2 Digital Marketing Tips for Field Electricians

Website Design 

According to an independent consumer research study, more than half of the surveyed participants are looking for a suitable service provider online? In the craft industry, consumers still like to rely on recommendations from friends and relatives, but the weakness of recommendation marketing is obvious: As soon as your customers stop advertising you, the flow of orders dries up. A website, on the other hand, advertises your offer 24/7. No wonder why digital is the best way to quote jobs in the field for field workers

However, this only applies if your homepage is up to date and offers a good user experience. Outdated or unprofessionally designed websites, on the other hand, have the opposite effect: 40% of consumers would rather refrain from contacting them in this case1. 

What does the electrician website have to be able to do?

Your website needs to be visible. For your homepage to be found by potential customers, it must first be found by Google and above all ranked well. 

Your website has to be mobile-friendly. According to the Austrian web analysis, more than 80% of Austrians used the Internet via mobile phones and smartphones in 2018. So if your website is not optimized for display on smartphones and the like, Google will not display it for most of the searches carried out. According to the Performance landscape study by Silktide3 (2018), in which over 30,000 Austrian websites were tested, 61% are not optimized for mobile devices. You can test here whether your website is one of them.

Your website needs to be secure. HTTPS is mandatory for electrician websites. Study has shown that only 29% of the websites tested have an SSL certificate and can therefore guarantee secure communication.

Your website has to be fast. According to a study, 20% of users leave a website if it does not load within three seconds. The websites of Austrian companies have an average loading time of 3.7 seconds on a laptop and 9 seconds on mobile devices. This means that they run the risk of overstretching the patience of their visitors.

Your website has to please the user. The first impression counts. This not only applies to people, but also websites. Can the homepage be used intuitively? Can the customer find what interests them directly? Is all the important information available? Is it easy to get in touch?

Search Engine Optimization

You already know why investing in your website design is important. Unfortunately, the best electrician website is of no use if it does not get a good position in Google search results. For this, there is SEO (search engine optimization). In a nutshell, search engine optimization is the art of making your website more relevant to certain search terms (keywords) so that it is displayed on the first page of the search results on Google & Co.

The good news: SEO is extremely lucrative because optimizing ensures that a website ranks organically. This means your website will be viewed and visited more often WITHOUT having to run paid ads. The bad news: SEO changes almost daily. What improved the ranking years or even months ago doesn’t necessarily have to do it today. That means: you have to stay on the ball.

How Does Search Engine Optimization Work For Electricians?

The basics of search engine optimization are of course more or less the same for all industries. For electricians and electrical engineering companies, however, it is particularly important to be found locally. Among the roughly 200 ranking factors that Google uses to sort the indexed websites for each search query, electricians should therefore focus on the following factors if they want to grow their business in 2020 and beyond:

  • secure connection, SSL (HTTPS vs. HTTP)
  • high quality, informative and relevant content
  • Length/scope of content pages
  • Loading speed
  • high-quality backlinks
  • Optimization for display on smartphone (mobile-friendliness)
  • Crawler-friendly photos/graphics
  • Age of the domain
  • Scheme markup

Local Search Engine Optimization for Electricians – Google My Business

General SEO is a good place to start for electricians. Just as important, however, is solid local search engine optimization, which ensures that your contact details are presented in the best possible way for local search queries. To achieve this, there is the free tool Google My Business. Here you can manage and optimize the appearance of your company in all Google products (Google Maps, Google Search and the presumably soon discontinued Google+).

The primary goal is to ensure that your contact details (name, address, telephone number) are always up-to-date for as many relevant search queries as possible. For the search query “Electrician Vienna”, the local listings are currently generated ABOVE the regular results of the organic search:

Blake Cohen
 

Blake is a business journalist with a wealth of experience covering the world of finance, economics and technology. With over a decade of experience reporting on the latest trends in the corporate world, Blake has a reputation for being a knowledgeable, analytical and forward-thinking journalist. He has a keen eye for spotting emerging technologies and trends in the business world, and is able to explain their impact on the economy and society in a clear and compelling way.