The Backroom of Your Site that Google Says is More Important than Your Content
You can have the best written service pages in town. Great pictures, genuine pricing, great reviews. And if the technical side of your website is a shambling mess, Google will still prefer to display the competitor with half your content, but faster site speed and a technically sound website. That’s the part of seo for electricians that people don’t talk about because it’s not as exciting as content marketing and not as measurable as review numbers, but it’s just as important and in some markets it’s the difference between appearing on page one or falling down the drain of page two and beyond. Technical SEO is the plumbing of your digital presence. You don’t see it, but if it’s not working, everything else can go wrong.
The great news is that most small electricians‘ websites have technical problems, so if you fix yours, you’ll be ahead of the game. The bad news is that most electricians don’t know there’s a problem, because it’s far less obvious than a bad review. They just erode your rankings while you sit there scratching your head over why you’re not getting as much business as you should.
It’s Time to Focus on Page Speed
Google declared it years ago: page speed is a ranking factor. It’s also a conversion factor, making it all the more important. If your site takes four seconds to load on a mobile phone, you will lose many potential customers before they ever see the name of your business. People looking for an electrician are often in a state of panic to some degree – a breaker tripping, an outlet not working, a light blinking that could be a sign of something worse. They don’t want to wait for your home page to load with a rotating image of a group of light bulbs.
It’s easy and takes just a minute. Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool will give you a desktop and mobile rating, as well as a list of issues that are slowing you down. The reasons why most electrician sites don’t rank well for mobile speed are pretty standard: the images were uploaded in full resolution and not compressed; there are too many third-party scripts; or the hosting plan was selected based on cost and not speed. There are solutions to those problems. They don’t require a complete overhaul.
Let’s focus on mobile performance because most local searches for services are done on mobile devices. If your lawn lights go out, you’re not going to go to your home office to look for electricians on your laptop. They’re out in their drive, looking for answers on their phone. If your webpage is slow to load, or has a small font or buttons too small to click or content that should be scrolled horizontally, then you’ve lost them. They’ll click the x and dial the next number.
Crawlability Means Google Can Index Your Pages
If Google can’t crawl your website efficiently it’s like it doesn’t exist for search rankings. Crawlability is how easily Google’s bots can access and read the content of your website, and index the pages you want to appear in search results. This is complicated by a number of technical factors that are more prevalent than you might expect in contractor sites built by the generalist web designers who are not local SEO-focused.
Broken links are one problem. If you have a link from one page to another that no longer exists, Google’s spider gets lost. Too many broken links and Google begins to think your site is badly maintained, which impacts how much and how often it crawls, and how much it trusts your pages. Running a broken link checker (which you can easily find free on the Internet) is all you need to find out.
The other big crawlability scourge that surprises electricians is duplicate content. If you have more than one version of a page with the same content (this is common in WordPress sites with default settings, where you can access the same page using multiple versions of the URL), Google doesn’t know which version to serve up in its search results (and you don’t get ranked well for any). This issue can be fixed by setting canonical tags (an instruction for Google to treat this version of the page as the “original“) but it needs to be done by someone who knows what they’re doing.
Your sitemap is the map you give to Google to show them where all of your pages are. It should be there, it should be sent to Google Search Console, and it should be updated regularly. If you’ve added service pages or location pages over the past year and haven’t bothered to update your sitemap, Google may not be aware of their existence. This is easy to do, usually in a couple of minutes, with most site platforms, and it’s commonly overlooked on contractor sites.
If the Above Is Greek to You
If you’ve gotten this far and are feeling like I’ve just given you an owner’s manual in Chinese, you’re not alone. Most electricians didn’t go into the business to learn how to develop a website, and shouldn’t need to. But you need to know enough to talk to the person who built your website, and know what to ask. Is my site mobile-friendly? Is HTTPS properly configured? Do I have a sitemap in Google Search Console? Do I have structured data implemented? Just these four questions, put to the right person, can reveal technical issues that have been holding you back from the top spot for months.
Technical SEO is a “set it and forget it” solution. Unlike content – which must be produced consistently – technical SEO on your website is mostly done upfront and then maintained. The time invested doesn’t need to be doubled each month. And, unlike paid ads, a technically optimized website ranks well because the credibility signals it sends out are built up over time and remain in place after the ad spend stops.
