Marketing for electricians, built by someone who only works with trades

Electrical work is one of the few trades where the customer cannot inspect the thing they are buying. They cannot see behind the plasterboard. They cannot judge a termination or read a test result. So they judge everything else: how you answer, how you explain, whether your paperwork looks like the paperwork of a business that knows what it is doing.

That should be an enormous advantage. You are registered with a competent person scheme. You issue certificates. You test, record and sign off work to a standard that most trades never have to meet. Almost none of that reaches the person deciding between you and the next number on the list.

Instead the average electrician website says "fully qualified and insured", drops a couple of scheme logos in the footer, and lists twelve services in a bulleted row. It communicates neither certification nor trust. It reads like it was built once, in an afternoon, by someone who did not ask what the jobs were worth.

The gap is not effort. It is that nobody has translated a regulated trade into something a homeowner or a landlord or a facilities manager can actually assess in ninety seconds on a phone. That translation is the actual job of marketing for an electrical business, and it is the part that almost never gets done.

Ask most electricians and the answer is "word of mouth, mainly". That is usually true and usually incomplete. Recommendation gets your name mentioned. It rarely ends the search there. The person you were recommended to still types your name, or the job, into Google before they ring.

In practice the work arrives through five channels, and almost every electrical business is over-indexed on one of them without having decided to be. Marketing, for a business your size, mostly means choosing which of the five you are going to be deliberate about.

Repeat and referral is the best work you get, and the least controllable. Letting agents and landlords give you steady, low-drama volume once you are on the list, and they are hard to get onto. Search, both the map results and the ordinary blue links, is where the jobs you have no existing relationship with come from. Directories and lead platforms sell you introductions that three other people bought at the same time. Contractors and builders pass you work at a margin you did not set.

The point is not that any channel is wrong. It is that most electricians could not tell you which one produced last month's revenue, so they cannot tell which one to strengthen.

I do not sell leads and I do not buy them. That is a business decision, not a moral one, and it does not mean bought leads are always wrong.

Here is what you are actually buying. An introduction, usually sold to several electricians at once, at a fixed cost per enquiry regardless of whether the enquiry is a rewire or someone wanting a socket moved. You compete on response speed. You have no control over the quality of what arrives, no relationship with the platform's audience, and no asset at the end of it. Stop paying, and the enquiries stop that day.

Now the fair part. Buying leads is genuinely the right call in three situations. When you are new and have no reputation, no reviews and no rankings, and you need work this month rather than in six. When you have real spare capacity, an apprentice standing idle, and a low marginal cost of doing one more job. And when you are testing a new service line or a new area and want volume quickly before committing to building anything.

What makes it a trap is running it as a permanent strategy. Cost per lead rises, competition on the platform rises, and after three years you have spent more than a website and a search programme would have cost while owning nothing. The test I would apply: work out your cost per won job, not per lead, and compare it against what the same money would buy in an asset you keep. If you cannot calculate cost per won job, that is the first thing to fix, whatever else you do.

Everything is done by one person. Me, James Tandy. There is no account manager, no junior writing your service pages, and nothing sent offshore. You have my number and you speak to the person doing the work.

Websites are £1,995, fixed. Up to eight pages, two rounds of revisions, live in three to four weeks, thirty days of support after launch, and you own it outright including the domain and the files. Local SEO starts at £495 a month with no long contract and a report every month that shows what changed and what it did.

The first step is a free audit. I look at your website, your Google Business Profile and what you currently rank for in your area, and I send you a written summary within three working days. I review it personally. There is no sales call attached to it and no obligation afterwards. If the answer is that you do not need me, the audit will say so.

I will not promise you rankings or a number of enquiries by a given date. Anyone who does is guessing. What I will tell you is what is wrong, what I would change, in what order, and what it costs.