It’s the Little Things that Search Engines Care About
When electricians create a website, most think it’s good to go when the pages look nice and the phone number is easy to find. It makes sense – getting a site online is hard. But what looks right to you and what’s acceptable to Google are not always the same. There are layers to seo for electricians, and the layer that’s often completely ignored is on-page optimisation: the grunt work of writing decent meta tags, using proper headings, and correctly optimising your images. You won’t win any friends with your title tag at cocktail parties. But Google sees it every time it crawls your page, and it plays a part in whether you end up ranking for the searches that make you money.
On-page SEO is like the labels in a hardware store. You have all the products (services, experience, location), but if there’s no signage people will get lost, confused, and leave. The same can be said for bots. They land on your page and begin to read and make decisions about the contents of the page according to certain cues. They’re called meta tags and headers. Do them well and you’re giving Google a neatly stocked shop. If you get them wrong, or fail to use them, you’re leaving it to guess. And computers are not good at guessing.
Meta Titles: First Impression and First Click
The meta title is the blue clickable headline on a search result. It’s the first impression that a prospective customer gets of your webpage. It serves two masters: the search engine, for whom it indicates the page’s topic, and the person, who clicks or not based on it. Both matter equally. “Home – Electrical Services” is not much of a clue to either. A title like “Licensed Electrician in [City] – Panel Upgrades & Rewiring” tells Google what the page is about, and tells the user what they’ll see if they click through.
Keep meta titles short – 60 characters or fewer. Google cuts off anything longer in search results, which doesn’t look good and means the searcher will miss part of your message. Put your main keyword at the beginning of the title. Include your city for local searches (for most electricians this will be the case). Don’t overdo it (Electrician Electrician Services Electrical Contractor Electrician – no-one will read that like it makes sense, and Google won’t like it). A unique title for each page. You have different pages on your website and each page should be targeted for a service or topic and should have a title written for that page, not the same title but for the word “electrical“.
Meta descriptions are the paragraph of text that shows up below the title in search results. Google may rewrite them with information from the page, but it’s important to get the right one because it affects click-through rate even when the placement is fixed. Two sentences, maybe three. What’s on the page, where you are and a call to action. “Need an electrician in [City] to upgrade your panel or wire your home? We provide quick and affordable electrical services to [area]. Request a free estimate today.” There’s a meta description at work. Compare with “We provide our customers with electrical services in the local area” and you can see the difference.
Headers: The Bones in the Body
Headers help structure a page – for the reader who is skimming or for the search engine that is trying to understand the page’s content. The H1 is the headline, at the top of the page. There should be only one H1 per page. The H1 should describe what the page is about, and include the page’s primary keyword. It’s a lost opportunity so great it border’s on the impressive for an H1 to read “Welcome to Our Website“. The H1 is the most obvious indication to humans and search engine crawlers of what the page is about. If you squander that opportunity, you’re swimming against the current for the rest of the way.
H2s are section headings, breaking the page into smaller sections and signalling subtopics to Google. H3s are sub-sections. This needs to be structured, just like chapters and subchapters in a book. Jumping from H1 to H4, or using headings in a haphazard way to make words large and bold, confusingly mixes up the structure in a way that affects both user experience and searchability. A page about panel upgrades, for example, might have an H1 of “Electrical Panel Upgrades in [City],” H2s for the cost of upgrades, the signs you need a new panel and how to install it, and H3s for details in each section. Clean, logical, useful.
Headers can contain secondary keywords. If your panel upgrade page has an H2 titled “How Much Does a Panel Upgrade Cost in [City]?” you’ve just included a question that people are searching Google for all the time. This isn’t trickery, it’s writing headers that are in line with user intent. It’s good for the user and good for the search engine.
This Work is Never Done
Well-performing pages are reviewed, updated and improved. A meta title that resonated two years ago may need to be revisited if your services have changed or there’s been a shift in competition. Images added last year without alt text are still hanging around without a caption. Headers that were hastily-constructed during a site build may be misconstructed in ways that you would notice if you took a new look. On-page SEO isn’t like building a concrete foundation: it’s more like gardening. It’s important to plant the right seeds, but it’s also important to tend the garden.
Google Search Console shows you which phrases are bringing users to which pages, and often the results are counterintuitive – a page that is ranking for a different phrase than you thought it would, or a page that should be ranking but isn’t quite cracking the page one code despite having reasonable content. These are clues to areas where on-page optimizations will help most. A better title tag, more informative H1, more relevant alt text on the main image. Lots of small things, repeated. That’s the beauty of on-page SEO: many small improvements, done well, across all pages and posts that are important to lead generation.
