Electrician websites: what actually gets the after-hours call

A sparkie we work with sent through his call log last winter, mostly to argue with me about something else. What I noticed instead was the shape of it. A long tail of calls between five and nine in the evening, and a separate cluster on weekday mornings, and the two groups of people wanted almost nothing in common.

The evening ones had no power, or half their power, or a switch that had started doing something they didn't like the sound of. The morning ones were organising a switchboard upgrade or asking about a charger for a car they hadn't bought yet.

His website was built entirely for the second group. Nicely, too. It just had nothing at all to say to someone standing in a dark hallway at seven o'clock holding a phone.

That split is the thing I'd think about before anything else on an electrician's site, and it's the bit that makes this trade different from the general advice we wrote up for tradie websites. Same industry, two customers, one site trying to serve both.

The evening reader is not reading

They're scanning, badly, in a hurry, probably annoyed. They will give your page a few seconds and they want three answers.

Are you working right now. Do you come out to where I am. What happens if I ring.

Most electrician sites answer none of those above the fold. What they've got instead is a photo of a van and the phrase "24/7 emergency service", which is the single least useful thing on the page, because everybody says it and half of them don't mean it.

If you genuinely take calls at night, say when and say who answers. "Someone picks up until 10pm, seven days" is worth more than any amount of 24/7 branding, because it's specific and it sounds like a person made a decision. If you don't take night calls, say that too. I'd much rather a customer read "we're on the tools 6am to 4pm and we call back first thing" than ring three times and get voicemail, because the second one is how you become the bloke who never answers.

The callout arrangement belongs there as well. Not a price, just the shape of it: whether there's a callout fee, whether it's waived if you go ahead, whether after-hours is charged differently. If you do quote a figure anywhere, be clear about GST, because the ACCC's rules on displaying prices apply to a website the same as they apply to a quote on paper, and the argument you avoid is worth the extra four words.

The one that's actually costing you calls

Coverage. Every emergency caller has the same silent question, which is whether you'd really drive out here at this hour, and a site that never names a suburb doesn't answer it.

This is mostly not a website job. It's your Google Business Profile, where the service area and hours live and where the after-hours caller is probably looking anyway, because they searched from their phone and tapped the first map result. Get the profile right first. It's free and it moves faster than anything you do on the site.

The site's job is to back it up so the two agree with each other. We went through how that side works in the on-site half of local SEO. For an electrician it's usually one honest paragraph naming the councils and suburbs you actually cover, plus the truthful bit most sites leave out: how far out you'll go after hours, which is normally a smaller radius than the daytime one.

The slow job deserves its own page

Now the other reader. Switchboard upgrade, EV charger, ceiling fans through a whole house, solar. These people are not in a hurry at all. They're getting three quotes over a fortnight and reading every one of them properly.

Almost every electrician site I open handles this with a page called Services and a list of dot points, and one of the dot points says "EV charger installation". That page cannot rank for the thing and, worse, it can't sell it. Someone comparing three quotes for a charger install wants to know what's involved at their place, whether the switchboard will cope, how long the power is off, who deals with the network application, and what they end up holding at the end.

Write that page. One per job you actually want more of. Four of them, written like you'd explain it standing in someone's garage, will out-earn a services list every time. That's the same argument as the order of operations for small business SEO, just applied to a trade where the individual jobs are big enough to be worth their own page.

Paperwork is a selling point, oddly

Electrical is one of the few trades where the compliance side genuinely reassures people, and almost nobody uses it.

Put your licence number where it can be read. A nervous customer can check it on the NSW licence register in about a minute, and the equivalent exists in every state. Say plainly that the customer gets a certificate of compliance for the electrical work when the job's done. Half of them don't know what that is, and the ones who do have usually been burned by someone who never produced one.

None of this is marketing. It's just stating what you already do, which is the part tradies skip because it feels too obvious to mention. It isn't obvious to the person deciding between you and two names they found the same way.

What I'd skip

The generic electrical safety blog post. Everyone has one, nobody reads it, and it's usually the thing that gets written instead of the four service pages.

Also the live chat widget. On a trade site it mostly intercepts people who were about to ring you, which is the opposite of what you paid for.

This week

Open your own site on your phone, at night, and time yourself finding the answer to "will these people come out tonight". If you can't answer it in five seconds, neither can the person with no power, and they're less motivated than you are.

Fix that one line first. Then do the profile. The service pages can wait a fortnight, and if you want someone to tell you which of these you've already got covered, we'll go through the site for free and say so if the answer is not much.