What an electrician's website needs to get calls

Five things decide whether someone who lands on an electrician's website rings it: whether the first screen says what you do and where, whether the phone number is one tap on a phone, whether there is a separate page for the job they searched for, whether there is any proof you have done that job before, and whether the form actually reaches you. Everything else on the page is decoration. We have audited enough trade sites to say that most of them fail on two of those five, and the two are almost always the phone number and the job pages.

The first screen has one job

Someone has searched for an electrician, tapped a result, and is holding a phone. They are deciding, in about three seconds, whether you are near enough and real enough to ring. The first screen has to answer both: what you do, the area you cover, and something that makes you a person rather than a template.

The commonest mistake is a headline that could belong to any trade in any town. "Quality workmanship you can trust" tells a visitor nothing they did not already assume. "NICEIC approved electricians covering Wrexham and Chester" tells them two facts they were looking for. One of those headlines gets rung and the other gets the back button.

The phone number, and the fault we keep finding

On a trade site the phone call is the conversion. Which makes it worth saying plainly: the number must be real text, it must be a tel: link so one tap dials it, and it must be visible without scrolling on a phone.

It is worth testing yourself, on an actual phone, because this is the fault we find most often and it is invisible from a desk. Page builders let you show one block on desktop and a different block on mobile. When the number changes, somebody updates the block they can see and not the one they cannot. We have opened a client's site at phone width and found the most prominent call button dialling a placeholder left in by whoever built it. On a laptop it looked perfect. Every mobile visitor for months had been tapping a dead number.

Open your own site on your phone, in a private window, and tap the call button. Not the number in the header on your laptop. The one a customer's thumb lands on. If it dials, check the second one further down the page too.

A page for each job you want more of

This is the difference between a site that exists and a site that earns. People do not search for "electrician". They search for the thing that has gone wrong or the thing they want fitted: a consumer unit replacement, a fuse board upgrade, an EICR for a rental, an EV charger, outside lights, a rewire on a house they have just bought.

Each of those is a different search, a different price and a different customer. A single Services page listing fifteen bullet points cannot rank for any of them, because it says almost nothing about each. A page that names the job, says what is involved, says what changes the price, says how long the power is off and answers the two questions everyone asks can rank for it, and it converts better when it does, because the customer arrives already half-convinced.

Proof, and what actually counts as it

Registration bodies do a lot of work here. NICEIC, NAPIT, Part P: say which, and link to your entry on the register where there is one. That is a claim a customer can check in ten seconds, which is what makes it worth something.

Photographs of your own work count. Stock photographs of a stranger's consumer unit do not, and customers can tell. A slightly badly lit photo of a board you actually installed, with the old one beside it, is worth more than anything you can buy. Reviews count, and Google reviews count most because they are the ones the map pack reads. Named reviews with the town in them count more than anonymous ones.

• The register you are on, named, with a link people can check
• Photos of your own jobs, before and after, even imperfect ones
• Google reviews, shown on the site and kept current
• The years you have been trading, if it is a number you are happy to state
• Insurance, stated plainly, because commercial customers look for it

The form nobody fills in

Two faults, and they are both common. The first is asking for too much: a form with nine fields, including a dropdown of job types and a request for a full address, gets abandoned by people who only wanted to ask whether you cover their village. Name, number, and a box to describe the job is enough to start a conversation.

The second is worse and completely invisible: the form sends to an address nobody reads, or stopped sending at some point and never said so. Send yourself a test through your own form today. If it does not arrive within a minute, you have been losing enquiries for as long as it has been broken, and there is no way to know how many.

What to leave off

A carousel of stock photographs that pushes the phone number below the fold. A chat widget that covers the number on a phone. An intro animation. A news section last updated three years ago, which tells a visitor the business may not exist any more. A PDF brochure instead of pages, which Google reads badly and customers do not open.

Speed belongs in this list too. A site that takes six seconds on mobile data outside somebody's house has already lost to the one that took two, regardless of which is better once it loads.

How to tell whether yours is working

Search Console is free, takes ten minutes to verify, and answers the only question that matters: which searches showed your site, and how many people clicked. If a page you built for consumer unit replacements is showing for nothing, the page is not the problem, its title and its targeting are. If it shows for the right searches and nobody clicks, the title and description are the problem, not the ranking.

Count where enquiries came from for one month, on paper by the phone. Most electricians are surprised. The answer changes what is worth spending on next, and it is the cheapest piece of research available.