This guide covers SEO for electricians.
Below, you’ll find a list of tips that can help improve search engine optimization for an electrician website. Understanding how to do good SEO for electrical contractors is essential for getting more organic search traffic, which means more general contractors and customers hiring your business for residential and commercial jobs.
You’ll also find a set of SEO keywords for electricians to help you get started with the on-page and off-page search engine optimization process.
By the end of this guide, you’ll know how to set up a complete SEO strategy for an electrical contractor website to give your business the best chance possible of ranking for its local target keywords in search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
What Is SEO for Electricians?
SEO for electricians is the process of using search engine optimization to improve an electrical contractor’s website so it shows up more in the search results for relevant keywords that attract customers. Electrician SEO focuses on getting results through unpaid organic search traffic.
Why Electrician SEO Is Important
SEO is important for electricians because it makes it easier to reach new leads and customers without using paid search campaigns. Good electrician SEO helps the website rank higher in local search results which is a cost-effective digital marketing strategy with a high return on investment (ROI).
SEO for Electricians
1. Focus On Local SEO for Electricians
The first step for doing SEO for electricians is to focus your marketing strategy on local search engine optimization rather than a national or global SEO campaign. Local SEO is a search engine optimization method that helps electrical contractors with a physical address increase visibility in local search result listings on Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
Local SEO for electrical contractors generates better online visibility. And without it, your business will be invisible to other contractors and customers who are searching for a good electrician to hire through the Local Map Pack box that appears at the top of search engines and within the Map feature itself.
The strategies throughout this guide will help you improve your local SEO results for an electrician’s website to generate more leads, customers, and opportunities for electrical work for both residential and commercial projects.
2. Create a Google My Business Profile
The next step for effective electrician SEO is to create a Google Business Profile by going to google.com/business/.
Previously referred to as Google My Business, this is a free profile listing your local electrical contractor business on Google’s search engine to help increase visibility for local searches. As mentioned previously, without a Google Business Profile, your website cannot appear in Google Maps or rank in the Local Map Pack that’s displayed to users on the first page of Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs).
Now, Google requires a physical address for every business. But if you don’t have an office location for your electrical company, then you can just use your home address when setting up your Google Business Profile. That’s perfectly safe and common for many electrical contractors.
After you create your free Google Business listing, you should follow these optimization tips below to maximize the SEO value of your profile.
- Claim and verify your business listing.
- Include the name, address, phone number, and hours of operation.
- Include the website URL.
- Add the business opening date.
- Add relevant keywords to the business description that apply to your electrical contractor services. (See this other guide for tips on how to add keywords to Google My Business.)
- Choose primary and secondary categories that relate to electrical work.
- Add relevant business attributes.
- Add all of your electrician services. The more, the better.
- Upload photos and videos of completed electrical work as well as common wiring issues you fix as a contractor.
- Pre-populate questions about your electrical services and then provide the answers.
- Set up messaging to communicate with potential customers who want to talk to you in real-time through your Google Business listing.
The SEO tips above for electricians come from this Google My Business Optimization Checklist. See that related page for expanded details on any of those items.
3. Create Bing and Yahoo Business Profiles
Bing and Yahoo are the second and third most-used search engines in the world. And for some people, Bing or Yahoo is their default search engine on their desktop computer or mobile phone.
Therefore, you should also set up a free business profile for your electrician services on these two websites to attract more local search traffic. If you don’t, you’re essentially missing out on new leads, customers, and contracting opportunities.
Fortunately, this step is easy to do for SEO. You can apply the same tips in the last step to your Bing and Yahoo profiles.
- Set up a Bing Places profile here: bingplaces.com
- Set up a Yahoo profile through Yext here: yext.com/pl/yahoo-listings/index.html
4. Add NAP & Schema to the Electrician Website
Another important local SEO strategy for electricians is to add NAP information on the website through Schema Markup. NAP stands for name, address, and phone number. And Schema Markup is a type of structured data code that presents the NAP information in a language that search engines like Google use to read and understand for SEO.
It’s important to have consistent NAP information online for your electrical contractor business because even a slight mismatch of NAP details can cause ranking issues for the company in the search engines.
For example, there are many ways to format an address for a business that’s located on a route highway, such as:
- Route 9
- RTE-9
- RT-9
- US Route 9
- U.S. Route 9
- Highway 9
- US Highway 9
- U.S. Highway 9
The best tip for electrician SEO you can follow for the NAP information is to establish a single standard format for the address and stick with it throughout your websites and on every online marketing channel you choose to use. This concept also applies to your electrical business name and phone number format. Always use the exact same name and format for these business details.
For example, if your business is a Limited Liability Company and you include LLC at the end of your business name on legal or billing documents, then make sure to include LLC on your website and business profiles you set up in step 2 and 3 above. This strategy will reduce confusion about these important business details for the local search engine ranking algorithms.
After you’ve established consistent NAP information for your electrical business, you’ll want to make sure the NAP information is listed accurately on every web page. This helps verify the accuracy of the listings search engine algorithms crawl on third-party sites.
There are three ways to do this SEO strategy for electricians:
- Put the name, address, and phone number in the website footer.
- Include the NAP information on both the about and contact pages.
- Include Schema Markup on the site that has the NAP information.
Schema Markup is a type of HTML code that helps improve the quality of your business listing in Google, Yahoo, and Bing because it contains the key information for your company to display in the SERPs. Essentially, Schema Markup gives the search engine crawlers accurate details about your business so there is no guesswork involved.
You can create the Schema Markup for your contractor business for free by using Rank Ranger’s Schema Markup Generator. Choose the “Local Business” option to get the correct fields for NAP and SEO. Once you’re done using the tool, copy the HTML code and place it in the HTML section of the footer on your website.
Once you’re done with this step, the foundation of your website is set up correctly to rank for local searches in Google, Yahoo, and Bing.
5. Choose Good SEO Keywords for Electrical Contractors
The next step for doing SEO for electrical contractors is to choose the right keywords to target for attracting local customers and general contractors who hire electricians for residential and commercial projects.
This step is important because you want your website to be displayed in Google, Yahoo, and Bing for relevant keyword searches in the organic SERP listings that are not inside the Map feature.
At the end of this guide, you’ll find a section with a list of good SEO keywords for electricians to help you generate ideas for your website. To get started here, just think about the various words and phrases that potential customers and other contractors would use to find your type of business online.
For example, local customers looking for help with a home remodeling project would search for phrases such as:
- home electrician in Seattle
- residential electrician in Vermont
- New York domestic electrician
- Provo house wiring electrician
To make the keyword research process easier, it’s good to use an SEO keyword research tool like KWFinder by Mangools (try it for free). KWFinder is one of the only SEO tools I recommend as an affiliate because it’s cheap, yet powerful for keyword research. However, you can use any other tool you like on the market.
A keyword research tool like KWFinder is important for electrician SEO because you can search for a seed keyword like “electrical contractor Chicago” and get a list of other related terms to fill out your SEO keyword list. (More details about this in the next tip.)
Also, a tool like KWFinder shows you the average number of searches per month for each keyword and the SEO difficulty score to help you estimate how hard it may be to rank for that term in the top 10 positions on Google.
In the image below, you can see this process in practice. Related keyword ideas for “electrical contractor Chicago” include “electrician companies in Chicago”, “residential electrician Chicago”, “commercial electrical contractors Chicago”, etc.
You’ll want to take your time doing keyword research to uncover all of the keyword variations people use to find electrical contracting services in your local area and state. You may be surprised at the different types of words potential customers and other contractors use to find good electricians to hire online.
Your goal here is to come up with a long list of ideas for every type of electrical services work you offer so you can capture the most organic search traffic possible. More about this strategy is explained in the next SEO tip.
6. Add Web Pages for Each Electrician Service
After you’ve completed your keyword research for SEO, you’ll want to create a separate web page for each type of electrical contractor service you offer.
For example, if you’re a residential electrician, you don’t just want to have a single page on your site about home electrical work. Instead, you want 5, 10, 15, or even more pages that target SEO keywords people use to hire various types of residential electrical contracting work.
The more pages you have on your site, the more opportunities your electrical business has to get indexed in the search engines for relevant SEO keywords that attract leads and customers.
In step 8 below, you’ll learn how to optimize each of these web pages for on-page SEO. But for now, you just need to come up with the largest list possible of relevant electrical services your business offers. Then assign an individual web page for each service and start building it out with high-quality content that explains the type of work.
Again, this is where a keyword research tool like KWFinder comes in handy for electricians. You can enter a seed keyword and get additional ideas about how people are searching online to find the type of services you offer.
For example, these are the types of SEO keywords that KWFinder revealed for the search phrase “electrical contractor”, which could be individual pages on the website to attract more search engine traffic:
- residential electrical contractor
- industrial electrical contractor
- commercial electrical contractor
- low voltage contractor
- high voltage electrical contractor
- home electrical contractors
- electrical installation contractor
For this step, you want to omit your local area or state in the keyword search. Right now, all you want to do is uncover every keyword variation that relates to electrical contracting. So start with seed keywords like “electrician” and “electrical contractor”. Then, search again for each of the specific types of electricians people hire as mentioned in the list above.
Basically, you’re diving deeper and deeper into each keyword phrase to uncover every variation you can use for a web page on your site. More examples of good SEO keywords for electricians can be found at the end of this guide.
7. Optimize for On-Page SEO
The next stage of doing SEO for electricians is to optimize each web page for its target keywords using on-page search engine optimization strategies. On-page SEO is a critical element for higher rankings on Google, Yahoo, and Bing because search engine crawlers use certain HTML signals on the page to understand the keywords the content should rank for in the SERPs.
The tips below will give you a crash course in on-page SEO to help your electrician website rank higher on Google, Yahoo, and Bing for its target keywords.
Note: Each web page should be optimized for both the target keyword phrase you found during the keyword research process in the last step as well as your local service area. For example, if you’re a business located in Boise, Idaho, and you’re creating a web page that targets the keyword phrase “low voltage contractor”, then you’ll want your target phrase for on-page SEO to be “low voltage contractor in Boise, Idaho”.
This step is important to help your web pages rank for localized keyword searches instead of national or global searches that won’t bring visitors that convert into customers.
Now that you understand that local SEO strategy, you’ll want to optimize these specific HTML elements for SEO on each page:
- Page Meta Title: Put the entire keyword phrase at the start of this field. This HTML element is invisible to the visitor but crawled by Google and displayed for your listing in the SERPs.
- Page Meta Description: Start this field with the keyword phrase, then add language that encourages people to click on your listing, such as “same day service”, “emergency service”, etc. Do not go over 160 characters. This is your mini sales message to get people to visit your site.
- Page URL: Make this the exact match keyword phrase with dashes (-) in between each word; not underscores (_).
- H1 Heading: Copy the page meta title into this section. Typically, this is coded as the visible title for the page for your visitors to read.
- H2 Subheading: Include the keyword phrase in the first H2 subheading on the page, which should appear directly after the introduction content.
- Body Content: Include the entire keyword phrase a few times through the main content of the page in a natural way. Add the first instance in the introduction and the last in the summary. Don’t go above 5 instances to avoid over-optimization.
By following these on-page SEO tips, you’ll have your target keyword phrase in the optimal locations for search engines to crawl and better understand which keywords the page should rank for in the SERPs. Again, make sure to include the local service area for each keyword instance. Referring to the example above, you should see “low voltage contractor in Boise, Idaho” in all of these on-site HTML locations.
8. Create Optimized Internal Links
You can further improve the on-site signals for your web pages by adding optimized internal links to boost the SEO relevancy. Each time you link internally to a page on your electrician site, you’re telling the search engine crawlers that the page is important for your users and it should have more search engine visibility.
Additionally, the anchor text used for the internal links is also a ranking factor for SEO in Google, Yahoo, and Bing. Search engines use this anchor text information to help confirm what keywords the content should rank for in the SERPs.
Here are the basics you need to know to get started for electrical contractor websites:
- Include at least 3-5 internal links to every service page on your site from within the body content of those pages.
- Use the main keyword for the target page as the anchor text for the internal links.
- For internal links you build above number 3, include additional filler words in the anchor text to avoid over-optimization.
If you only have a few electrical service pages, then you may find it difficult to do proper internal linking for SEO as mentioned in this tip. Therefore, you should consider adding a blog to your website where you answer common questions about electrical projects. This blogging strategy will give you plenty of opportunities to add internal links to your services pages to improve the SEO performance as well as gain more organic search traffic that can lead to contracting work.
Here’s an example of how to use this SEO tip for electricians that has a services page targeting the keyword phrase, “home electrician in Akron, Ohio”:
- Internal Link #1: home electrician in Akron, Ohio
- Internal Link #2: home electrician in Akron, Ohio
- Internal Link #3: home electrician in Akron, Ohio
- Internal Link #4: general home electrician in Akron, Ohio
- Internal Link #5: home electrician in Akron, Ohio details
9. Build Local Citations for Electricians
Another good SEO tip for electrician websites is to use off-site search engine optimization techniques in the form of local citations to improve the Domain Authority and trust of your website through backlinks.
A backlink is a third-party website linking to your electrician site. And these links count as votes of confidence in your business for the search engine algorithms to take into consideration when ranking your site for relevant keywords.
In competitive markets, the web pages with the most backlinks typically rank higher in the SERPs for their target SEO keywords. However, on-page SEO is also factored into the ranking algorithm. Therefore, if you can do both good on-page (as mentioned previously) and off-page SEO by building backlinks, then your electrical contractor website can get more search engine visibility for its target keywords.
The easiest method for getting backlinks for an electrician’s site is to build local citations, which are placed on business directories that list the NAP information for a business along with the website’s URL.
You can find a complete list of business listing directories here. But to get started quickly, below are some of the top business directory sites you can use to create local citations to improve your site’s off-site SEO signals:
- yelp.com
- foursquare.com
- bbb.org
- mapquest.com
- yellowpages.com
- hotfrog.com
- local.com
- pro.angi.com
- manta.com
10. Build Backlinks from Other Contractor Sites
Local citations are not the only way to build quality backlinks to an electrician website. You can also get links from other local contractors who have hired your business for subcontracting work.
The SEO strategy here consists of asking those other business owners if they’ll add a backlink to your website as a reference for local electricians they hire. The link could also be placed in a blog post if the contractor has an active blog. The location on the site doesn’t matter as much as just getting the backlink from the third-party domain.
There are many other ways to create backlinks for electrical contractor websites. You can see this related guide with more tips on how to get high quality backlinks yourself or visit this page on the best link building services that can do the outreach work for you.
BONUS TIP: Get More Online Reviews
If you truly want to maximize the SEO value of the business profile pages on Google, Yahoo, and Bing that you created in steps 2 and 3 of this guide, then you’ll want to get more online reviews for your listing.
The more positive reviews your business has on those platforms, the more trusted it becomes for both users and search engines. And Google’s algorithm, in particular, prefers to rank trusted sites higher in its search engine results pages because they tend to provide a better user experience.
Therefore, you should encourage your residential and commercial customers to leave a review on Google, Yahoo, or Bing for your electrician business to help improve the quality of your listing for local searches.
SEO Keywords for Electricians
Contractor Keyword Ideas | SEO Keyword Examples |
---|---|
“electrician type” + “your local area” | construction electrician in Clearwater, WI |
“electrician service” + “your local area” | indoor lighting electrician in Misty, Ohio |
“class of electrician license” + “your state” | master electrician in Filmont, AK |
“electrical contractor type” + “your local area” | industrial electrical contractor in Baltimore, Maryland |
“electrical contractor service” + “your state” | electrical panel installation in Texas |
residential + electrician + “your local area” | residential electrician in Detroit, Michigan |
commercial + electrical contractor + “your local area” | commercial electrical contractor in Omaha, Nebraska |
emergency + electrician + “your local area” | emergency electrician in Las Vegas, Nevada |
24 hour + electrician + “your state” | 24 hour electrician in Provo, UT |
Note: These SEO keywords for electricians are just general ideas. You can mix and match the examples above and use other words that apply to your particular area of expertise in electrical contractor work.
SEO for Electricians Summary
I hope you enjoyed this guide on SEO for electricians.
As you discovered, the basic strategy for local electrical contractor SEO is to set up business profiles on Google, Yahoo, and Bing to rank for localized searches. You’ll then want to create and optimize web pages for every type of electrician service your business offers to attract more leads and customers. Optimized internal links and quality backlinks are also important for electrical contractor websites as well as getting more positive online reviews for strengthening your off-site SEO signals.
SEO Chatter is dedicated to teaching the fundamentals of search engine marketing to help marketers understand how to increase organic website traffic and improve search engine rankings.