How a 32-Year Plumbing Company Found a 14x Better Market With One Page
Lew Plumbing had 724,000 impressions and a 0.15% click-through rate. One Chinese-language page hit 2.2% CTR. Here is the full breakdown.
32 Years in Business. Near-Zero Online Visibility.
Lew Plumbing & Heating has been in business since 1994. Family-owned. 14 service areas across Metro Vancouver. Licensed, bonded, insured, WCB, TECA member, FortisBC Approved. 32 years of doing the work.
And their website was practically invisible.
724,469 impressions over 90 days. People were seeing Lew Plumbing in search results. But the click-through rate was 0.15%. The benchmark for local service businesses is 3-5%. That means for every 1,000 people who saw a Lew Plumbing listing, roughly one or two clicked. The other 998 picked someone else.
We ran a 48-page SEO and Google Ads audit in March 2026. The audit found what you would expect on a site that had been running for years without a strategic SEO partner: duplicate H1 tags, 23 JavaScript files and 45 CSS stylesheets loading on every page, a mobile PageSpeed score between 22 and 35 out of 100, and a phone number typo baked into the HTML.
But buried in the Google Search Console data was something unexpected.
One Chinese-Language Page Was Outperforming the Entire Site
One page on the site, /zh-plumbing-heating-vancouver/, was pulling a 2.2% click-through rate at an average position of 9.8. That is 14x the site average. On a page that most agencies would never have thought to build.
The full English site: 724,469 impressions, 1,053 clicks, 0.15% CTR. The single Chinese-language page: 1,905 impressions, 42 clicks, 2.2% CTR. Fewer eyeballs, dramatically more engagement per impression.
We looked for competitors targeting Mandarin-speaking homeowners in Vancouver with plumbing content. Milani Plumbing, Lew's primary competitor (15,196 Google reviews, 4.8 stars, in business since 1956), does not have a Chinese-language page. Neither does anyone else with meaningful organic visibility in this space.
Almost zero competition. In Vancouver, a city where Mandarin and Cantonese are the most common non-English languages spoken at home.
Why This Is Not a Gimmick
When we brought this up with Gord Lew, the owner, he told us he has a Mandarin-speaking technician on staff. The page is not a translation dropped onto the site for SEO points. There is a real person who picks up the phone, speaks Mandarin, and shows up to fix the boiler.
A translated page with an English-only phone team is a dead end. This is a genuine service offering that no competitor is matching online.
The Referral Layer Most People Miss
For small language communities, organic search volume is low by nature. But that is not the point. These pages serve a second function: referral validation. When a Mandarin-speaking homeowner gets a recommendation from a friend, the first thing they do is Google the company. If the site has a page in their language, it confirms the referral. If it does not, doubt creeps in. The page converts referred visitors who would otherwise bounce.
Search volume matters less here. Conversion quality matters more. A 42-click page that connects a homeowner with a Mandarin-speaking technician generates higher-trust, higher-conversion leads than 500 clicks from generic "plumber near me" traffic.
What 724K Impressions and 0.15% CTR Actually Means
Two things stood out in the GSC data for the 90-day window ending March 8, 2026.
First: the volume was there. 724,469 impressions means Google was showing Lew Plumbing in results hundreds of thousands of times. The site has content. It has age. It has topical coverage across plumbing, heating, and HVAC. This is not a visibility problem. It is a conversion problem. Google shows the listing, but searchers do not click.
Second: the trajectory was moving in the right direction. Average position improved from 35.0 in December 2025 to 22.6 in March 2026. That is a 12.4-spot improvement in three months. Clicks doubled year-over-year: 1,053 vs. 404, a 100% increase. Impressions climbed 74% YoY.
The blog strategy we started in August 2025 (20+ posts published since then) was working at the foundational level. Rankings were climbing. But the CTR gap meant most of that progress was not converting into actual site visits.
Rankings That Are Working
| Query | Position |
|---|---|
| gas fitter vancouver | 3.9 |
| plumbers port moody | 3.9 |
| hot water tank replacement cost bc | 4.5 |
| heat pump repair vancouver | 4.6 |
| emergency furnace repair vancouver | 4.6 |
| toilet not flushing properly | 4.8 |
| sewage smell in bathroom | 7.5 |
"Gas fitter vancouver" at 3.9 is strong. That is a commercial query with clear hiring intent. "Hot water tank replacement cost bc" at 4.5 is a cost-transparency play that almost no competitors are targeting with dedicated content. When someone searches a cost question, they are deep in the buying process.
Fixing the Google Ads Leak
When we took over the marketing relationship, Lew Plumbing's Google Ads were managed by another agency. We transitioned to a new agency in November 2025. Cost per lead dropped 29% after the switch.
But the bigger problem was the data itself. Conversion tracking was double-counting every lead. The system was firing both a page-load tracker on the thank-you page and a form submission event. Every single conversion was counted twice. Both agencies were reporting inflated numbers.
We caught it during the audit. We removed the page-load tracker, kept the form submission event, and started getting clean data for the first time.
On top of that, we found FortisBC keyword waste. Gord was getting calls from people asking for FortisBC or R&B Plumbing & Heating, companies that have nothing to do with Lew Plumbing. The Ads campaigns were matching on broad keywords related to gas fitting and pulling in searches for other companies entirely. We added negative keywords to cut the waste.
The Competitor Gap Lew Can Actually Win
Milani Plumbing has 15,196 reviews, has been in business since 1956, and dominates the local pack. Competing on "plumber vancouver" is a slow, expensive fight Lew would lose on budget alone.
But here is what Milani does not have:
- Chinese-language pages (or any non-English content)
- Cost transparency content ("how much does X cost in BC" pages)
- A blog that answers the service questions customers search for
- Dedicated location pages with unique content (Burnaby boilers, Port Moody plumbing)
Lew does not need to outspend a 20x-review competitor to win. The growth path is owning the search lanes Milani ignores: multilingual content, cost-transparency queries, and suburb-level pages. Port Moody already shows this. Four clicks in 28 days on a basic page with no optimization. That is local demand Lew can capture while larger competitors stay locked on "plumber Vancouver."
What Changed
Before
- CTR: 0.15% across 724K impressions
- Average position: 35.0 (December 2025)
- Conversion tracking double-counting every lead
- FortisBC keyword waste in Google Ads
- 23 JS files and 45 CSS stylesheets per page
- Mobile PageSpeed: 22-35 out of 100
- Duplicate H1 tags on key pages
- Phone number typo in site HTML
- No blog strategy
- No location-specific content
After
- Average position: 22.6 (12.4-spot improvement)
- Clicks doubled YoY: 1,053 vs. 404
- Impressions up 74% YoY
- Google Ads CPL down 29%
- Clean conversion tracking (double-count fixed)
- FortisBC keyword waste eliminated
- 20+ blog posts published
- Location pages live (Burnaby, Port Moody)
- Chinese page identified as top performer
- 7 queries on page 1 of Google
Frequently Asked
How long did it take to see ranking improvements?
The blog strategy started in August 2025. By March 2026, average position moved from 35.0 to 22.6, and clicks doubled year-over-year. That is roughly 7 months from first blog post to measurable ranking movement. SEO for local service businesses is a 6-12 month investment before the compounding effect kicks in.
Does adding a page in another language actually work for a small plumbing company?
It did here. But only because Lew has a Mandarin-speaking technician who can actually serve those customers. A translated page without the team to back it up creates a bad experience and wasted spend. The page works because the service behind it is real. If you have bilingual staff, you probably have an untapped market sitting right there.
Did Beazy build the Lew Plumbing website?
No. Beazy manages SEO, Google Ads, content strategy, and the 48-page audit that uncovered the Chinese page opportunity. The website was built separately. Beazy's scope is marketing performance: rankings, traffic, lead quality, and ad spend efficiency.
The Rebuild
The Website, Before and After
Everything We Delivered
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