Build the site around water losses and keep fire as a small, deliberate section. Insurance Information Institute data, citing ISO, puts the average water damage and freezing claim at $13,954 with a frequency of 1.61 claims per 100 house-years, which the III describes as roughly one insured home in 60 filing every year. Fire and lightning averages $83,991 per claim at 0.24 per 100 house-years, roughly one home in 425. Water is the volume business. Fire is the severity business. Most restoration sites are built as though the opposite were true.
Two things before the argument. Both figures are five-year weighted averages covering 2018 through 2022, excluding Alaska, Texas and Puerto Rico. And both are total claim values paid by the insurer across every trade that touched the loss, not what a mitigation contractor invoices. That second point matters more than the numbers do, so it gets its own section below.
A fire claim is worth about six times a water claim; $83,991 divided by $13,954 is 6.0. A fire claim happens about seven times less often; 1.61 divided by 0.24 is 6.7. Those two ratios almost cancel each other out.
Multiply severity by frequency and you get the dollars moving through each category per 100 insured homes per year. Water damage and freezing comes to $22,466. Fire and lightning comes to $20,158. The two are within about ten percent of each other, and given that the source rounds frequency to two decimals, the honest reading is that they are roughly equal.
So a similar amount of insurance money moves through both categories in any given neighborhood. It arrives in completely different shapes. Water arrives as a steady stream of moderate events, about seven of them for every fire. Fire arrives rarely and lands hard. That difference in shape, not the difference in claim size, is what should decide how your pages, your Google Business Profile and your review process are built.
| Measure | Water damage and freezing | Fire and lightning |
|---|---|---|
| Average claim severity | $13,954 | $83,991 |
| Claims per 100 house-years | 1.61 | 0.24 |
| How often a household experiences it | About 1 in 60 insured homes per year | About 1 in 425 insured homes per year |
| Claim dollars per 100 insured homes per year (severity multiplied by frequency) | $22,466 | $20,158 |
| Shape of the demand | Steady year-round with a winter freeze component | Rare and unpredictable, with long gaps in any single service area |
| Relative size of the search pool | Roughly seven times larger | Thin |
Severity, frequency and the one-in-60 and one-in-425 figures come from the Insurance Information Institute, citing ISO, a Verisk Analytics business. The dollars-per-100-homes row is my own multiplication of their two published numbers. The last row is inferred from claim frequency; I have not measured homeowner query volume by category, and I am not going to present an inference as a measurement.
$83,991 is what an insurer paid on an average fire and lightning claim. That number covers structural rebuild, contents, and every trade involved in putting the house back together. A mitigation contractor is one line inside that figure, not the recipient of it. The same is true of the $13,954 on the water side.
Anyone who shows you these numbers and implies they represent job value is selling something. Read them for what they actually are: a measure of how much money moves through each type of event, and how often each event occurs. That is enough to make the decision this post is about. It is not enough to model your revenue, and this post has nothing to say about adjusters, claims handling or what may be billed on a loss.
Water damage restoration marketing carries the site because water carries the call volume. Seven times the events means seven times the households in your service area who have a reason to search this year. The sales cycle is shorter, the decision is made in a panic, and the caller usually has standing water on the floor while they dial.
Build the water cluster by cause, not just by service. Burst supply lines, frozen pipes, appliance overflow, sewage backup, roof intrusion, and general water damage cleanup. Each cause is a different search and a different moment. Then build the city pages on top of the water services first, before you build a single city page for fire.
Fire content will not perform on any metric you normally look at. A fire damage restoration page in a mid-sized market may bring a handful of visits a month. Build it anyway, and build it properly: fire damage restoration, smoke and soot removal, odor treatment, contents cleaning. One fire job changes a quarter, and the page only has to work on the day someone in your area needs it.
The mistake is judging that page by the same standard as the water pages, deciding it does not pay, and cutting it. Judge water pages on call volume. Judge the fire page on whether it exists, ranks, and answers the question clearly when the rare search happens.
Kevin Indig’s analysis of 1.2 million ChatGPT responses found that 44.2% of citations came from the first 30% of a page’s content. If the answer to “what do I do about water in my basement” sits below a company history section, the models are far less likely to pull it.
Whitespark ran 540 manual queries across three US cities and six local service industries and found AI Overviews present in 68% of local searches, against 39% showing local packs. Restoration was not one of the six industries studied, so treat that as a directional read on local search rather than a measurement of your category. The direction is clear enough: answers are being extracted from pages before anyone clicks.
List the water services first in your Google Business Profile and list them individually rather than under one umbrella service. Keep fire in the list; it costs nothing to have it there.
Review velocity is a volume game, and volume lives on the water side. Every water job is a review request. Fire jobs are worth asking too, for a different reason: fire reviews are rare, and the text of one describes a job nobody else in your market has a review for.
The III combines water damage and freezing into a single category, so the freeze losses are already inside that $13,954 average and that 1.61 frequency. I cannot split them apart from this source, and I am not going to guess at the ratio.
What the combination tells you is that a meaningful share of water demand peaks in the cold months, when a lot of the trades around you go quiet. That is a scheduling advantage and a publishing calendar. Frozen pipe content goes live in early fall, not in January when the pipes are already open. Pages need time to rank before the demand shows up.
The III places mold damage inside the water damage and freezing category where policies cover it. That is the correct place for it on your site too. Mold is downstream of a water event, it is the same house and the same customer, and it frequently starts as a call about something else.
Treating mold as a separate business, with its own brand or its own disconnected section, cuts it off from the pages that produce the calls. Link it from the water pages, make the causal chain explicit on the page, and let the water cluster feed it.
Most marketing for restoration companies is sold as one undifferentiated package that treats both loss types the same. They are not the same, and the claim data says so plainly.
NetPageTwo runs this as a productized service. Visibility is $489 a month and covers technical and on-page SEO, AI search optimization, a monthly strategy meeting and email support. Visibility + Revenue is $1,297 a month and adds conversion work, unlimited landing pages, bi-weekly calls and Slack access. Month to month, 14 days notice, no contract.
Book a call here and we will look at how your current pages split between water and fire, and what the split should be.
Related: restoration SEO work.
