SEO for electricians: the searches that actually bring work in

"Electrician near me" gets roughly 74,000 searches a month in the UK. Nothing else in electrical work comes close.

The catch is that this search is mostly answered by the map box, not by websites. Three businesses appear there and most people never scroll past it. So the work that wins this one is your Google Business Profile: the right primary category, a truthful service area, real photos added regularly, correct hours, and a steady flow of reviews.

It costs nothing and we can't do it for you, because it's tied to your business verification. If an agency is billing you monthly to look after a Google Business Profile and nothing else, you're paying a retainer for about twenty minutes of work. That said, the difficulty score on the underlying search is genuinely low and the pages that do rank carry an average of only five links from other sites, so the website half isn't hopeless either. It's just second in line behind the map.

"EICR" gets around 22,200 searches a month, and "EICR certificate" another 18,100 or so. "Landlord electrical safety certificate" adds roughly 1,600. That's a lot of people looking for a legally required piece of paper.

Two things make this worth more than the raw numbers suggest. Landlords are repeat customers on a five year cycle, and letting agents who find someone reliable hand over whole portfolios. One landlord found through search can be worth considerably more than one homeowner.

The honest caveat is that these are the most contested terms in this article. The pages ranking for EICR carry an average of around 25 links from other websites, and for the certificate variant it's closer to 32. Those are national informational searches, and a lot of them are won by large directories and compliance companies rather than by electricians.

So don't try to beat them nationally. Go local. "EICR Manchester" or "landlord certificate Stockport" is a different and far softer contest, and it's the search a landlord with a property in that area actually makes.

This is the interesting part, and it's where we'd spend the effort.

"Emergency electrician" gets around 4,400 searches a month. The pages ranking for it carry an average of under three links from other websites. Advertisers pay around £12.64 a click for it, which tells you exactly what that work is worth to the people already buying it. High value, urgent, and almost nobody has built a proper page for it.

"Fuse board upgrade" is around 320 a month with under two links behind the ranking pages, and it's a transactional search, meaning the person is ready to book rather than researching. "Rewire cost" is around 480 a month with under four.

None of those are huge numbers on their own. That's the point. They're small, specific, high-intent searches that no one is competing for, and there are dozens of them once you start listing every job you actually do. Ten pages each pulling a handful of ready-to-book enquiries a month is a better business than one page chasing a term you'll never win.

"EV charger installation" runs at roughly 18,100 searches a month, and it's commercial intent, so these are people looking to buy rather than read.

It's also the one area in this article where the competition has genuinely arrived. Ranking pages carry an average of around 34 links from other sites, which is more than triple what the emergency and fuse board terms need. Manufacturers, national installers and the grant schemes have all built content here.

Worth doing, but go in with your eyes open. Compete locally rather than nationally, and lean on what a national installer can't offer: you'll come and look at the actual consumer unit, tell them honestly whether the supply will take it, and do it next week rather than in six.

NICEIC, NAPIT, Part P, public liability. Letting agents and commercial clients genuinely won't book without seeing them, and homeowners use them as a quick shortcut for whether you're legitimate.

Put them where someone comparing three firms on a phone sees them without scrolling. Most electrical sites put them in the footer next to the copyright notice, which is the one place nobody looks. It's a two minute change that does more than a month of blogging.

Fifty town pages with the name swapped in. This gets sold to trades constantly. It's a doorway page, Google has explicitly disallowed the pattern for well over a decade, and it ranges from useless to actively harmful. Three genuine area pages beat forty fake ones.

Paid directory listings bought as SEO. The links almost never pass any ranking benefit. If a directory sends you actual paying customers, buy it for that reason and judge it on enquiries, not on rankings.

Weekly AI-written blog posts. "Five signs your fuse board needs replacing" posted every Tuesday ranks for nothing. One proper page about fuse board upgrades beats a year of it.

Chasing "electrician" on its own. It's a huge national term dominated by directories and Wikipedia, the intent behind it is mostly people researching the trade as a career, and it wouldn't bring you a single booking.

Google Business Profile changes can move the map results inside a few weeks. It's the fastest thing available to you and it's free, which is why it goes first.

The job pages take longer. On uncontested terms like the ones above, three to six months is realistic before they settle. Anyone guaranteeing page one inside a month is either aiming at something nobody searches or isn't being straight with you.

The reason it's worth the wait is that it compounds and it doesn't repeat. A page about emergency call-outs written once keeps producing for years. Paid ads stop the day you stop paying for them.

A page for each job worth having, written the way you'd explain it standing in someone's hallway. What's involved, what it depends on, how long it takes, what certificate they end up with, and what happens if you open it up and find something worse.

Your accreditations high on the page. Your own photos rather than stock images of American consumer units. A phone number that's one tap. And the whole thing fast on a phone, because that's where these searches happen, usually with the person standing next to the problem.

What that looks like in full is on our websites for electricians page, and there's a broader version covering trade businesses generally. If you want the non-electrical version of this article, it's SEO for tradesmen.

Our plans start at £20 a month, no setup fee, no minimum term, nothing up front, covering design, build, hosting, your domain, business email, security, backups and ongoing changes. We'll redesign your current homepage and send you a link within three working days before you pay anything, so you can judge it against what you've got rather than take our word for it.

And to repeat the bit that doesn't suit us: the reviews and the Google Business Profile are yours to do, they're free, and for a lot of electricians they'll move more work than the website will in the first few months. Do those first whether or not you ever talk to us.

These volumes come from Google's advertising data and are rounded estimates reported in fixed bands, not exact counts. They shift month to month and seasonally. Treat them as an indication of scale.

The figures that actually matter here are the link counts, because they tell you how much work it would take to outrank whoever is currently there. Search volume tells you the size of the prize. Links tell you the price of entry, and on several of these jobs that price is close to zero.