A Guide to Increasing Website Traffic, Leads & Sales for Your Electrical Contracting Business

I’m willing to bet you’re a great electrician, but are you great at electrician marketing? Chances are, you built your business based on your high-quality services, experience, and passion for your craft. It’s a hard thing to do, and if your electrical contracting business has lasted more than two years, you’ve already outperformed 34 percent of small businesses. Bump that up to five years, and your company has lasted longer than 50 percent of your peers.

So, first off—congratulations! Well done. Now, however, the hard part begins.

Your experience and industry passion won’t be enough to grow your business much more than it already has. Not only is competition the fiercest it’s ever been, but you also have to take into account the recent digital transformation—97 percent of consumers now go online to find local businesses, and while word of mouth used to be your primary source of leads, the review generation and recommendation process has moved online to places like Google, Nextdoor, and other online directories.

What I’m saying is, if you want to grow your electrical contracting business in 2020 and beyond, you need to market yourself online.

With the right combination of online marketing strategies for electricians, you can create a self-sustaining flow of quality leads and booked jobs that will not only boost your bottom line, but also establish you as THE authority in your market.

Contractors make up more than 50 percent of Blue Corona’s client base, and we’ve spent the last decade testing, tracking, and tweaking various electrician marketing plans—so we know what works and what doesn’t to increase booked jobs. Below I’ve outlined 10 tried-and-true electrician marketing strategies that we use for our electrical clients and that we have proven will increase qualified leads and booked jobs.

Wondering how to market your electrical contracting business online? Follow these 10 electrician digital marketing strategies.

The 11 Electrician Marketing Strategies You’ll Ever Need

1. A great electrician website design
2. Search engine optimization (SEO for electricians)
3. Content marketing
4. PPC marketing for electricians
5. Google Local Services Ads
6. Social media marketing for electricians (including Facebook ads for electricians)
7. Email marketing
8. Video marketing
9. Customer service as an electrician marketing strategy
10. Online review generation and management
11. Call tracking and intelligence reporting

Before you dive in, read or bookmark this list of 50+ digital marketing statistics for contractors to get the basics down. Then keep reading for our top tips for marketing your electrical contracting business.

The Best Electrician Marketing Plans Engage Customers Throughout Their Buying Journey

In today’s digital age, consumers turn to the Internet first to find information. With a few clicks of a button, homeowners can search for a local electrician, pick multiple contractors to contact for a quote, and quickly move on about their day. In fact, studies show that the average consumer leaves a web page 10-20 seconds after first landing on it, so you only have a few seconds to capture their attention.

The Modern Online Buyer’s Journey

Chances are you’ve heard of a “marketing funnel.” Most electricians commonly view their marketing funnel as a very narrow, single-channel approach:

Image Source: Wikimedia Commons

The best electrician marketing plans engage customers throughout their online buying journey simultaneously and work in tandem with one another to maximize your online visibility and the amount of leads generated from your website. It’s critical to understand: Electrician marketing means you must be found online wherever your customers spend their time—whether it be on Google itself, or popular social networking platforms like Nextdoor or Facebook.

Today’s customers choose their own destinations on the web, and their journey is full of looping twists and turns when choosing an electrician for hire:

• Awareness – Your customers first realize they have a problem (e.g. – They are without electricity, they need a new chandelier hung, they want to install a whole-home generator, etc.).
• Consideration (and Research and Discovery) – Your customers begin evaluating your business and your competitors, identifying which electrical contractor can best serve their need based on your website, online reviews, and perceived expertise.
• Purchase – Your customers buy your services.
• Post-Purchase Experience (and Loyalty Loop) – Your customers leave you an online review, subscribe to your monthly email newsletter and become raving fans of your business.

To reach more local customers and get more electrical leads, start with your website.

1. You Need a Great Electrician Website Design

Since 97 percent of consumers go online to find local services, your website is likely the first interaction prospects will have with your company.

But, it’s not enough to just HAVE a website—75 percent of people have judged a company’s credibility based on its website design and 48 percent say it’s the top factor in assessing credibility. Not only that, but a single bad experience on a website also makes users 88 percent less likely to visit the website again.

Make sure your website is up to snuff by following these tips:

• Your website needs to be visible – When we say visible, we mean in search engines like Google. We talk more about search engine optimization (SEO) for electricians a bit further down.
• Your website needs to be mobile friendly – In the past 12 months there have been almost 1.5 million online searches for electrician keywords, and 61 percent of those searches happened on a mobile device. Not only that, but 57 percent of users say they won’t recommend a business with a poorly designed mobile site.  If that’s not enough to convince you, Google also ranks mobile websites higher in the search engine results.

• Your website needs to be secure – Is your website HTTP or HTTPS? It should be HTTPS. Data breaches and hacked consumer information are commonplace now—and your website visitors know this. If your electrical website has any place where users can fill in personal information (even if it’s just a phone number and email address) it needs to be secure.
• Your website needs to be fast – Website visitors need to see something happen on your site in under three seconds. If not, 40 percent of them will leave and go to another website.
• Your website needs to have a great user experience – Is your website easy to navigate from a mobile device? Is your contact information front and center? Is it intuitive and does it answer top questions right away? Is it attractive? It needs to be all of the above. Once your page loads, users form an opinion in 0.5 seconds. They expect to be able to find information easily and quickly—especially from a mobile device.

Learn more about websites for electricians »

2. You Need to Master Search Engine Optimization for Electrical Contractors

We’ve covered how you need a great website. Now—can your website be found in search engines? Unless you’ve invested in search engine optimization (SEO) before, the answer is “probably not.” SEO is the process of altering your website content and code to help search engines understand what your page is about and, as a result, help your relevant web pages rank higher for specific search queries.

If you’re one the electricians who say “I optimized my website for search engines YEARS ago—I don’t need to do it again,” I have bad news: SEO has changed drastically over the past few years, and what it took to rank in 2015 doesn’t necessarily apply anymore.

On top of that, SEO for electricians is a bit different than other industries because of the emphasis on local service areas. While there are more than 200 actual ranking signals, here’s what you should focus on if you want your electrician marketing plan to work:

• Secured sites (HTTPS vs. HTTP)
• Websites that are mobile-friendly
• Schema markup
• Webpage content quality
• Webpage content length
• Page speed
• Social signals
• Quality backlinks
• Optimized images
• Domain age

See how we helped on electrician increase organic leads by 179 percent year over year by downloading this electrician SEO case study. Or, learn more about SEO for electricians »

Local SEO for Electricians

On top of general SEO, you’re  also going to need a dash of local SEO, which is the process of helping your business show up in Google’s local listings:

To show up in the local listings you need to optimize your NAP (name, address, phone number) citations across the web. The more local citations you can build with consistent NAP information, the better.

Learn more about how to get to the top of Google’s local listings »

How to Rank in Cities Where You’re Not Located

Ranking in cities you aren’t located in is tough, but not impossible. You’ll need to put in some extra effort to capture rankings over multiple cities or states. Here’s how you do it. There is a myriad of ways to improve your local SEO so you’re more visible to users in your service area, but let’s start with three of the easiest ways that you can boost your electrical company’s local SEO right now.

3. You Need Volumes of Quality Content that Resonate with Your Target Audience

Content marketing is a big bucket that includes things like blogs, videos, ebooks, infographics, downloadable guides, and pretty much anything on your website. You need it because 82 percent of customers have a more positive outlook on a company after reading custom content, and 70 percent of customers feel closer to a company after reading or watching their content. In fact, 74 percent of companies found that their lead number and quality of leads went up as they implemented a content marketing strategy.

Your Electrician Marketing Plan Needs to Include Blogging

Yes, you need some sort of a blog. Google ranks web pages, not whole websites—so as part of your electrician marketing plan, you need to answer every single question a homeowner or property manager might have before signing the dotted line (e.g. anything on home rewiring, circuit breaker replacement, electrical outlet repair, etc.).The more search terms you can be found for, the more visibility you’ll have.

4. You Need to Invest In Pay Per Click (PPC) for Electricians

Take a look at the image below:

The top half of the search results page is dominated by PPC ads for electricians. What you’re seeing are Google Local Services ads on the top and general PPC search ads underneath.

And guess what? People actually click on paid ads. 

Yep, you read that right—75 percent of people say paid search ads make it easier to find the information they are looking for online.

Learn more about paid search ads here »

5. Google Local Services Ads for Electricians

Google Local Services ads are pay per lead ads at the top of the search results for local home services queries.

Here’s how it works: if you qualify for the Google Guarantee, you get to select a list of electrical services you offer. When a person’s search matches criteria for those services, your ad will be eligible to show. Unlike Google Ads, because you are selecting categories and not specific keywords, you can’t pick exactly what your ads will and won’t show for. This may not be a big issue for some companies because you aren’t paying by the click.

According to Google, some of the factors that determine how your electrician ads rank include:

• Your company’s proximity to the user
• Your company’s Google My Business rating and number of reviews
• Your responsiveness to the people that contact you through these ads
• Your business hours (though your ads may still show when you are closed, it will show when you open)

We created an in-depth guide on Google Local Services ads, so be sure to read it!

A Note on Pay Per Lead Services for Electrical Contractors

It’s easy to be tempted by sites like Angie’s List, HomeAdvisor, and Yelp when you constantly see their names in search results for your target services. The thing is, there are many factors to take into consideration when deciding whether to invest in these types of pay per lead services. See our in-depth discussion here.

6. Your Electrician Marketing Plan Should Include Social Media

Many electrical contractors come to us asking if social media is worth it. Here’s what we tell them: If customer service, growing your brand and owning your online real estate matter, then yes. It absolutely matters. Still need convincing? Click here for three reasons why investing in social media services matters for small businesses.

If you want to make social media work for you, you need to put some money behind it. There are several types of Facebook ads you can run depending on whether you’re looking for more website clicks, “likes” on your Facebook page, or engagement on a particular post. Click here to learn more about Facebook ads for electrical contractors.

Get More Commercial Electrical Contracting Jobs with LinkedIn Ads

Did you know LinkedIn is great for commercial advertising? Four out of five LinkedIn members drive business decisions, and LinkedIn’s audience has 2x the buying power of the average web audience. If you want more commercial clients, I highly recommend distributing your content on LinkedIn and putting an ad budget behind it. You can target ads by:

• Company name
• Company industry
• Company size
• Job title
• Job function
• Job seniority
• Member schools
• Fields of study
• Degrees
• Member skills
• Member groups
• Member gender
• Member age
• Years of experience
• Company followers
• Company connections

Learn more about social media for electricians »

7. Use Email Marketing for Electrical Contractors

Email marketing for electrical contractors is an inexpensive, reliable way to increase both new and recurring business. So how can your electrical contracting company take advantage of this marketing channel? Will your return on investment be worth it? These are valid questions to be asking. Click here to learn more and find out if you should be sending a regular email newsletter to your customers every month.

Even when you know the basics of electrical email marketing and you’ve sent out a few messages to your contact list, it can be tough to get people to open your emails. Click here for a few simple tips that will help your next email newsletter stand out from the crowd.

8. Invest In Video Marketing for Electricians

Video marketing is the present and the future. U.S. internet users currently spend an average of 15 hours each week with digital videos, and Cisco predicted that video will even make up 82 percent of all internet traffic in 2021. Not only that, but including a video on a landing page can increase conversion rates by 80 percent, and video drives a 157 percent increase in organic traffic from SERPs. Start by filming the following videos, and create a YouTube channel:

• Company profile videos – Who are you, and why does your company exist? Customers want to know.
• Customer testimonial videos – The top source of leads is recommendations, so get ahead of the game by filming them
• How-to videos that answer common questions – How-to videos earn the most attention out of any videos on YouTube. For example, create videos on common questions like how to install a light dimmer switch, or how to reset a circuit breaker.
• Animated videos that break down complicated electrical concepts and installation processes – Most people don’t understand complicated electrical wiring regulations and processes. Animated videos are a great chance to break it down for them.
• Technician introduction videos – I’d feel better knowing who was coming into my home to work on my wiring—wouldn’t you?

Learn more about video marketing strategy »

9. Customer Service as an Electrician Marketing Strategy

Every business owner knows that it’s cheaper to keep an existing customer than it is to find a new one. If you’ve found that you don’t have many customers coming back for repeat services, you likely have a customer service problem.

Too many companies treat customer service as an afterthought, and they’re making a terrible mistake.

The #1 most effective long-term growth strategy any contracting company can use is top-notch customer service. The first step to evaluating your customer service strategy is to find out how well it’s working in the first place. And if your customer service representatives (CSRs) aren’t doing a great job, all they need is a little extra training.

Need tips for boosting your customer service strategy? Learn more here.

10. Get More Electrical Leads with Online Review Generation

Word of mouth and customer referrals probably make us a large portion of your leads—and you’ve probably noticed you’re getting less of them. That’s because the online review and referral process has moved online to places like Google, Yelp, and Nextdoor. Consider these statistics:

• 88 percent of consumers trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation
• 72 percent of consumers say that positive reviews make them trust a local business more
• 90 percent of consumers say that their purchases are influenced by online reviews

Review generation and management are important for your marketing plan. Not only could low review ratings (or a total lack of reviews) steer potential customers away from your website, but high review ratings help you get in the “local pack” on Google search result pages.

Also, make sure you don’t ignore Nextdoor. According to Steve Wymer, Nextdoor’s vice president of policy, approximately 30 percent of all posts on the up-and-coming platform are recommendation requests for local services.

Read this post for guidelines on how to get more Google reviews for your business, and go here to learn about Nextdoor advertising. 

11. Convert More Electrical Customers with Call Tracking and Analytics

How do you know if any of the above strategies are working? Call tracking and intelligence reporting, that’s how.

It’s easy to use Google Analytics to track how many visitors to your website convert and which digital marketing strategies brought them there. However, most of (or at least a good portion of) your business likely comes from customer phone calls. With the right call tracking and intelligence reporting, you can see exactly which marketing strategies are resulting in phone calls, and which ones aren’t.

For example, when one of our electrical contracting clients’ signs on for call intelligence reporting, our call analytics team listens to and tags every single one of their calls. We then turn this data into an easy-to-read report and highlight certain takeaways, including:

• How their customers are finding them
• The volume of calls from each electrician marketing strategy
• What percentage of the calls from each strategy are leads
• Why your leads aren’t closing
• The true value of your marketing investments
• Ways to improve your in the future

Learn more about call tracking and intelligence reporting »

Need Help Leveling Up Your Electrician Marketing Plan?

At Blue Corona, we know that creating a solid electrician marketing plan can be overwhelming. But with more than ten years of experience helping electrical contractors grow their businesses, we know a thing or two about electrical company marketing. No matter where you’re starting from, we’re here to help. Contact us today to get started.