No, You Don’t Need a CS Degree
Here’s a secret that most digital marketing articles won’t tell you: most “technical SEO” isn’t really technical. The words are unfamiliar, there are acronyms, and those who make their living from it have an incentive to make it sound too complicated for the layman to understand. But strip away the words and the majority of the concepts are simple cause-and-effect scenarios – the sort of thing an electrician who fixes problems with houses’ wiring should be able to understand. The seo for electricians has a technical component, sure. That technical aspect is more benign than the industry would have you believe, and the solutions to most of the problems are almost always things that a non-coder can understand, implement, or at the very least sensibly point someone else to.
Imagine a search engine crawler is a building inspector, walking around your home. It turns up at the front door (your homepage), and begins to tour each room, making sure all the rooms are in order, for any violations, and to report their state. If your site is well-maintained, the inspector can continue its tour and come away with a full picture. A problematic site is like a home with doors that the inspector can’t unlock, rooms that go nowhere, and problems that indicate the house might not be structurally sound. How your site is reported on (the crawl data) is what defines your site in search. Poor ranking if the report is bad. A great report is the starting point for success.
Crawlability – What it means in simple terms
Crawlability is simply the ability for a search engine to access your pages. Simple concept. The two most common reasons it’s blocked are: robots.txt files that inadvertently prevent crawlers from entering a site, and noindex tags on pages that should be indexed. Both of these are usually set by developers and left. The robots.txt file is a tiny text file on your site that crawlers use to decide which parts of the site they can and can’t access. When sites are being developed, it’s standard to block crawlers from accessing the site. The issue occurs when the site is launched and the ban is left in place. The site appears to be completely normal to visitors but is invisible to Google. It’s a common problem that many businesses fall victim to, and it’s fixed by adding one line of code.
The noindex tag is very similar – it’s a piece of code that tells Google not to index a page. It’s handy for non-ranking pages like thank you pages and internal search pages. Oh dear if you do this to your primary service pages. The Coverage report in Google Search Console lists which pages are indexed, which are excluded and why. Check it. If your service pages are listed under “Excluded” check for the noindex meta tag. It’s an easy fix that takes minutes.
Dead links are also a crawlability issue, and they’re one of the most common problems on the electrician websites that have existed for several years. When a URL changes without a redirect, all links to the old URL go nowhere – they become 404 errors. These are bad for both the site visitors who find them and crawlers that try to use them. The solution is a 301 redirect, which is a permanent redirect that automatically forwards visitors (and search engines) from the old URL to the new one. They can be set up in minutes by your hosting control panel or site administrator. A free crawl with a program such as Screaming Frog will list all broken links on the site in a report.
HTTPS: The Lock Icon That Signals Trust
The little lock symbol in the address bar isn’t just a symbol. It means the web site is using HTTPS: a secure communications protocol that makes it harder for data to be intercepted between a user and the web server. A few years ago, Google announced HTTPS as a ranking factor. More importantly, it’s an indicator that Google Chrome browsers will actively flag insecurities (“Not secure“) before a page loads. A security warning on an electrician’s website means they lose customers before they’ve even clicked on the website. The user assumes – rightly – that an electrician who can’t secure their site is probably not paying enough attention to other details either.
To migrate a site from HTTP to HTTPS, you need an SSL certificate, which sounds complicated and costly. It’s neither. The latest hosting companies provide free SSL certificates and can install them with a click of a button in the control panel. If you’re still serving traffic via HTTP, it’s the most important technical change you can make. Navigate to your hosting account, search for SSL or HTTPS and turn it on. Next – and this is critical – make sure to set up a redirect so that if someone lands on your site via an HTTP URL, they’re redirected to the HTTPS version. If you don’t do this, you’ll have two versions of your site live at the same time, which causes duplicate content issues (as well as the security problem).
Google Search Console: The Free Dashboard You’re Not Using
Search Console is a free tool from Google that tells you how your site is doing in search results – what people search for to find your site, which pages have errors, what your Core Web Vitals scores are, and whether Google has noticed any issues. Few electricians have used it. Others have installed it but not used it since their initial setup. This is something like installing a circuit breaker panel and never looking to see if any breakers have tripped.
The most important reports for a non-technical site owner are the Coverage report, which indicates which pages are indexed and with what errors; the Performance report, which shows which search queries are bringing visitors and which pages they land on; and the Core Web Vitals report, which shows visitors’ experience scores. These don’t require technical expertise. They take about half an hour to look at and act on.
The first step to overcoming your fear of technical SEO is to put it in plain English. Crawlers need access. Pages need to load fast. HTTPS needs to be active. Business details need to be well organised. There needs to be fewer bugs. These are maintenance tasks, not mysteries – and for someone who works for a living maintaining complex electrical systems, it’s all about following the logic.
