since cancelling before anything else produces is how trades conclude that search does not work.
Running Both
Almost nobody should switch. For most plumbers this is a sequence rather than a decision, taking about a year.
Keep the platform exactly as it is while search work starts. Change nothing. Your enquiries are paying for the work you are about to do. Removing income to fund marketing is a poor way to run anything.
Start recording both properly from month one. Per block eleven.
Wait. Profile and map work can move inside a month. Pages and coverage take quarters.
Then reduce gradually, as the numbers say. Step down, watch for a month, then step again if nothing suffers.
One timing point specific to your trade. Do not make the first reduction in November.
Reducing a channel immediately before the season that produces your heaviest demand will produce an alarming month that tells you nothing about either channel. Step down in spring, when a quiet month is a quiet month rather than a verdict.
Stop where it settles, frequently not at zero. Many plumbers keep a platform permanently at a reduced level for the flexibility in block eight, while most of their work comes from their own visibility.
How To Compare The Numbers Properly
Most trades compare these by feel. Feel favours whichever produced the most recent good job. Recording it properly takes minutes a week.
Record five things on both sides, over the same period.
Total spend, everything included. Membership, lead fees and subscriptions on one side. The monthly fee on the other. A comparison missing a fixed cost is not a comparison.
Enquiries received. Counted the same way on both sides.
Jobs won.
Value of those jobs. Most often left out and most likely to change the answer.
Cost per won job, plus cost as a share of the revenue it produced.
Three conditions that make the comparison real rather than flattering. The third is specific to plumbing.
Run it over six months at least. A quarter is noise at a handful of jobs a month.
Count from the same start date. An established account against three months of search work always favours the platform.
Compare like seasons. A comparison spanning a cold snap on one side and a quiet spring on the other is measuring the weather.
Keep the platform.
Start the other thing.
We would not ask anybody to cancel a working channel to pay us. Keep what produces work, record both properly for six months across comparable seasons, then let your own numbers decide.
What is included every month:
£350 per month, one target area. No setup fee, nothing billed separately.
Nine guides.
One trade.
This guide covers the lead platforms. The rest of the series covers the whole picture, emergency plumbing, blocked drains, boilers, bathrooms, leak detection, power flushing and multiple towns.
