Content gets all the credit. Keywords get all the attention. Until finally someone asks, “why is the site, which looks great, on page three of the search results (despite all the work I’ve been doing)?” The problems almost always lie in the structure – broken links, crawl errors, duplicate content or a hundred other things that don’t send up error messages to users, but do to search engines, seo for electricians has a foundation that everything else sits on top of, and if that foundation is cracked, all the other work is doomed to fail. Fixing these problems isn’t sexy. It’s like rewiring the home, more than adding a fancy light fixture – you don’t see it once it’s installed, but it’s critical.
The thing is, most technical SEO issues are easy to fix. It’s not that they’re hard to fix. It’s invisibility. A dead link on the site looks great to those who never click it. Double content goes on and on collecting weak authority. An incorrectly set-up redirect takes crawlers and people on a wild goose chase that costs trust and authority. Neither of these issues create a bill or send out an email. They simply erode your results and make you wonder why you’re not ranking as well as your competition, despite having similar content.
Crawl Errors and Indexed Pages That Shouldn’t Exist
The best place to start a technical audit for real, and it’s free, is Google Search Console. The Coverage report will tell you which pages are indexed, which are not, and which have errors. The biggest surprises for electricians are pages that are accidentally excluded from indexing (perhaps a webmaster added a noindex tag when testing the site and forgot to remove it), and pages that are indexed but shouldn’t be, such as old service pages for areas you no longer service, thank-you pages that aren’t relevant to search, or tag and category pages from a blog that generate thin content at scale.
Crawl errors are important because each time Google hits an error while indexing your site is a sign of poor site maintenance. It’s normal and not really a problem for a site to have a few 404s for pages that have literally been deleted, particularly if they’re fixed with 301s. But when a site has tens of internal links pointing to 404s, or when other sites link to 404s rather than valuable content, it’s losing both the user experience and link equity that should be reaching pages that can effectively use it. Redirect 404s to the right place using 301s if the URL was valuable. Delete internal links to dead pages.
Duplicate Content: When You’re Your Own Worst Enemy
Duplicate content is one of those problems that sounds like it only happens to the sloppy sites, but it’s something electrician sites frequently do wrong. The archetypal example is a site that is accessible via both “http://yoursite.com” and “https://yoursite.com”, or “yoursite.com” and “www.yoursite.com”, and delivering identical content to Google as though they were two different pages. To Google, that’s two websites that say the same thing and compete for the same keywords. The fix is to point a canonical tag to the preferred version, and to redirect all traffic to the one preferred URL.
Another dupe that electricians sometimes accidentally create is location pages. An electrician with a ten-suburb radius creates ten location pages where the only difference in the text is the name of the suburb. Google has thin, duplicate content for all ten suburbs and assumes the worst. The solution is to make it different – local detail, references to the local permitting office, home types in the area, response time context, anything that makes each page not the same as a template with find-and-replace.
Blog pagination and URL parameters from site search, filtering or sorting can also create duplicate or similar pages en masse. If you have a blog on your site with a page 1, page 2, page 3, canonical tags or noindex on the pages mean the paginated pages don’t steal authority from your primary content.
Redirect Chains and the Slow Tax They Impose
Any redirect imposes a small, but noticeable tax. A 301 redirect from the old URL to the new is common practice and not a problem. A redirect chain (where A goes to B goes to C goes to the real destination) compounds the problem. Chains are followed by search engines but with decreasing patience, and they lose some link juice along the way. Users on low-speed connections feel that as well, which contributes to page load times used in ranking.
Chains accumulate over time. A URL is moved, and then moved again. It doesn’t bother to update the first redirect to the new address. Site redesigns and chains of four or five are not uncommon. Site auditing tools such as Screaming Frog will crawl your entire site and identify chains. And the solution is to change the redirect to the live URL, removing the chain. It’s tedious. It’s also the sort of fix that results in measurable improvements in crawl efficiency and occasionally page speed.
Issues with Site Architecture that Build up Over Time
A site that has pages that are too many clicks (five or six) from the homepage will see those pages being crawled less frequently and will have less “weight” (authority) than pages that are closer to the homepage. This is a common issue with electrician sites that have evolved over time, with pages and blog posts added in an ad-hoc fashion. Key service pages that should be two clicks away from the homepage may become accessible only via a blog post that has no incoming links, so gets no authority flow and no authority to pass to the service page.
To flatten the site, examine the key pages that are important to generate leads and provide direct paths to them from the homepage, navigation or landing pages. Linking from high-value pages to low-value pages puts those pages higher in the priority crawl queue and passes authority to make them stronger pages that can rank better. It’s like electrical work in a house where the electrician ran all the electrical circuits through the same junction box – spreading the load around makes the system work better. The goal with technical SEO is to make every page that matters for your business as accessible as possible to the search engine.
