Location Pages are the Workhorses of an Electrician’s Website
Electricians typically service several suburbs, towns or areas. They cover a large geographical area each day, working in six different postcodes before midday. But their website? It talks about one location, it uses one address, and wonders why it’s only ranking for that one location. The disconnect between where electricians work and where the sites says they work is one of the biggest, most common and most easily fixed issues in seo for electricians. The answer is location pages – but only if they are done right, and most are not.
A location page is a page on your website for a particular location you work in. If done well, it signals to Google that your business is relevant to those looking for a service provider in that suburb or town (even if your business is actually located elsewhere). Done poorly – which often means duplicating the same page ten times and changing the name of the city – it’s a waste of time (for you, the client and Google) and can even send a message to Google that you’re running a scam with low-value content. The difference between a location page that works (i.e. ranks) and one that doesn’t all comes down to a few decisions that most electricians and web designers don’t bother with.
Google Doesn’t Just Go by Address
Google’s local search algorithm will use your address to calculate distance, but it also knows that trades businesses are not just confined to a single location. But if you don’t explicitly tell Google that your business operates in other locations, it will only show your business to people searching for businesses in the location where your business is registered. If you live in one suburb, but you work in three others, your website must actively make this argument – not rely on Google to guess.
Location pages create those signals. Every page you create for a given location provides another piece of information to Google that your business is there, that you do work there, and that you have enough presence and authority in that area to be worthwhile. And over time, a good location page strategy makes you a larger local search presence. You go from being a local business that ranks in a single location to being a local business that ranks everywhere your customers are looking for you.
The Key Differences between a Location Page and a Thin Duplicate
And this is the mistake that most electricians (or web developers they hired for an absurdly low-cost website package) make. They make what appears to be a location page but is in reality a template. The same layout, the same words, the same descriptions of services, with “[City Name]” inserted ten times. Google’s quality raters have seen it a hundred times. Thin location pages don’t rank. They are overlooked or worse, penalise the overall site.
A proper location page has information that can only be written about that particular location. It refers to the kind of buildings you might find in that area – older buildings with older electrical systems, new developments with electric vehicle charging points, commercial areas with specific compliance requirements. It mentions the suburb or town in ways that show you’ve got a handle on that area. It might refer to the types of work you do there, for example, or that there are a lot of old panels that need to be replaced there. You don’t have to lie. It just requires sitting for 20 minutes and thinking about what is true of your locations.
How a Location Page Should Look
All successful location pages for electrical contractors have a few common features. The title of the page and the heading (the H1) should contain the main service and the name of the location – for example, “Electrician in [Suburb Name]” or “Emergency Electrical Services in [Town].” These are not art installations, but rather Google’s clues about page content. It’s better to be clear than creative when naming pages.
The page should immediately and naturally establish your service in the area. Include that you work in the area, what type of work you do and that you can do residential and commercial work if appropriate. This doesn’t have to be lengthy. Two or three good paragraphs that address someone living in that suburb looking for an electrician will be much better than five paragraphs of waffle.
What you say about the types of work you do should be relevant to that suburb. If you’re trying to reach a suburb that has a lot of home renovations and extensions, highlight panel replacement and new circuits. If it’s a commercial suburb, include commercial wiring. Tailoring your page to the specific needs of the area makes the page valid – it’s valid because it’s true. Over time, Google’s algorithms are becoming better and better at picking up on local relevance rather than manufactured keywords, and this feels right to the user.
All location pages must have a strong call to action with phone number, a contact form and an explicit statement of what areas you service. If you have a homeowner who is looking for a Westfield electrician at 7 p.m. and has a blown circuit breaker, you don’t want them rummaging around searching for your phone number. Make it obvious.
Don’t Cannibalise
One thing to be aware of: if you set up location pages that are too similar, they can end up cannibalizing each other, instead of doing separate work. This is known as keyword cannibalization and it can confuse search engines as to which page to display. Every location page should cover a different location and have different content. If you can’t tell the difference between two suburbs, and you don’t have different content to write about one versus the other, then why would you need separate pages?
It’s good to plan like this at the beginning so you don’t have to rework it later. When it comes to location pages, think of them like a wiring diagram – if you think through the system before you start pulling the wire, then when it’s finished it will work efficiently.
