The short answer
Electrical work is six search markets, not one. The contractors winning online give every real service its own page, above all EV charger installation, which is the fastest-growing part of the enquiry mix and the worst-served page on most electrician websites.
Key takeaways
- Fault finding, EICRs, rewires and EV charging are four different buyers arriving in four different frames of mind.
- EV charger installation is the fastest-growing part of the enquiry mix and the thinnest page on most electrician websites.
- An EV page answering grants, supply capacity, charger choice, timescale and price beats local competitors who have written nothing.
- State your scheme registration in the scheme's own words, with the number, because homeowners check registers and a logo proves nothing.
- Reviews naming the actual job beat a longer pile of reviews saying great service, because the job words are what people search.
Electrical work looks like one trade from the inside and six separate markets from the outside of a search box. The contractors doing well online are the ones who stopped treating those markets as a single services page. This guide covers how each type of electrical searcher behaves, why EV charger installation is the segment most sites still treat as a footnote, and what to fix first.
The six searches an electrician actually competes for
Each stream arrives in a different frame of mind, from a panicked hallway phone call to a buyer who reads for weeks before ringing anyone.
When people talk about SEO for electricians they treat it as one job. It is not. There are at least six distinct demand streams behind an electrician's phone, and the person behind each is in a completely different frame of mind.
Two of the six need less explaining than the rest. Consumer unit upgrades sit in between: the job usually starts as something else, a failed inspection or an insurance question, and becomes a specified job, so the searcher is half informed and wants someone to confirm what they have been told. Outdoor lighting is discretionary and visual, bought on photographs more than on any wording you use. The four that decide how a site should be built are below.
Fault finding: an emergency, decided in seconds
A fault finding search is an emergency. Half the house is dark, the RCD will not stay in, there is a burning smell from a socket. That person is standing in a hallway on a phone and will call the first three numbers that look local. Nothing you write persuades them. What wins is the map pack, a number one tap away, and answering it.
EICRs and landlord certificates: a deadline
- EICR
- Electrical Installation Condition Report. An inspection and test of a property's fixed wiring, written up as a report that says whether the installation is satisfactory and lists what needs putting right. Landlords and letting agents are the usual buyers, which is why the search normally arrives with a date attached.
That buyer is neither scared nor excited. They have a date to hit and a form that needs signing off, so they want price certainty, availability and confidence the certificate will be accepted, and they often book by email rather than phone.
Rewires: months of reading first
A rewire search is a months-long consideration. Nobody wakes up and rewires a house on Tuesday. They are pricing it against a kitchen, worrying about plaster and carpets, and reading for weeks before they contact anyone. They will visit your site more than once and compare you against others.
EV charging: unlike anything else on the list
EV charging behaves unlike any of the others, and it is where most electrician websites give up. Like the rewire buyer, this one reads before ringing, but the questions are technical enough that a paragraph cannot answer them.
EV charger installation is the segment sites still treat as a footnote
Most sites give EV charger installation one line on a services list, so the five questions the buyer has get answered on somebody else's site.
Across the electrical contractors I look at, EV charger installation is the fastest-growing part of the enquiry mix and the worst-served part of the website. I will not put a number on that growth, because any figure I invented would be worthless. You already know the direction of travel from your own diary.
Here is what a typical electrician website does with it. There is a services list, and the eighth item says EV charger installation. It links nowhere, or to a paragraph. The searcher has questions a paragraph cannot answer, so they answer them somewhere else, usually on a manufacturer's site or a national installer's, and that is where the job goes.
The five questions an EV charger buyer needs answered
Grants and eligibility
Is there funding they can claim, do they qualify, and can you claim it for them.
Whether their supply can take it
Main fuse rating, earthing arrangement, whether the network operator must be notified or the supply upgraded, and whether load management is the cheaper answer to a marginal supply. Homeowners cannot answer that one alone, which is the best reason to call an electrician rather than order a charger online.
Which charger
Tethered or untethered, cable length, smart features, and whether you fit a range or one brand.
How long it takes
Whether it is one visit or two, and what happens to the wall.
Cost
Give a real range with the variables that move it, or at least explain what makes an installation cheap and what makes it expensive.
Answer those five properly on a dedicated page and you are ahead of most local competitors on EV charger installer searches, because most have written nothing.
NICEIC, NAPIT and Part P: what to claim and how to word it
Nobody is Part P qualified; what exists is scheme registration in a named category, and stating that accurately beats a row of badges.
Trust signals matter more in electrical work than in almost any other trade, because the buyer cannot inspect the work and knows it can burn their house down. They only help if you present them accurately, and plenty of trade sites present them in a way a knowledgeable reader sees through.
Part P is a section of the Building Regulations covering electrical safety in dwellings in England and Wales, with separate building standards regimes in Scotland and Northern Ireland. It is not a qualification, and there is no such thing as being Part P qualified however often the phrase is used.
What exists is a set of government-authorised competent person schemes whose members can self-certify that notifiable domestic work complies, rather than notifying building control job by job.
NICEIC and NAPIT are two of the bodies that operate those schemes. They are separate organisations, registration with one is not registration with the other, and each runs different categories. A domestic installer registration is not an approved contractor assessment covering commercial and industrial work.
So write it plainly: registered with a named scheme in a named category, number given, work certified to BS 7671. Say which registration you hold in the words the scheme itself uses, and put the number on the site. Boring, and worth more than a row of badges.
Two things not to do.
- Do not display a logo for a scheme you have lapsed on. It is the fastest way to lose a job at the checking stage.
- Do not imply a domestic registration covers commercial work if it does not. Commercial buyers who catch that are gone, and they talk to each other.
Domestic and commercial intent pull in opposite directions
Serve both buyers from one site with a proper commercial section, rather than two sites you cannot feed.
Plenty of electrical contractors do both domestic and commercial work and try to serve both from one website. In my experience that site serves neither well, because the two buyers are convinced by opposite signals.
Photographs of kitchen downlights work against you with a commercial buyer, as does a homepage headline about friendly local electricians.
What differs: What reassures them
- Homeowner
- A face, a van, a tidy finish, reviews from their postcode and a price they can picture
- Commercial buyer
- Insurance limits, method statements, accreditation appropriate to the sector, out-of-hours cover and evidence you have handled sites of their size
What differs: How they search
- Homeowner
- Longer, more anxious, heavier on location
- Commercial buyer
- Shorter and more procurement-flavoured, often with a sector word: commercial electrical contractor, industrial electrician, three phase installation
What differs: Where they should land
- Homeowner
- The main site, leaning toward whichever side pays your wages
- Commercial buyer
- A commercial section with its own landing page, language, examples and contact route, linked from the main navigation rather than buried
| What differs | Homeowner | Commercial buyer |
|---|---|---|
| What reassures them | A face, a van, a tidy finish, reviews from their postcode and a price they can picture | Insurance limits, method statements, accreditation appropriate to the sector, out-of-hours cover and evidence you have handled sites of their size |
| How they search | Longer, more anxious, heavier on location | Shorter and more procurement-flavoured, often with a sector word: commercial electrical contractor, industrial electrician, three phase installation |
| Where they should land | The main site, leaning toward whichever side pays your wages | A commercial section with its own landing page, language, examples and contact route, linked from the main navigation rather than buried |
The fix is usually not two websites. Two sites means two things to maintain and two to rank, and most small contractors cannot feed one properly. The split belongs inside one site.
If you want commercial work as a separate brand, a second site can be defensible. Go in knowing you have doubled the workload.
One page per service beats one page listing services
A page can only be the best answer to one question, so six services sharing a page is the best answer to none of them.
The structural change that does the most work in electrician SEO is also the least glamorous. Give every real service its own page.
A combined services page that gives six things a sentence each is the best answer to none of them, and Google has no reason to show it for any. It also gives the visitor nothing to read, which hurts most with the rewire buyer who wants twenty minutes of understanding before picking up a phone.
- Rewires
- Consumer unit upgrades
- EICRs and landlord certificates
- Fault finding
- EV charger installation
- Outdoor lighting, if you do enough of it to care
A good service page contains the following, in order.
- What the job involves, step by step
- How long it takes and what disruption to expect
- What it typically costs and what moves that number
- How it is certified and what paperwork the customer ends up holding
- The questions you get asked every week, answered honestly
- One obvious way to get in touch
Not clever. Just complete, and complete is rare.
The rewire page deserves the most words, because the rewire buyer reads the most: living in the house during the work, chasing walls versus surface trunking, decorating, phasing, and how a partial rewire differs from a full one. The EV charger page deserves the second most.
The pages then support each other, since a marginal board is a common reason an EV installation costs more than expected, which makes the consumer unit page a companion to both. I go into structuring and linking these on the SEO for electricians page.
The Google Business Profile fields electricians leave empty
For same-week work the profile does more than the website, and most of the available gain sits in fields nobody filled in.
For the emergency and same-week end of electrical work, your Google Business Profile does more than your website does, and it is where most contractors leave the easiest gains on the table. Six fields, in the order I would work through them.
Set the categories properly
Electrician is the right primary for most, but add secondaries for the distinct work you do rather than leaving one generic listing.
Fill in the services list
Most profiles list three or four services when they could list fifteen. Add each real service with a short description, in the words a customer uses: house rewiring, consumer unit replacement, electrical safety certificate, EV charger installation, fault finding, emergency callout.
Spend ten minutes on attributes
Whether you offer online estimates, whether you serve the customer's location rather than working from a shopfront, identity attributes where they apply, accessibility details if people visit premises. They feed filtered searches you otherwise never appear in.
Set the service area honestly
Thirty towns you would never drive to does not extend your reach, it dilutes the signal for the places you actually work. Set the radius you cover and let the website's location pages do the rest.
Use photos as evidence rather than decoration
A tidy consumer unit, a finished EV charger on a normal house, the van, you. Recent photos beat stock. Post about the work you want more of, because a profile showing EV installations is likelier to be shown for EV searches.
Ask for reviews that name the job
Ask after every job, and ask the customer to mention the actual job in their own words rather than leaving a general compliment.
Twenty reviews saying EV charger, rewire and consumer unit beat fifty saying great service.
A self-audit you can run this evening
Six checks on your own phone tell you where the enquiries are leaking before you pay anyone to look.
Do this on your phone rather than your laptop, and pretend you are the customer rather than the owner. It takes an evening and costs nothing.
Search for yourself in a private window
Search your main service plus your town and note where you appear, if at all, in the map results and the ordinary results underneath. Repeat for each of the six services above, one at a time, because the answers differ and the gaps are the point.
Count your service pages
Not blog posts, service pages. Fewer than five real ones and that is your first job, built in the order of the work you most want. Check each answers cost, duration, process and certification, because a page that skips cost loses to one that does not.
Find the EV charger page
Be honest about whether it is a page or a line item. If it is a line item, ask whether it answers grants, supply capacity, charger choice, timescale and price. If it answers none of them, you are asking the customer to choose you while knowing nothing, and mostly they will not.
Check the trust signals
Is the scheme registration named accurately, with a number, and is it current. Is your insurance mentioned. Is there a real name and face anywhere on the site, because anonymity costs more in electrical work than in any other trade.
Test the mechanics
Tap your own phone number on a mobile and see whether it dials. Time the homepage on mobile data rather than office wifi. Fill in your own contact form and see when the enquiry arrives and whether anything acknowledges it. Check your name, address and phone number match exactly across the site, the profile and any directories.
Count your profile services
Fewer than ten entries in the Google Business Profile services list and you have found ten minutes of work worth doing tonight.
What I would fix first, in order
A weekend on the EV charger page and the profile services list costs nothing and moves the most.
If you only have one weekend, spend it on two things. Build a proper EV charger installation page that answers the five questions above, and fill out your Google Business Profile services list. Neither costs anything.
After that, split the services page into individual pages, starting with the job you most want more of. Then make your certification wording accurate.
None of this is clever or fast, but it compounds, and it belongs to you rather than to a lead seller taking a cut of your work. I do not sell leads and would not buy them either. Owning the enquiry is the point.
If you would rather someone looked with fresh eyes, that is what the free audit is for. I review the site myself, you get it back within 3 working days, and there is no sales call. You get a written list of what is costing you enquiries, in priority order, including where you stand on the searches your competitors are taking.
The SEO for electricians page explains what ongoing work looks like, from £495 a month.
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The bottom line
Electrical work is six markets, not one, and each searcher behaves differently: the fault finding caller wants an answered phone, the landlord wants a date and a price, the rewire buyer wants weeks of reading. EV charger installation is growing fastest and is the worst served by most electrician websites. Give every real service its own honest page, state your scheme registration accurately with a number, fill out your Google Business Profile properly, and stop asking one page to do six jobs.
Where to go next
Sources
- NICEIC One of the bodies operating a competent person scheme for electrical work. Its register shows whether a business is currently registered and in which category.
- NAPIT A separate registration body running its own scheme and its own categories, so a NICEIC registration is not a NAPIT one and each is checked in its own place.
Written by James Tandy
James builds high-converting websites and runs local SEO for UK home-service businesses, with ten years spent turning local search into booked jobs. More about James →