Local SEO for electricians: found for the work you actually want.

One has no power and needs somebody today. The other is planning a switchboard upgrade, a rewire or the electrical for a renovation and will take a fortnight to decide. They search differently and they choose differently.

The urgent search behaves like a plumbing search. Map, three results, tap a number, done. The planned search behaves like hiring a builder, with three quotes and a look at each business's website.

Most electricians are set up for only one of those and do not realise it. A profile with good reviews wins the emergency call and loses the rewire, because there is nothing anywhere explaining that you do rewires.

Working out which of the two you actually want more is the first decision, and it changes everything after it. A business chasing switchboard upgrades should not be spending its money the way an emergency callout business does.

An electrical licence number is the strongest trust signal in the trade and it belongs on the profile, on the website and in the reviews. Being visibly licensed separates you from the results a homeowner is nervous about.

This matters because electrical is the trade where the customer is most conscious of risk. Nobody worries about an unlicensed painter. Everybody worries about the wiring in their house, and they are right to.

There is a practical ranking angle too. Categories like electrician, electrical installation service and security system installer are separate, and appearing for the ones you actually do means selecting them rather than hoping.

What actually matters on an electrician's profile

• The licence, stated plainly.

  On the profile, on the site, in the same words every time. It costs nothing and it removes the reader's main worry.

• Categories for what you actually do.

  Switchboards, EV charger installation, data and security are separate searches with separate competition.

• Emergency availability, if it is real.

  If you take after hours calls, say so. If you do not, do not, because a call you cannot take is worse than one you never got.

EV charger installation, battery and solar connection, and smart wiring are now real searches with real volume and almost no competition in most suburbs, because most electricians have never made a page for any of them.

This is the clearest opportunity in the trade at the moment. The established electricians rank for electrician and nothing else, and a business with a genuine page about home charger installation can take that search almost unopposed.

The jobs are also better than the average callout. A charger installation involves a switchboard assessment and often an upgrade, so the enquiry is worth several times a standard service call.

The condition is that the page has to be real. Something that says we install EV chargers in three sentences will not rank. Something that explains the load assessment, the switchboard question and what the rebate situation is will.

The profile first because it is free and fast, then reviews because they decide it between similar looking results, then pages for the specific work you want more of. Not the other way around.

Electricians commonly do this backwards, paying for a website before the profile has the right categories. The website is the slowest of the three to pay back and the most expensive to get wrong.

The reviews are worth being systematic about because electrical work is invisible once it is finished. Nobody can see a good switchboard, so what other customers said is the only evidence available.

The order worth doing it in

• Get the profile complete.

  Categories, licence, service area, hours, and photographs of actual work rather than stock images of cable.

• Then make asking automatic.

  Every completed job, the same day, without anybody having to remember.

• Then write the pages you actually want work from.

  One per type of job, written properly. Three real pages beat thirty thin ones.