Legionella: the compliance work nobody is competing for

Across the compliance disciplines we run brands in, legionella and water hygiene consistently show the worst average search positions. Not slightly worse — materially worse, with large parts of the demand sitting on pages most people will never see.

That sounds like bad news. It is the opposite. Poor positions across an entire discipline mean nobody in that discipline is doing the work. The positions are not being defended; they are simply vacant.

Why the discipline is invisible

Water hygiene has a structural marketing problem that the other compliance trades do not share quite so acutely.

The duty is widely misunderstood. Most employers, landlords and building owners have some obligation to assess and control the risk of legionella under health and safety law. A very large number of them have never heard of it, or assume it applies only to cooling towers and hospitals. Demand that the market does not know it has is demand nobody markets against.

The work is unglamorous and recurring. Risk assessments, temperature monitoring, tank inspections, chlorination. It does not produce a before-and-after photograph. Firms that do it well tend to be technical operators who grew by word of mouth and referral, and who have never needed a website that does anything.

The buyer is often an intermediary. Facilities managers, managing agents and maintenance contractors buy a lot of water hygiene work on behalf of someone else. That has trained the industry to sell business-to-business, through relationships, and to neglect the direct search channel entirely.

All three are reasons the positions are empty. None of them is a reason they should stay empty.

The question behind most of the searches

The largest cluster of water hygiene searches we see is not people shopping for a provider. It is people trying to establish whether the law applies to them, and what it would cost if it does.

Is legionella testing a legal requirement. Do I need a legionella risk assessment for a rental property. How often does a legionella risk assessment need reviewing. What does a legionella risk assessment cost. Who is responsible for legionella in a leased building.

These are not browsing queries. A landlord asking whether legionella testing is a legal requirement is a landlord who suspects it might be and is worried. A facilities manager asking about review frequency has an assessment on file and is trying to work out whether it has expired.

They convert well, for a reason worth stating plainly: the person who answers the obligation question becomes the obvious person to fix the obligation. There is no comparison stage. The search ends when the question is answered and the booking form is there.

We looked at this intent split across all the compliance trades in why price and regulation questions beat “near me”. Water hygiene is where the effect is strongest, because the proportion of buyers who do not yet know they are buyers is the highest.

Three products, three buyers

Most water hygiene sites present a single service list. The work actually divides into three, and they are bought by different people for different reasons.

The risk assessment. Bought by the duty holder — a landlord, an employer, a managing agent — usually in response to an obligation they have just become aware of. First-time buyers, uncertain, price-sensitive, and the largest group by number.

Ongoing monitoring. Bought by facilities and maintenance managers who already have an assessment and need the control measures carried out: temperature checks, flushing records, tank inspections. These are contract buyers with an existing programme, often switching from an incumbent.

Remedial and specialist work. Chlorination, disinfection, tank cleaning, pipework modifications. Bought against a specific finding, usually urgently, often by whoever is managing the building that day.

Three pages, three sets of questions, three enquiry routes. A firm that does all three and says so on one page is competing weakly in all three.

The recurring argument

A legionella risk assessment is not a one-off. The guidance expects it to be reviewed periodically and whenever the system or its use changes, which in practice means a cycle of roughly two years for most buildings, and the control measures in between are continuous.

So the first assessment is the start of a programme, not a transaction. Won properly, it produces an assessment fee, a monitoring contract, periodic reviews and whatever remedial work the assessment identifies — from a single building, from a single enquiry.

That is a substantial lifetime value for what is typically a modest first invoice, and it is the number that should decide what you are willing to spend to acquire one. Most water hygiene firms we have spoken to price their marketing against the assessment fee and conclude it does not work. Priced against the programme, it works easily.

What to build first

If you do one thing: build the obligation page.

Not a services page. A page whose only job is to answer, clearly and honestly, whether legionella risk assessment is a legal requirement for the reader — with the distinctions that actually matter. Employer versus landlord. Residential versus commercial. Domestic rental versus HMO. What the duty actually says, and what it does not.

Then a cost page with a real range and the variables that move it. Then review frequency. Then responsibility in leased buildings, which is a genuinely confusing question that almost nobody answers well.

Four pages. In a discipline where almost nobody is competing, four good pages will move you further than a year of anything else. And when you have them, the step after is making sure the enquiries that arrive are handled quickly, because response speed decides who wins far more often than price does.