Your Competitors Are Showing Up on Google. Here's Why You're Not.

Most electrical contractors who come to us with underperforming SEO aren't lazy or uninformed. They've tried — they have a website, they've claimed their Google Business Profile, maybe they've even hired someone to 'do SEO' for a few months. The problem isn't effort. It's that SEO advice for tradespeople is often too generic to be useful, and the mistakes that kill local rankings are specific.

Local SEO for electricians operates differently from SEO for e-commerce stores or national service brands. Google is trying to answer a very specific question: which licensed, trusted electrician is closest to this person right now? The signals Google uses to answer that question — proximity, relevance, authority, and trust — are each vulnerable to a different set of mistakes.

What makes this harder is that most SEO mistakes are invisible in the short term. Your site looks fine. Your GBP is claimed. But three months in, you're still not in the Map Pack, and you're not sure what's wrong. This guide is built to close that diagnostic gap.

A few things to note before we go through the list:

• These mistakes aren't ranked by severity — they interact with each other, and fixing one often amplifies the benefit of fixing another
• Some fixes take an afternoon; others take months of consistent effort
• Not every mistake applies to every contractor — read through and flag the ones that match your situation

This isn't a comprehensive SEO playbook. It's a targeted breakdown of what goes wrong most often, why it matters, and what to do about it.

Keyword strategy is where most electricians lose the SEO game before it even starts. The mistake usually goes one of two ways.

Going Too Broad

Targeting 'electrician' or 'electrical services' as your primary keyword means you're competing with every electrical contractor in the country, plus home improvement aggregators, directory sites, and national chains. In our experience, single-word or category-level terms almost never convert for local contractors even when rankings are achieved — the search intent is too vague.

Going Too Niche Too Early

The opposite mistake is building pages around obscure, ultra-specific terms that nobody searches — 'EV charger installation for 1962 split-level homes in suburban markets' — before establishing baseline rankings for core services.

The Fix

The right keyword structure for an electrician looks like this:

• Primary service + city: 'electrician [city name]', 'licensed electrician [city]'
• Specific service + city: 'panel upgrade [city]', 'EV charger installation [city]', 'emergency electrician [city]'
• Intent-based queries: 'how much does rewiring a house cost in [city]', 'electrician near me [neighborhood]'

Each of these deserves its own page or section — not a single homepage trying to rank for all of them at once. Google needs a clear signal about what each page is specifically about.

Start with your highest-revenue services and your primary service area. Build those pages first, rank for those terms, then expand. Trying to rank for ten cities before you've ranked for one is a common growth mistake that stretches thin content even thinner.

These two mistakes are grouped because they compound each other — and because fixing both at the same time produces the fastest visible improvement in local rankings.

The Abandoned Google Business Profile

Claiming your GBP and then leaving it alone is one of the most common and most damaging things an electrician can do for local SEO. Google uses your GBP as the primary data source for Map Pack rankings. An incomplete or inactive profile sends a signal that the business may not be active, reputable, or relevant.

Specific abandonment signals include:

• No photos (or only one stock image from years ago)
• Services section left blank or using generic categories
• No posts in the last 90 days
• Questions from customers left unanswered
• Business hours not updated after a schedule change

The fix: Treat your GBP like a second website. Add real job photos monthly. Fill out every service with a brief description. Post updates — even once every two weeks — about completed jobs, seasonal tips, or service availability. Answer every question within 48 hours.

Inconsistent NAP Across Directories

NAP stands for Name, Address, Phone. If your business is listed as 'Smith Electric' on Google, 'Smith Electrical Services' on Yelp, and 'Smith Electric LLC' on Angi, Google has three different entities to reconcile. In our experience, NAP inconsistency is one of the quietest ranking suppressors in local SEO — it doesn't trigger an error you can see, it just slows everything down.

The fix: Run a citation audit using a tool like BrightLocal or Whitespark, or manually check your top 15-20 directory listings. Standardize your exact business name, address format, and phone number across all of them. Pay particular attention to your state contractor licensing board listing — that citation carries trust weight because it's a government source.

Your website is doing two jobs: convincing Google you're relevant, and convincing visitors you're trustworthy enough to call. Most electrician websites fail at both — not because they're ugly, but because of two specific, fixable problems.

Slow Mobile Load Times

Google uses mobile-first indexing, which means it evaluates your site as a mobile user would. A page that takes more than 3 seconds to load on a mobile connection loses a significant portion of visitors before they even read a word — and Google factors that signal into rankings over time.

Common causes of slow electrician websites:

• Uncompressed images (especially large job-site photos)
• Cheap shared hosting that can't handle traffic spikes
• Outdated website themes loading unnecessary scripts
• No caching or content delivery network in place

The fix: Run your site through Google's PageSpeed Insights (free). Fix the issues it flags, starting with image compression and server response time. If your hosting plan costs less than $20/month, that's often the bottleneck.

Thin, Generic Service Pages

A service page that says 'We offer panel upgrades for residential and commercial clients. Call us today.' gives Google almost nothing to rank and gives a prospective customer no reason to trust you over the next electrician on the list.

A useful service page for an electrician includes:

• What the service involves and why a homeowner might need it
• What your process looks like (sets expectations, builds trust)
• Service area and typical project scope
• Licensing and insurance mention
• Real photos from completed jobs
• A clear call to action with your phone number

This isn't about stuffing keywords — it's about giving both Google and your prospective customer enough information to make a confident decision. Thin pages rank poorly and convert poorly. They're doing double damage.

Reviews are a direct ranking factor in Google's local algorithm — not an indirect trust signal, not a soft benefit. Businesses with more recent, high-quality reviews rank higher in the Map Pack. Full stop.

The mistake most electricians make isn't responding badly to negative reviews (though that's also a problem). It's simply not generating reviews consistently. A burst of 15 reviews two years ago followed by silence doesn't help you today. Google weights recency, and so do your prospects.

What 'Consistent' Actually Means

You don't need 50 reviews a month. For most local electrical contractors, in our experience, a cadence of 3-6 new reviews per month sustains ranking momentum and keeps your profile looking active to new visitors. The exact number that moves the needle varies by market competition.

Common Review Generation Mistakes

• Asking once, awkwardly, at the end of a job — most customers forget before they get home
• Sending a generic email blast — low open rate, lower conversion
• Not making it easy — if they have to search for your Google profile, most won't bother
• Ignoring negative reviews — no response signals to Google and future customers that you don't care

The Fix

Build review requests into your post-job process. Send a direct link to your Google review page via text message 24-48 hours after job completion — when the customer is most satisfied and the work is freshest in their mind. Keep the message short. Respond to every review, positive and negative, within a week. A professional response to a 3-star review often does more for trust than the review itself.

Displaying your license and insurance information on your website also supports review credibility — customers who can verify you're legitimate are more likely to leave a detailed, positive review rather than a vague one.

Knowing what's wrong is only useful if you know what to fix first. Tackling all six mistakes simultaneously usually means none of them get done properly. Here's a practical sequencing based on what produces results fastest.

Week 1-2: Quick Wins

• Audit and standardize your NAP across your top 20 directory listings
• Complete every section of your Google Business Profile — services, description, hours, photos
• Compress your images and run a PageSpeed audit

Month 1: Foundation

• Build or rewrite your top 2-3 service pages with real content, local relevance, and a clear call to action
• Implement a simple post-job review request process via SMS
• Start posting to your GBP twice a month

Month 2-3: Growth Layer

• Expand keyword targeting to secondary services and neighboring cities
• Build internal links between service pages and your homepage
• Begin building local citations on niche directories (electrical trade associations, contractor boards)

SEO for electricians typically takes 3-6 months to produce measurable ranking improvements, and results vary by market competition, your starting authority, and how consistently fixes are implemented. This isn't a reason to delay — it's a reason to start now rather than next quarter.

If you'd rather have an expert diagnose which of these mistakes is most responsible for your specific situation, that's a faster path than working through the list blind. You can fix these mistakes with professional electrician SEO support tailored to your market and service mix.