Why your electrician website is not ranking, and what fixes it

When an electrician's website does not rank, it is almost never a mystery penalty. It is one of a short list of ordinary problems: the site is one page trying to rank for everything, it is not indexed at all, the pages say nothing specific, it takes six seconds to load on a phone, or it has no evidence that a real business is behind it. Search Console shows which one within ten minutes.

1. It is one page

A single-page site with sections for "Services", "About" and "Contact" can rank for your business name and not much else. Google ranks pages for searches, and one page cannot be the best answer to "EV charger installer" and "emergency electrician" and "EICR" at once. Every job you want more of needs its own page, with its own title, its own opening paragraph and its own questions.

2. Google has not indexed it

More common than you would think. A "noindex" left on from the build, a robots file that blocks everything, a sitemap that was never submitted, or a site so slow that Google gives up. Search Console's Pages report says exactly which URLs are indexed and why the others are not. If you have never opened Search Console, that is where we start.

3. The pages could be about any electrician anywhere

"We provide a professional, reliable service to domestic and commercial customers" appears on a hundred thousand sites. Google has read all of them. A page ranks when it is the most useful answer for a specific search, which means it names the job, the area, what is involved, what affects the price, how long it takes, and what the certificate is for. Specific beats polished every time.

4. It was built on a page builder and never optimised

Wix, Squarespace and the heavier WordPress themes are fine to build on and terrible to leave alone. Unoptimised images, a dozen scripts, fonts loaded from three places. On a phone over 4G the page takes five or six seconds, and the person searching has already gone back. Google measures this and it counts, modestly for ranking and heavily for whether anyone stays.

5. Nothing on the site proves you are real

No address, no named person, no photos of actual work, no registration number, stock images throughout. Google's guidelines call this experience, expertise, authority and trust, and for a trade it is simple: show the person, the van, the certificate scheme, real jobs, and real reviews. A site that looks like a template with the name changed is treated like one.

6. Titles and descriptions were left on the defaults

The page title is the blue link in Google. If it says "Home" or "Services" or the business name alone, it is not competing for anything. Each page's title should lead with the job and the area, in plain words, and each description should say why to click. This is a small job with an outsized effect on how many people click when you do appear.

7. The profile and the site disagree

A different phone number on the profile, a different trading name in the footer, an old address on a directory. Each mismatch is a small reason for Google to trust the whole set less. One name, one number, one address, everywhere.

8. There is no reason for anyone to link to it

Links still matter for competitive searches. Electricians rarely get them, because there is nothing to link to. A genuinely useful guide, a local sponsorship, a manufacturer's installer list, a mention in the local paper: these are how a trade site earns the handful of links that separate page one from page two.

We check all eight before we quote. Sometimes the answer is "your site is fine, your profile is the problem", and we say so, because the fix is cheaper and faster than a rebuild.