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SEO for electricians
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An electrician does at least six different jobs, and customers search for each one separately. The work is making sure the searches for the jobs you want find you, and the rest find somebody else.
Somebody with no power at nine at night, a landlord with a certificate due next month and a homeowner who has just ordered an electric car all search for different things. Electrician SEO that treats them as one audience ends up with a single services page that ranks for none of them. This guide is about the search side: which searches carry which work, and how to be the result for the ones you want. How the pages themselves should be built is in web design for electricians, and the fundamentals every trade shares are in SEO for tradesmen.
Every job is a different search, so every job needs its own page
An emergency callout, a full rewire, a consumer unit upgrade, an EICR, an EV charger install and a commercial testing contract are six searches with six different people behind them. They differ in urgency, in value and in how much reading happens before the phone rings. The callout is decided in a minute. The rewire is decided over weeks, after three quotes. The EICR is decided against a deadline.
Google matches a search to a page, not to a business, so a page that gives all six a paragraph each is a weak match for every one of them. Give each job you want a page of its own that says what it involves, roughly how long it takes, what the customer needs to do beforehand and which areas you cover for it. Start with the jobs that pay best and that you would happily do every week, not the ones that happen to arrive most often. US readers will recognise the same split under different names, a panel upgrade where a UK customer says consumer unit.
Urgent work is won in the map pack
For an emergency, the three businesses in the map block above the ordinary results take most of the calls, and that block is fed by your Google Business Profile rather than your website. Choose the primary category for the work you most want, add secondary categories only where they are true, and keep the hours honest. An electrician who claims round the clock cover and does not answer at two in the morning collects reviews that say so.
Set the service area to the places you will actually drive to at short notice. Somebody with a fault wants a person close by, and a wide claim you cannot service produces calls you turn down, which is time on the phone for nothing.
Reviews do double duty here: they move the map ranking and they decide the call. Ask on the day the job finishes, by text, and ask whether the customer would mention what the job was. A review saying the consumer unit was replaced in a day and the house left clean does more for the next consumer unit search than five stars on their own.
Registration is something a customer can check, so let them
NICEIC and NAPIT both run public registers, and a careful customer, a landlord or letting agent especially, will look you up before booking. Where your registration is genuine, show the body and the number on your profile and on the pages for the work it covers, so the check takes seconds rather than a search of its own. Never show a scheme you are not on: it is checkable, which is exactly why it is worth having. In the US the equivalent is the state licence number, which many states publish in a public lookup.
Registration rarely lifts a ranking on its own. It converts the ranking you already have, which on a trade site is usually the cheaper win.
Landlord EICRs are work you can plan
Most electrical work arrives when something breaks. Landlord certificates arrive on a clock. In England, private landlords need an electrical installation condition report at least every five years, and Scotland and Wales have their own rules along similar lines, so check the one that applies to your area. The same properties need inspecting again on a known date, and the landlord or agent searches for it by name, usually close to the deadline.
That makes it the most plannable search in the trade. A page that says what the inspection covers, what happens if something fails, how the report is delivered and how quickly you can book catches the search. Keep a record of when each certificate you issue falls due and next year's work is sitting in a spreadsheet before you have spent anything on marketing.
An EICR is not a one-off job. It is the same customer, on a date you already know, needing the same thing again.
EV chargers are a considered job, and the page decides it
Somebody searching for a home charger has usually just ordered a car. They do not yet know whether their supply can take it, where the unit should go, how far the cable has to run or whether any grant applies to them. They read several pages before asking for a quote, which makes this one of the few electrical jobs where the page itself wins or loses the work.
Answer those questions plainly. Say which units you fit and why, what the survey involves, and what makes an install cost more than the headline price. Grant eligibility has narrowed and changed more than once, so point to the current government guidance rather than promising a figure. Many of the results for these searches are national installers, and a local electrician who explains the job properly and can be back next week is a real alternative to them.
Electrician marketing ideas worth the time
Most lists of electrician marketing ideas are long and generic. These are the ones that tend to produce work you can trace back to where it came from:
- Ask every customer for a review on the day the job ends, mentioning the job and the town if they are happy to.
- Add photographs of real jobs to your profile as you finish them: the consumer unit, the charger on the wall, the van outside.
- Write the page for your best paying job first, then the next, one at a time.
- Keep a renewal list for every EICR you issue and remind the landlord before it falls due.
- Ask every new caller where they found you, and write it down, until the tracking does it for you.
- Keep your name, address and number identical everywhere you are listed, and skip the paid directory bundles.
How to get more electrical work of the kind you want
The usual question is how to get more electrical work. The better one is how to get more of the work you want: more rewires and fewer midnight callouts, more commercial testing and fewer single socket jobs. Search can be pointed. The pages you build, the categories you choose and the ads you run decide which enquiries arrive.
In practice an electrician wants five things from all this: to turn up when somebody local searches, a phone that rings with the right jobs, a site that works on a phone and makes you look like the safe choice, ads you can turn up when the diary is empty and down when it is full, and to know which of it actually paid. That is SEO, lead generation, web design, ads and web development, in the words a contractor would use, and it is how we run marketing for electricians. It starts with measurement: every call and form recorded as a conversion, tagged with the search behind it, so next month's decisions rest on jobs rather than on traffic.
