SEO for electricians: the owner's playbook

TL;DR

• SEO for electricians is won in the map results, not on page 2 of the blue links. Your Google Business Profile does more work than your website.
• Google names three local ranking factors: relevance, distance and prominence. Two of those you can actually move.
• If you don’t have a shop customers walk into, you’re a service-area business. Take the address off and set your areas properly.
• One page per job you want to be called for. Rewires, fuse board upgrades, EICRs, EV chargers. Not one “Services” page listing all of them.
• Your scheme registration is a real trust signal. Most electricians bury it in the footer instead of putting it where it counts.

Most electricians who tell me Google has gone quiet don’t have a Google problem. They have a hygiene problem. The profile drifted, the site has one page doing the work of six, and nobody’s asked a customer for a review since 2023.

So this is the order I’d fix things in, and why most of the advice written about seo for electricians skips the parts that actually produce booked work. It’s written for the owner who does the quoting, the wiring and the invoicing, and has about an hour a week for this.

What actually works for seo for electricians?

Get the Google Business Profile right first, then build one page per job you want to win. That’s the whole thing in a sentence. Everything else is detail.

The reason is where the clicks are. Someone whose consumer unit has just tripped at 7pm is on their phone, typing “electrician near me”, and tapping one of the three map results. They’re not reading a 3,000-word guide to Part P.

Ofcom’s Online Nation report, published in December 2025, found UK adults now spend an average of four and a half hours online a day, and most of that time is on a smartphone. So the job isn’t to be encyclopaedic. It’s to be the obvious, credible, close-enough choice in the ten seconds they’re giving you.

Why does your Google Business Profile matter more than your website?

Because it’s the thing that appears in the map pack, and the map pack is where local intent lands. Your website supports the profile. For most electricians it isn’t the other way round.

Google is unusually open about how this works. Its own guidance on local ranking names three factors: relevance (“how well a Business Profile matches what someone is searching for”), distance (“how far each business is from the customer who’s searching”), and prominence (“how well-known a business is”).

Look at what that list gives you. Distance is mostly fixed, unless you move. Relevance and prominence are both things you control, and both are admin rather than genius: relevance is your categories, services, hours and description, and prominence is reviews, links and the general sense that you’re a real, established business. Google says plainly that “more reviews and positive ratings can help your business’s local ranking”.

One more line from that page is worth reading twice: “There’s no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google.” Anyone selling you a shortcut is selling you something else. The rest is profile optimisation: categories, services, hours, photos, posts.

Should you show your address or hide it?

If customers don’t come to you, hide it. This is the single most common setup mistake I see on electricians’ profiles, and it’s the one Google is most specific about.

Google’s guidelines say to use a precise, accurate address and service area to describe your business. Its service area guidance is blunter: if you don’t serve customers at your business address, remove the address and only enter your service area.

For most electricians that means your home address comes off the profile. You’re a service-area business. You go to them.

This makes owners nervous, because it feels like losing the postcode signal. To be honest, the risk runs the other way: a profile showing a residential address you don’t trade from can get flagged, and a suspension costs you far more than the postcode was ever worth.

Setting your service areas without tripping the rules

There are two hard numbers here, and they’re both in Google’s own documentation. You can list up to 20 service areas. And the boundary of your overall area “shouldn’t be more than about 2 hours of driving time from where your business is based”.

Twenty sounds generous until you start listing every village within an hour. Then it stops meaning anything.

The better move is to list the places you genuinely turn up to and would take a 7am call from. If you’re an electrician in Slough, that’s Slough, Langley, Burnham, Farnham Common, Windsor, Maidenhead. Not Bristol because you did one job there in 2019.

By the way, this is a separate thing from the pages on your website. Your service area tells Google where you’ll travel. Your local SEO pages are what earn the ranking for “electrician in [town]”. Owners conflate the two constantly, then wonder why listing 20 areas didn’t do anything.

Why does one page per job beat one page for everything?

Because each job is a different search, with a different intent and a different price tag, and one page can only rank convincingly for one of them. A “Services” page listing eight things ranks properly for none.

Think about what people actually type:

• “fuse board replacement cost”
• “EICR certificate [town]”
• “EV charger installation [town]”
• “house rewire [town]”
• “emergency electrician [town]”

Those are five different customers. The EICR one is a landlord with a legal deadline. The EV charger one has just ordered a car and is price-checking. The emergency one doesn’t care about your About page.

Give each its own page, with its own honest explanation of what the job involves and the questions you get asked on the phone every week. That’s it. Google’s Search Essentials keeps saying the same thing: create helpful, reliable, people-first content that shows real experience.

There’s a trap, though. Don’t take that logic and build 200 pages by mashing every service against every village. Google has been hostile to thin, templated pages for years. Five real pages beat two hundred spun ones.

Do Part P and scheme registration help you rank?

Not directly, but they help you win the click, and that’s most of what you wanted from the ranking anyway. This is the bit generic SEO advice always misses about electricians: you’re in a regulated trade, and that’s an advantage.

Joining a government-approved competent person scheme lets you self-certify that your work meets building regulations, instead of the customer paying for building control. GOV.UK lists the authorised schemes, and homeowners are told they can search the register to check you’re on it.

So your customer has been sent, by the government, to check whether you’re registered. Then they land on your site and your scheme logo is a 40-pixel image in the footer.

Put it where the decision happens: on the service page, in plain words, saying what scheme you’re on, what that means for them, and that they get a certificate. Google’s structured data for local businesses can carry your name, address, phone and hours into search results too, which is worth setting up once.

How do you get reviews without getting them filtered?

Ask every customer, at the moment the job’s finished, and never offer anything in return. That’s the whole system. The complicated versions are the ones that get you in trouble.

Google’s content policy prohibits offering incentives, such as payment, discounts or free goods, in exchange for reviews. Reviews are meant to reflect a real experience.

This isn’t only Google’s rule any more. Since April 2025, UK law bans fake and concealed incentivised reviews under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act. The CMA’s fake reviews guidance also covers hiding negative reviews and presenting ratings misleadingly. The penalties apply to the business, not the agency that suggested it.

So: a text the same day, with a direct link, saying you’d appreciate a review and it helps other people find you. Don’t tell them what to write. Don’t offer a discount. Don’t ask only the happy ones, which is its own banned practice.

And reply to all of them, including the bad one. The reply isn’t for the reviewer. It’s for the next person reading, deciding whether to call you.

Does site speed actually matter for an electrician?

Yes, but not for the reason most people say. It matters because your customer is on a phone with one bar outside a tripped consumer unit, not because a fast site wins some abstract ranking race.

Google’s own Core Web Vitals documentation is honest about this: there’s no single page-experience signal, and Search still wants to show the most relevant content even where the experience is sub-par. Speed contributes; it isn’t the lever.

But a site that takes eight seconds on 4G loses the customer before ranking is even the question. Fast, mobile-first, phone number tappable at the top, no popup. That’s the standard. This is most of what an SEO-first build is really for.

The link question most electricians get wrong

Someone will offer to sell you 500 backlinks for a flat fee. Don’t. Google’s spam policies name buying and selling links for ranking purposes as link spam, and the sites selling them are not sophisticated enough to hide from the company that wrote the rule.

The links that work for a local trade are boring and few. Your scheme’s public register entry. The supplier who lists approved installers. The local football club whose floodlights you sorted. The trade body membership page. The builder and the kitchen fitter you subcontract with.

That’s maybe eight links, and they’re worth more than five hundred bought ones, because they’re the links a real electrician in a real town would actually have.

This is where the honest disagreement sits between me and a lot of agencies. Agencies sell rankings, because rankings are easy to screenshot into a monthly report. You wanted booked work. Those aren’t the same thing, and any engagement that never connects the two is a science experiment you’re funding.

What I’d actually do first with seo for electricians

If you’ve got one hour this week, here’s the order. It’s deliberately not ambitious.

1. Open your Business Profile. Fix the primary category, take the address off if you don’t trade from it, set your real service areas.
2. Add your scheme registration and what it means, in words, to your two best-selling job pages.
3. Text the last ten customers asking for a review. No incentive, no script.
4. Pick the job you most want more of. Give it its own page. Write the answers you give on the phone.
5. Next month, do the next job.

That’s the boring version, and boring compounds. Local SEO doesn’t spike. Month one to three is mostly hygiene, month four to six is when the first lifts appear, and the position that’s genuinely hard for a competitor to dislodge is a 12 to 18 month build. The owners who quit at month four are usually quitting a month early.

I sell SEO consulting, website work and content. So you should know up front that’s the bias. I’d rather you knew than have me pretend I’m neutral. Everything above works whether you hire anyone or not, and most of it is an hour of your own time.

If you’d like an honest read on where your own site is leaking, drop the URL into the free audit. You’ll get a score on the page in about 15 seconds and a personalised report by email a few minutes later. No call needed to get going, and let me know what’s going on with the site while you’re at it.