Freeze season is six weeks out. Here is what a restoration company fixes now.
A short pre-freeze checklist for water damage restoration owners: hours on the profile, the on-call rotation, the emergency campaign built and paused, and the referral texts that go out before the first hard frost.
In most of the northern half of the country the first hard freeze lands between late November and mid December. Burst supply lines, split hose bibs, frozen pipes in uninsulated crawl spaces, ice dams a few weeks later. For a water damage company it is the busiest six weeks of the year, and the marketing that decides who gets those calls has to be done before the temperature drops, not during.
Here is the list, in the order it should be done, starting now.
Set the hours on your Google profile to the truth
Google filters late-night "open now" searches by listed hours. 26.3% of restoration profiles list no hours at all and only 62.3% show 24-hour service. A frozen pipe bursts at 4 a.m. when the house is coldest. If the profile shows closed, or shows nothing, the search skips you.
If a human answers overnight, set 24 hours. If not, set the hours a human answers and put the emergency number in the description. Then set special hours for Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year's Day, because losses on those days are common and a profile showing closed on a holiday hands the call to whoever shows open.
Decide the on-call rotation and the bonus
Who answers at 4 a.m. on December 23 has to be settled now. A rotating on-call tech with a weekly stipend and a per-dispatch bonus is what most two to four crew companies land on. Write the rotation through mid February. Put text-back under it so the calls that drop during a transfer get a text within seconds and a callback within five minutes. The missed calls guide covers the setup and the script.
Run your own numbers through the calculator if the on-call bonus feels expensive. It is not, next to the jobs that ring through to voicemail.
Build the emergency campaign and pause it
Google Ads accounts take time to approve, call tracking numbers take time to provision, and Local Services Ads take two to four weeks for the background check. Start all of that this week. Build the emergency water campaign with "frozen pipe", "burst pipe cleanup" and "water damage restoration" on exact and phrase match, with the negative list from the Google Ads guide, and leave it paused. Switch it on the day the forecast shows the first night under 20 degrees.
Bid higher overnight. Competition thins after 10 p.m. and the caller is motivated. A company that answers at night and bids for it gets the most valuable calls of the season at a lower cost than daytime.
Text the plumbers before the plumbers get busy
Every plumber in your area is about to be slammed with frozen pipe calls. Each of those is a water loss that needs drying after the pipe is fixed, and the plumber will refer whoever is on their mind. Text each plumber you have worked with: a thank you, the on-call number, and a sentence about your overnight response time. Do it now, while they have time to read it. A plumber who gets the text in October refers you in December; one who gets it in December is too busy to notice.
Do the same with property managers. A portfolio with a frozen-pipe unit on a holiday weekend wants one number that answers.
Publish the frozen pipe page
A plain page on your site, "What to do in the first hour after a pipe bursts": shut the main, open faucets to drain, move what can be moved, photograph everything before you touch it, call your carrier after you call a restoration company, not before. Publish it three weeks before freeze season. Agents and property managers share pages like that with their clients, and it ranks for the searches that happen at the moment of loss.
Push reviews from the fall jobs
Reviews landed before the surge are what the midnight searcher sees. Go through every job from September and October, text each customer once with the review link and a reference to the specific loss, and reply to each review that comes in. The median restoration company has 16 reviews. Ten landed in November change what the map pack looks like in December.
Check the site on a phone, over cellular
Stand outside, turn off wifi, and load your site. If the phone number is not visible and tappable in one second, fix it before anything else on this list. The midnight caller has one bar and no patience.
The order matters
Hours and the on-call rotation first, because they cost nothing and they decide whether any of the rest works. Then the campaign built and paused, the referral texts, the page, the reviews. All of it done by Thanksgiving. The companies that do this list in October have a calm December. The ones that start in December spend the busiest month of the year on hold with Google support.
Any item on this list can be set up and run in the free 14-day trial, no card, text or call. Starting now leaves time for it to be live before the first freeze.
Steven has spent the last several years running growth campaigns for local service businesses, restoration companies among them, and builds the benchmark datasets on this site from public Google listings. About the editor