Good Rankings, Bad Experience: It’s a No-Win Situation
I have a special irritation for poorly designed sites with good rankings. You discover one while searching, click through, and ten seconds later you are trying to read minuscule text, waiting for images to load, searching for a phone number in a tussle with a pop-up ad that won’t close. You leave. The electrician didn’t know you were there. Their ranking stays the same. Their phone stays quiet. This cycle repeats tens of times every day on websites where the owner spent time and effort to get traffic, but not to keep it; seo for electricians that focuses on rankings without focusing on user experience is like constructing a house on a beach – it looks great until it gets washed away. Google has been using signals of how users interact with sites for years, and the distinction between “ranking well” and “converting well” has become so blurred that you can’t really do one without the other.
Search and user experience used to be the domains of different specialists. The two are more and more artificial distinctions. A site that users hate has a high bounce rate, short visits, low pageviews, and so on that feeds back into the search engine‘s assessment of the quality of the site. A site that doesn’t frustrate visitors produces the inverse signals. The algorithm isn’t perfect, but it’s become really skillful at separating pages that serve the user from those that merely play word games. At this stage, designing a user-friendly electrician website is the equivalent of designing an SEO-friendly website.
Build for the Angry Man
Most people who are looking for electricians are not doing it out of the blue. Something has broken, or is about to break, or they’re embarking on a project that they didn’t anticipate. They’re rushed, they’re frazzled or they’re frightened. The website they need is different to the website that would win awards at a web design competition. It loads fast. It communicates its message quickly. It doesn’t require visitors to jump through hoops to find the right information. The phone number is easy to find, not presented in a stylish gray that matches the brand’s colours but is difficult to read outside on a sunny day.
Cognitive load is the hidden toll on designs that make our visitors work harder than they need to. Every additional click needed to get to the service page or article you want, every wall of unbroken text that demands an effort of will to get the information you need out, every animation that slows down information appearing – these are small withdrawals from a dwindling balance of patience that the user brought to the site. The accounts that run out the quickest are those with electrician websites that look pretty: wall-sized video backgrounds that use up mobile data, fancy introductions to their homepages that slow down access to service information, site navigation menus that rely on hovering over submenus in just the right ways that don’t work on touch devices. Beautiful, perhaps. Useful, not particularly.
Now compare to a site where the first mobile layout you see is the company name, a brief line of services, a large, tappable phone number, and a statement of the service area. No guessing required. No hunting. The visitor who rushed in gets the info they need in an instant. That’s not bad design, it’s just good design in terms of how well it works for its user, not how it looks in a portfolio.
Readability Is a Ranking Factor in Disguise
Google doesn’t explicitly measure readability. It does assess whether they’re read, how long they’re read for, and whether they’re engaged with or abandoned. Web pages that are easy to read send better engagement signals than pages that are technically informative but practically exhausting. For an electrician, this translates to explaining services in clear, simple terms, writing in paragraphs that are easy to digest, rather than paragraphs that are overwhelming, and in fonts that a 40-year-old doesn’t have to strain their eyes to read.
The length of the paragraph is important in web writing. Long paragraphs signal density. Density signals effort. Effort signals friction. A paragraph of eight or nine sentences in particular, on the screen of a mobile phone, feels like a full-on relationship. Four sentences per paragraph is fast and easy to read. It’s what draws the reader to the call to action. Without that rhythm, you lose the reader, around the third paragraph.
White space isn’t laziness. It’s breathing room. When you see a page with plenty of space between blocks of content, between paragraphs, between the title and the content, your brain knows it won’t be tiring to read. Information-dense pages evoke a very slight repulsion. It could be the greatest content ever. It has already rejected the content before you have read a word. This is particularly important for mobile screens where the relative effect of close spacing is greater than with a wide desktop screen.
CTAs, forms and the Big E
An electrician’s website is set up to reach a tipping point: the moment a visitor wants to make contact. All of the design, content, and even the site’s speed, have been leading up to this moment. But if there’s a form with vaguely labelled fields, a submit button that doesn’t immediately respond to a click or a confirmation message that is so lame the visitor wonders if the form even submitted, there’s nothing to stop the conversion at the last minute.
It all comes back to the phone number. Put it in the site’s header, restate it in context on service pages and also as an alternative before a contact form. Some people will not fill in a form. They will only call, and only if it’s made simple to do so. Others will fill in the form and are slightly squeamish about the phone. Both have the money for you. Both need an easy way to get to you. An electrician website that works makes the door as wide as it can, and then gets out of the way.
