By Boiler Quotes Editorial Team · Updated 21 August 2026
Start With the Numbers You Already Have
Before adding a channel, work out what a job is worth to you and how many more you want. An installer chasing two extra installations a week at £3,000 each is looking for roughly £312,000 of additional turnover a year. That figure decides how much effort each channel below is worth.
Then work out what you can afford to spend winning one. At a gross margin of around 30%, a £3,000 job carries roughly £900. Spending £100 of that on getting the work is 11% of the margin, which most installers would take without hesitating. Spending £450 is not.
Every channel below gets judged against those two numbers rather than on whether it sounds modern.
Word of Mouth and Repeat Work
Cost: nothing directly. Speed: slow to build, immediate once established. Effort: low, provided the work is good.
Still the best source of work in this trade and by some distance the cheapest. A fitted boiler lasts ten to fifteen years, so a satisfied customer is not a repeat installation customer. They are a service customer every year, and a recommendation to neighbours and family.
The practical lever is asking. Most installers never ask a happy customer whether anyone they know needs a boiler, and most customers are glad to help. A card left with the paperwork, a reminder set for the annual service, a text when it falls due: none of it costs anything and it is worth more than most paid channels.
The catch: it does not scale on demand. It will not fill a gap next week.
Google Business Profile
Cost: free. Speed: weeks to months. Effort: low to set up, ongoing to maintain.
If you do one thing on this list, do this one. A complete Google Business Profile puts you in the local map results when somebody searches for a boiler installer near them, and it costs nothing at all.
What actually moves it: fill in every field, pick the right primary category, add real photographs of your own work rather than stock images, collect reviews steadily rather than in bursts, and reply to all of them. Post occasionally. Keep the service area accurate.
The catch: you are competing with every other local firm for a small number of map positions, and reviews take time to accumulate.
Local SEO and Your Own Website
Cost: low to high, depending on whether you do it yourself. Speed: six to twelve months at minimum. Effort: high.
Ranking your own site for a new boiler in your town is the most valuable position on this list, because the traffic is free once you have it and it compounds year on year. It is also the slowest and the least certain.
Realistically it means a page for each main service, a page for each town you cover with genuinely different content on each, and the patience to wait two or three quarters before anything moves at all.
The catch: it is a long game against national sites with real budgets. Worth starting early precisely because it takes so long, but it is not a plan for filling next month.
Directories
Cost: annual fee. Speed: weeks. Effort: low once set up.
Membership sites put you in front of customers already looking for a trade, and the review history you build is an asset that keeps working for you. The fee is fixed whether or not the work comes.
The catch: you compete with every other member on the same page, frequently on price, and the fee is sunk through a quiet quarter.
Paid Advertising
Cost: high and immediate. Speed: same day. Effort: high, and it needs managing.
Google Ads on boiler terms is fast and expensive. Clicks on commercial heating searches are among the dearer ones in home services, and you pay for every click whether or not it turns into an enquiry. At a plausible cost per click and a plausible landing page conversion rate, the resulting cost per enquiry frequently lands above what a lead provider charges for the enquiry outright.
That is the honest comparison worth making. Run your own advertising and you own the channel but carry the risk and the management time. Buy leads and you pay a known price for a known thing.
The catch: without somebody competent running it, budget disappears quickly with very little to show. It also stops the moment you stop paying.
Buying Leads
Cost: known, per enquiry. Speed: immediate. Effort: low, beyond answering quickly.
Buying enquiries is the only channel here that turns on like a tap. That is its whole value. It fills a gap next week rather than next year, and it costs nothing in the months your diary is already full.
It is also the channel that builds nothing. Stop buying and it stops, leaving no profile, no rankings and no reviews behind. Which is exactly why it works best as one part of a mix rather than as the whole plan.
Where it fits best: newly established firms with no review history yet, established firms filling seasonal gaps, and anyone expanding into an area where they have no local reputation.
Buying boiler leads? BoilerQuotes sells enquiries from its own site and ads from £8 + VAT, priced by job type. No membership fee and no contract. See how it works for installers.
Putting It Together
| Channel | Cost | Speed | Builds an asset |
|---|---|---|---|
| Word of mouth | None | Slow to build | Yes |
| Google Business Profile | Free | Weeks to months | Yes |
| Local SEO | Low to high | 6 to 12 months | Yes |
| Directories | Annual fee | Weeks | Yes, the reviews |
| Paid advertising | High | Same day | No |
| Bought leads | Per enquiry | Immediate | No |
A sensible mix for most installers: Google Business Profile and word of mouth as the free foundation, your own site built slowly in the background, and bought leads as a tap for the gaps. Paid advertising only once there is somebody to run it properly.
Track Which Channel Actually Paid
Most installers running several channels cannot say which one produced last month’s work, which means they cannot tell which to spend more on and which to stop. Fixing that costs nothing but a habit.
Ask every caller how they found you, and write the answer down next to the job value. A notebook is enough. After three months you will have something most firms in this trade never get: the actual cost per job for each channel, rather than an impression of which one feels busy.
Two traps worth knowing about. People say "Google" when they mean your Business Profile, a paid advert or your website, and those have wildly different costs, so ask what they saw. And a recommendation from a customer who originally came through a paid channel is usually credited to word of mouth, which quietly understates whatever paid for the first job.
The Thing That Beats All of It
Whatever you spend, the single biggest lever on how much work you win is how fast you respond. An enquiry answered within five minutes converts far better than the same enquiry answered the following day, because the customer is still sitting with the problem in front of them and has usually contacted more than one firm.
That applies to every channel on this page. There is no point paying for enquiries you get round to on Thursday. Before adding any new source of work, make sure somebody can pick up the phone.
If bought leads look like the right fit, our guide to what boiler leads cost has the arithmetic, and the providers round-up covers who is in the market.
BoilerQuotes sells boiler enquiries generated on its own site and advertising, capped at three installers per job, with no membership fee and no contract. See coverage and pricing.
