If Your Site is Slow, You Won‘t Have SEO to Worry About
Let’s imagine this scenario: a person’s outside lights go out the night before a barbecue. They pull out their phone, go to Google and search “electrician near me“. Your website starts loading. And loading. And loading. After six seconds, they’ve gone back to Google and called your competitor instead. It’s not an example, it’s a reality for electricians that happens every day, and they don’t even know it. This is the seo for electricians that nobody talks about at the trade networking meetings: all the rankings in the world don’t do you any good if the site they get sent to sends them back to Google in a hurry.
Mobile-friendly and fast websites are no longer a luxury. They’re official search engine ranking factors, so a slow site or one that’s not mobile-friendly not only annoys your website visitors, it also pushes you down the rankings. You can be the best marketer in town, but if your website is slow, you’ll still only rank on page two. The search engine thinks you’re not worth visiting and so it pushes you down. Can’t say I blame them.
Google’s Spies Check Your Site Before Your Visitors Do
Google’s bots are regularly checking the quality of your website. Not only are they looking for relevant content, they’re measuring load times, how your site looks at different screen sizes, and a number of things called Core Web Vitals, which is a collection of performance tests that affect your site’s search engine ranking. Largest Contentful Paint is how quickly the main content loads. Cumulative Layout Shift checks for things shifting around on the screen as it loads – think it’s like if someone moved the chair from under you just before you tried to sit down. Interaction to Next Paint is how responsive your site is to clicks and taps.
Do these metrics too poorly and, out of the blue, Google will underrank your site in local search. Do well and you have the technical underpinnings for all other SEO efforts. Imagine Core Web Vitals are like the physical test that your website must pass to be able to compete. This will mean you won’t compete well if you aren’t but if you are, you are less likely to fail.
Customers Are Searching For You On Mobile
Over 60 percent of all local searches are done on mobile. In professions such as electrical services, where people are searching from a stressful situation, this figure is likely even higher. If a customer is standing in a darkened kitchen because their electrical breaker box let out a puff of smoke, they aren’t heading for their computer. They’re on their phone, a hand likely still on the flashlight.
A desktop-only website on that phone looks like a desktop website shrunk down to half the original size, with all the text too small to read, buttons too small to click without accidentally triple-clicking three things, and a phone number that’s an image you have to copy and paste and then manually dial. That last thing is particularly infuriating – a prospective customer in urgent need has to copy down your number and dial it, which few people will do. They just leave.
Google switched to mobile-first indexing a few years ago, which means it’s mostly uses the mobile version of your website to rank it, not the desktop version. So if your desktop site is impressive and professional-looking, but your mobile site is rotten, that’s what matters to Google. Having a gorgeous desktop site with a terrible mobile site is akin to having a stunning front door and a crumbling roof – it looks good on the outside, but it’s not structurally sound.
What Actually Makes a Site Fast
Getting pages to load quickly is a matter of a few easily remedied issues common among electrician sites. The number one culprit is large images. A photo of your van shot with a recent smart phone can be four to five megabytes. If you upload it to a website without compression it means every time someone opens the page they have to download a large file. Use a compression tool before you upload images or find a plugin that will do it for you. This can alone make a huge difference to loading times.
Hosting is critical, but not all business owners understand this. The cheaper the hosting, the more websites you share with. If they experience a traffic spike, so will your site. Moving to a higher hosting plan (not necessarily the most expensive one, just the one above the super cheap one) can drastically improve your load time without doing any code changes.
Excessive plugins, heavy themes and bad code also increase load time. Many electrician websites were designed by some guy’s nephew who knows a little WordPress and installed 15 plugins to add functionality that only three people use. Clean up your site. If there hasn’t been an update in the last two years or it does something you don’t need, take it out. Less code is faster. That’s just physics.
The Call Button Is More Important than the About Us Section
On mobile devices, your phone number must be clickable – an actual click-to-call button that launches the phone dialer. This may seem blindingly obvious, but many trade business sites still present phone numbers as text or even images. The more clicks between searcher and dialling your number, the more chance they might get distracted and move on.
Don’t Let Your Technical Foundation Undermine the House
There’s content, keywords, managing your Google Business Profile, reviews, backlinks, and a thousand other elements to local SEO for an electrician. It’s all built on top of the website’s technical performance, like a house on a foundation. If the foundation is flawed (for example, poor site speed, bad mobile design, poor Core Web Vitals scores), the house is less solid than it could be.
Get the technical right first. Make your site load in less than three seconds on mobile. Keep it easy to read, easy to click and easy to phone. Then you can build on top of that with content and SEO. The electricians who get this stop worrying about their SEO and wondering why they didn’t fix this thing sooner.
