Your Customers are Searching on Their Mobiles – Is Your Website Mobile Friendly?
Imagine this: a household is cooking dinner in the kitchen, turns on the light, and it won’t go on. Half the room is dead. They take out their smartphone, tap “electrician near me” and your site appears. They tap it. It takes five seconds to load. The text is tiny. The phone number isn’t clickable. They double tap and pinch trying to find some way to get to the phone, give up after eight seconds, and click the back button to move to the next site. Your competitor’s site loads in a blink, has a huge green “Call Now” button and that person books a job you should have had. This is what happens hundreds of times a day for electricians with bad mobile websites – and worse is that they often don’t even know it. Great seo for electricians gets you traffic. Mobile-friendly sites convert visits into phone calls, and at this stage in the game, it’s the weak link for electrical contractors.
Mobile-first search for local services isn’t a trend – it’s here to stay. Over 60 percent of local service business searches are done from a mobile device. For some service businesses, such as emergency services, the figure is even higher as distressed people find and grab the closest device, which is usually their phone. If you built your website with desktop in mind and mobile as an afterthought, you’re leaving a lot of potential customers to your competitors.
The First Impression of Your Site Is Speed
Before a potential customer sees your company name, your reviews, your telephone number – they feel your site speed. And they do it with the patience of someone who can tap or click to go elsewhere. In fact, it has been shown that if a mobile site takes more than three seconds to load, the visitors will leave. Three seconds may seem like a long time, but on a mobile network most poorly designed electrician sites take six to eight seconds to load. That’s not a small gap. That’s the difference between getting most of your mobile traffic or getting none at all.
It’s typically due to images. A web designer uploads pictures at their highest resolution – gorgeous, sharp and huge – and these pictures have to download through a mobile network. Shrinking the size of the images to a web-safe size, while maintaining quality, can reduce the page load time by half, for websites that haven’t done this yet. It’s one of those things that takes an hour to do and makes it faster forever. Also, extraneous plugins, bad code and hosting all slow things down in ways that don’t affect the site admin, but do affect the user waiting for the page to load.
Google PageSpeed Insights provides a free mobile score and list of things to fix, prioritised. If you haven’t visited it in a while, visit it now. The score is a number between 0 and 100, and most electrician websites fall between 30 and 55 on mobile, which is – to be polite – not ideal. If you can get to 70 or above, you can see improvements in rankings and conversions.
Click to Call Is the Most Valuable Real Estate
On a mobile phone, the sole goal of your website is to get the user to click a button to call you. All other elements support this call to action. With that in mind, it’s surprising to me that many electrical contractor sites hide their phone number in the header in small font, list it as non-tappable text, or force the visitor to fill out a contact form (which is unlikely to happen while the visitor is in a dark room with his phone in his hand).
Your phone number should be clickable at the top of every page of your mobile website. It should be big enough to tap. It should stand out visually – a different color, a button, something that screams “this is a phone number and I can tap to call.” Mobile users are not digesting your site’s content like desktop users; they’re looking for something they can do. Make it stand out like a sore thumb. A fixed-position header that remains on screen as the user scrolls, and which prominently displays the phone number is more important to conversion rates than any other design choice.
Contact forms are fine for when the inquiry is not urgent, but for electricians where the best leads are people with problems, a form that requires the user to type in their name, email, phone and message description is a barrier to conversion. If you’re going to use a form, then have two fields for the mobile site (name and phone number) and respond in minutes. The form-submitter is calling three other electricians. They’re likely to get the first response.
Here’s what a mobile electrician page looks like
The easiest way to look at a high-converting mobile electrician page is to remember what the desperate homeowner needs. They need to know that you’re real, you’re available and they can contact you. That’s it. All the content on the page should contribute to those three things. An easy-to-find phone number and service area solve the availability and reachability challenges. Testimonials, business name and pictures of the work get at legitimacy. Anything that isn’t doing one of these three things is a distraction on the mobile page.
The length of the page is different on mobile. A detailed service page is a good fit for a desktop visitor who is researching a service, but a mobile visitor at 9pm who just found a sparking outlet is not reading 1,200 words on your panel upgrade process. More succinct, cleaner pages with less text work better for mobile visitors with emergency needs. When service pages are aimed at longer-term service work, such as a full rewire, a commercial project, a generator installation, a little more detail is in order, but the key details should still be top of the page without any scrolling on the part of the visitor.
The best way to find out is to test your site on your phone (not in mobile preview mode in your browser). Simulate how a visitor would find your services: visit the home page, find your services, click to call you, find your service area. If you need to work harder to do any of this, you have a leak. Plug the leaks and the calls come in.
