Why You’re Invisible in Local Search (Electricians Must Fix This)

Destiny Marketing Solutions specializes in marketing for electricians. Trusted by electrical contractors across the U.S., we help electricians grow through digital marketing—local SEO, local service ads, Google Ads, content, and automation.

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Transcript

Leonard Parker's video recording: 0:00

You know what's funny about electricity? You only notice it when it's not working. But as an electrician, the opposite is true. If customers don't notice you, you don't work. Hey there, I'm Leonard Parker from Destiny Marketing Solutions, and today we're tackling a problem I see constantly. With electrical businesses making$200,000 a year, but still struggling, you're invisible in your own backyard. Let me ask you this. How many times have you driven past a house with another electrician's van parked outside in your service area and thought that should be my job? If you're nodding right now, this video is for you. I'll show you exactly why you're losing local jobs to competitors. Who may not even be as qualified as you are and stick around to the end. I have a couple of expert tips about some digital visibility hacks that 95% of electricians don't know about, but could instantly boost your local visibility in the search results. Here's what's happening in your market right now. Local homeowners and business owners, they're actively searching for electricians. Maybe for a panel upgrade, maybe for some new lighting, but they're not finding you. Instead, your competitors are ranking higher in getting those calls, even if they have less experience or charge more than you do. The brutal truth is this, it's not the best electrician who gets the job. It's the most visible one. I worked with an electrical contractor here in Houston who had. 22 years of experience, but was getting beaten out by a company that had only been around for two years, all because a newer company had better local visibility. This isn't just frustrating. It's literally money left on the table every single month. Let's look at why this matters. Now more than ever, the stats are brutal. 90% of searchers choose a business on the first page of the search results. If you're on page two, you might as well be invisible. And that map section at the top of Google results, that's called the Map pack, and it absolutely dominates mobile searches, where most people will look for an electrician these days. Here's something most electricians don't realize, in the eyes of your potential customer, visibility equals trust. If Google puts you at the top, you must be good, right? Local search has become the new word of mouth, and if you're thinking I get plenty of referrals, that's great, but what about all the homeowners and business owners who don't know someone who knows you? They're going straight to Google. If you're not showing up where people are searching to them, you don't exist. So what's actually hurting your visibility? It usually comes down to four core issues. First, an important or inconsistent Google business profile. This is the foundation of your local visibility, and most electricians set it up once and forget about it reviews aren't just nice to have They're ranking factors. Third, no local SEO on your website. If you're not using combinations like service plus city keywords, like emergency electrician, Omaha, you're missing huge opportunities Fourth, A lack of fresh content and location signals that tell Google you're active and relevant. Here's the key takeaway. Most electricians don't have a visibility problem. They have a foundation problem. Fix the foundation and visibility follows naturally. If you're feeling called out right now, drop a comment saying, guilty as charged. we've all been there. Now let's fix this problem, starting with the most important piece, dominating the Google Map pack. First, you want to claim and fully optimize your Google business profile. This isn't just filling out the basics make sure that you're using the appropriate service categories. Accurate business hours and proper geotargeting. One mistake I see constantly is electricians selecting electrical contractor as their only category when they could also use. Other categories like emergency electrician, lighting contractor, among other relevant options Even if you want to go the local service ads route. Google will connect your local service ads account with your Google business profile. So you wanna make sure that profile is in good standing and it is a prerequisite before you can use those local service ads. Next post updates and fresh photos weekly, if not weekly, at least try to do this monthly on a regular basis. Google Rewards active profiles. I worked with an electrical company that started posting one project photo a week, and we saw their local rankings and visibility. Climb within a month, get consistent reviews with service and location keywords. The magic phrase to tell customers. If you wouldn't mind mentioning the specific service we provided and your neighborhood in your review, that would really help us out. Not only does that send signals to Google and other search engines that you are an expert in this particular service in this particular area. But that will also help prospective clients, see that you've helped others around them. The mat pack is your golden ticket. It puts you in front of homeowners and business owners who are ready to book right now, not just browsing, The second piece of the puzzle. is turning your website into a local SEO magnet. This means using city and neighborhood names in key areas of your website. You don't just wanna stuff them randomly. You wanna make sure That anything you add to your website is readable, and understandable for humans. But you want to strategically place your city and service combinations in titles, headers, and specific places in the content. Stay tuned and I would do a quick demo of an electric services company that's doing this well. You wanna create service area pages for each location you serve. If you work in five different cities or counties, you should have five different pages optimized for each of those areas. You also want to add local schema markup. This is code that helps search engines understand your location data. Don't worry if you don't know how to do this. This is something you would usually hand over to an SEO consultant or a web developer This is a snippet of code that they will add to the back end of your website. there are ways you can test it to make sure that it is firing correctly. I'll go over that in a minute. You also want to reinforce your location authority with content that mentions local landmarks, and neighborhoods. Maybe there's local happenings in your area that are relevant to your services. You want to make sure you write for that local audience. what I tell clients is if you take your logo, and branding off your website, and then stick someone else's logo and branding from another part of the country, if the content you have on that page is still relevant. Then you're not being specific enough to your local audience. you really want to write for the local audience because you are a member of your community. write as if you were writing to yourself. we see this over and over again. we've worked with. Electricians in Southern California and San Diego, and they were able to create these local pages for La Jolla, for Pacific Beach and so on, all from this one simple change. they were able to rank very well for those different phrases. These different local SEO tactics tell Google Bing and your customers exactly where you work and who you serve. It removes all doubt. as I promise, I'm going to now click out of my slides. and quickly show you the example of service pages. So this is Express Electrical Services. They are based in Southern California in the Los Angeles area. I went to their service areas page. they have pages broken down by county, we drilled down to Los Angeles County. First, let's take a look at this little box that just popped up This box is called the title tag or page title. if you see this section in the search results. This is the title tag. It's important to incorporate your target keyword and your target service area.here. So you can see here we hover over it again, they are calling out LA County Electrician. And, they're saying they're a 24 hour emergency electrician, so it's likely that's one of their most important service offerings. And then we scroll down the page. We see they're also using Los Angeles County here, and the Heading Tag. So usually the primary heading on the page, that's going to be what's called a heading one. If you're writing an outline, think back in school, you maybe had to write an outline for a paper. That heading tag is pretty much going to be the title of the page or what is that page about? And it's the most important place for keyword and service area placement. So they're doing that very well here. You'll see here in their subheadings, they're using different variations of. Licensed Electrician, LA County. Again, they are calling out Los Angeles County and so on, and you'll see here I'm not gonna get it too far into the content, but do mention like Los Angeles electricians and other things here that are relevant for that primary keyword for the page. one thing that they could improve that could get them even more visibility, of course, Los Angeles County, that includes. Los Angeles proper, but also other little towns and suburbs around the city. So if they really wanted to go hyper-local, they could call out those specific suburbs and towns. It may not be necessary to create a landing page for each of those towns. Especially for large cities, there could be many suburbs but maybe you just prioritize those where you have historically seen the most business or where you see the most opportunity. So that would be one area of opportunity. But all in all, this is an example of a good local landing page where they're combining the target location. With their primary keyword. The other thing I mentioned going back to the slide, I mentioned local schema markup. And so this is where things can get a bit technical. But again, if you partner with a developer, this is something also that we've been doing for over a decade. So feel free to reach out to us. This is a great way to. Add more local relevance about your business. the more data points that you give search engines like Google, Bing, and now AI powered search, like chat, GPT, perplexity, the more beneficial it will be for you this is just one type of data point. this is a templated schema snippet JSOS schema snippet that you can add. So what you can do, you'll see here, I'll zoom in here a bit. And don't worry, I will link to this snippet in the description, you can update your name. actually put your business name, for image I would include a URL to your company's logo. That's usually gonna be the best image to include here. Also make sure that your address is relevant and then include your phone number, your hours of operation and so forth. There are schema builders. I'll link to a few of those in the video description. Merkel is a popular one. You also have Dentsu, they have a schema markup generator. all you have to do is fill out the information and then this generator will build a schema snippet while you fill out that information. So let's say if I put Leo's. Electrician, you can see here on the right it is starting to fill out that information. I suggest using a tool like this so that you don't have to figure out what's what, and then. Hand it over to your developer to see if they can add it to your website. how do you know if this is working or not? You can go over here to a schema validator, and I'll also link to this in the video description. this is the same snippet that I pulled from the other tab. You can run a new test. This is just a template snippet, copy and paste that you're gonna run the test and what you're looking for, you wanna make sure that this runs with no errors or warnings. yes, it's more technical, but you can add more data points to your website to feed to these different traditional search engines and AI powered search tools. let's talk a bit about review. this is something that. I find not just electricians, but business owners are uncomfortable with asking for reviews. They are your visibility currency. The more you have, the richer you appear online, as far as Google and Bing's eyes. High review counts and quality directly improve your rankings. One study found that moving from a three star to a 4.5 star rating increased conversion rates by 25%. More. People are converting on your website. indicating these users are engaged. They're not bouncing from your website, so you are matching what users are searching for. over time, this sends positive user engagement signals to the search engines. So how do you get more reviews? My advice is always to create a system around things, especially if it's something you don't feel comfortable with. Build a system where after the job is completed. You have an automated follow up, maybe via text message or email to get that customer's review. be prompt about this because, we're all busy, so you don't wanna leave time to waste. Most happy customers are willing to leave a review. They just forget unless you ask. And don't feel bad if they don't. Sometimes it does take follow up, via text or email. Maybe someone from your team gives'em a call to follow up. But you wanna make sure to make it as easy as possible. There is a way to provide a link that goes directly to your Google Reviews or Yelp, if that's where you want to build your reviews. You wanna make it as easy as possible for your customer. Something else that I see many electricians miss is that you wanna make sure to respond to every review, positive or negative. This keeps your profile active and engaged and it signals to the search engines that you care about customer feedback. more reviews. Don't just build trust; They can literally boost your rankings and conversions being form filled and calls on your website. If you've struggled to get reviews consistently, drop a comment below and I'll share a simple script you can use to ask for them. Moving on to your OnPage, local SEO. when we talk about OnPage, these are things that I went over in the first demo about your title tags, your headings, and so forth. you wanna make sure that you are using your service plus location in page titles, your main headings, subheadings, and your meta descriptions. for example, if you have a page dedicated to. Emergency services and you're serving the Dallas Fort Worth area, your title tag may be something like Emergency Electrician in Dallas, Texas, and then, hyphen 24/7 service. And then a hyphen or pipe symbol with your company name. You also want to add internal links between your service and location pages. This creates a website that helps both Google and users. Navigate your site better. What you don't want is for people to go to your website and it's difficult to find what they're looking for. one way you can make it easier to get around your site is by linking relevant pages together. Next, you want to optimize your image alt tags and file names with local context.So let's say you have a panel upgrade service page, instead of naming an image file or alt tag using panel upgrade, do something more specific like. Electric coal panel upgrade New Orleans, for example. And you also want to keep your location specific content unique and relevant. What I mean by that, and something that I've seen is where electric services company, they'll have many different local pages, but if you look at them, it's really all of the same content. They just replace the name, the heading and so forth. So that's not really best for your local SEO. it's also not as helpful as it could be for the user, especially if you're targeting a vast area. So you wanna make sure to make that page specific to that neighborhood or community This could also create an issue with duplicate content if you have 10 different location pages on your website but all the content is very similar. They're gonna pretty much compete with each other. instead of Google and Bing returning all 10 of those pages they will try to pick the best one and just return that page on a search result. So this is something that you want to keep in mind because you spend all that time either creating those pages yourself or paying someone to create those pages and they're not really giving you the vast visibility that you're looking for. Next we have NAP consistency NAP is short for name, address, and phone. This is very important for local trust. it might sound simple and obvious, but if a business has not, performed an audit to actually fix these issues this is something that can easily go. Uncorrected for a long time, and it can create different issues with trust in the different search results. So when we're looking at name, address, and phone, you wanna make sure that your website URL is consistent across different profiles like your Google Business profile, your Facebook business page your Yelp, your Manta, and so on. You also wanna make sure that your phone number. is accurate, your address is accurate. some of the common things that I see, let's say if you're renting out an office in a larger building. For example, on your Google business profile, you spelled out suite, so S-U-I-T-E, but on your Facebook business page, you're abbreviating it, so it's ST, 500 or wherever your suite number is. When search engines look at those two listings, that's going to be seen as inconsistent because they're not exactly the same. Another example I see, let's say if you have not. taken the initiative to build out your citations, your different profiles for your business. Maybe there was an older business at that address that's no longer in business, but they had a Yelp profile from 15 years ago. since you have never created a Yelp profile for your business. Google and other search engines are still going to pull that information from that inactive business from 15 years ago. if you ever do one of these audits, you can see other businesses that have used your address in the past. So you just wanna make sure that you are proactive with this. Instead of reactive these small things. can hurt your local visibility especially if you have competitors who are taking the initiative to fix these types of issues. So I actually wanted to do a quick screen share and show you some examples. of what I just covered. first with the alt tag. I just picked a website here. this depends on your website platform WordPress is very common. This is something when you upload an image to a website, you'll be able to specify the Altech and what is the Altech. initially the Altech was for accessibility, Back in the days of Dialup with very slow internet connections Altech would describe that image for someone who has maybe a slow internet connection or they're visually impaired. it's a sign of accessibility, which is always something great to consider for your website. So if I just look at this particular picture, you don't have to worry about this stuff on the right. when you're uploading an image or someone from your team is uploading an image, they don't really have to get into the code, If I select this image, it highlights this snippet of HTML. Here on the right, the alt tag is King Harry, the eighth of England. that's a way to describe the image. how can you make this relevant for you? You can specify. the service the picture is describing. if it's on your ev charging installation page, you can put something like ev charging installation. Then you can add the target location for that page and even maybe add your business name Assuming that you are using original images these images will then be eligible to show up in a search results as well, and then they'll associate that image with your company. So again, another way to get more visibility in the search results locally. The next thing I wanted to quickly go over was that name, address, and phone or nap, factor. So I always recommend businesses, especially if you're getting started It's to do a citation audit. I use SEMrush. That's our go-to SEO software. However, there are other tools out there that provide the same information. I'll include a link to this tool here in the video description. What you'll do is type in your business name, I showed an earlier demo, with Express Electrical Services, based in Los Angeles. I already ran the audit for them. to show you what this looks like. It'll give you an overall grade, and tell you how many listings you need to fix. It'll also give you more information about your average review rating, and total reviews If you scroll down, it'll tell you The specific issues that need to be addressed with each profile. For example, on Yelp, they need to update their phone number. Or for Bing it's not present. sometimes there might be false positives So it helps to manually check, especially if you have a Facebook business page. this is a great starting point, and it's all about. Making sure your branding is consistent online. And you might have new profiles that you can add that might be relevant for electricians and electrical service providers. now, going back to my content here, this. Video focuses on online local visibility factors. But don't forget about offline visibility. Digital is critical, but the physical world still matters. use yard signs on active job sites in your target neighborhoods. This could be free advertising exactly in areas where you want to build your presence. If it's within your means, invest in branded vehicle wraps with your location and contact info. Your service vehicles can be your mobile billboard, so make them work for you. Sponsor or attend local community events. If you sponsor a local. Little league team or some, local charity. you're giving back to the community. That's most important. But it's a great way for added visibility. I always encourage my. Electrician clients to join the local chamber of commerce and if they are targeting a large area with multiple chambers of commerce, consider joining multiple chambers. usually with your membership, you're going to get a profile on their website. And you can use that profile to link back to your website. Chamber of Commerce links, are very powerful because the chamber is a very trusted organization. If you are on their website search engines know that you're a legitimate business. that can be very helpful for your offline visibility and your online visibility. being seen as part of the community helps build trust and recognition. good old fashioned networking. Leave cards, flyers, and one pagers at local supply houses and businesses. Other contractors and businesses can be great referrals, resources as well. And the key takeaway here is that local visibility doesn't start online. It starts where you do business every day. If you're not ranking where your competitors are, you're losing leads before you ever get a shot. That's why we developed the full circuit growth method, a comprehensive approach that integrates all these visibility elements into one system. taking a quick look at our framework, we start with the typical issue why someone will reach out to us. A lack of qualified leads, highlighting in green on the left. we work towards your dream outcome through getting found by the right clients, converting those leads into projects, and knowing exactly what's working and what's not. With a robust analytics implementation, it's about building a sustainable system that consistently puts your business in front of the right people. Implementing all this yourself takes time and expertise that most busy electrical professionals simply don't have, and that's where we can come in at Destiny Marketing Solutions. We specialize in helping electricians. Dominate local search and build predictable lead flow. Through our full circuit growth audit, we'll uncover exactly what's broken in your current visibility and give you a detailed plan to fix it fast. If you're serious about not letting your competitors do one more job, that should be yours. You can click the link below. I'll make sure to include it in the video description so that you can book your full circuit growth audit. You've already done the hard work of building a quality electrician business. Now let's make sure that people can actually found you. I have two expert tips for you with this video. The first is geotagging. This is where you add location based data to any images that you might upload to your website or to your other profiles. this is a topic that is a bit divisive in the digital marketing community. Some people think it works, some people think it doesn't have any impact. I'm of the camp that the more data points you can provide the different search engines, the better that's going to be for your visibility long term. I suggest you do add geo tax. you might just be uploading your photos to your Google Business profile from your phone while realizing that they can embed location data into those images. you can use a tool like. Geo imager to add location data to your photos before uploading them to Google and to your website. This embeds the exact GPS coordinates of where the photo was taken. Why does this matter? Because Google uses this data to verify that you actually work in the areas you claim to serve. It's a powerful trust signal that few of your competitors are using. for viewers. with a larger business or a multi-location business, you might already be aware of the benefit of this. Google allows separate business profile listings for distinct office locations. If you have the resources, consider opening satellite offices or service hubs in different parts of your city. If you are serving a very large market each verified address can rank in its own local map pack. So I'll show you, where this can be beneficial. the key takeaway here is with your satellite offices, multiple service locations equal multiple ways to dominate local search. So let's start with the satellite offices. this is where I'm at in the Greater Houston area, and I want you to pay attention to these listings in the map pack on the left hand side. as I started scrolling, you can see how it's starting to change. I did a search for a backup generator installation. And so where I scroll to this is probably no more than 15 minutes from where I live. And you can see here we have a completely different set of businesses showing up. if you are serving a large area like Houston or Los Angeles, your visibility can be severely limited. Based on your proximity to that searcher. one way to address this is to have satellite offices across your service area. some common ways you can start a satellite office, if you don't want to. Open a full functioning office, you can try to find a coworking space. Many will offer a mailing address. if, You want to have a meeting that can be a great option for meeting space. You have different options. That's one I found. if you have a business friend or someone from your network, you can go half on office space somewhere other than your main location. So as I say, you do have different options But the key takeaway here is that having satellite offices. Can help you boost your visibility across a larger metro area. Now, for the first expert tip, the geo tagging, I use a tool called Geo Immature. There are other tools that provide the same functionality. And like I said I'll link to this in the video description. So if I click start now, I can upload my image. In this particular tool, they have a free and a pro version. The free version only allows you to do five geo tax per day while the pro allows you to do I believe it's either 10 or 100, You can use the search feature, to find the latitude and longitude. the easiest way to do that is to hop over to maps.google.com and type in a location. Here I'm just using our Google business profile, you'll notice in the URL. after your business name, there'll be an symbol followed by two coordinates. you can copy and paste. the coordinates. latitude comes first, so copy that then go back and get the longitude You can see here it's now correctly pinned my map. And then from there you can add keywords and tags. For this demo, you write your tags, so it's gonna ask you to sign in for Google. this is how you can add geotags or create geotags for your image. once you created those, you'll go to your image properties and actually add those to the properties of your image on your phone or on your computer. I would love to know which of these strategies you're most. excited to implement. drop a comment below. I read and respond to everyone. If you found value in this video, do me three favors. Hit that like button, subscribe for more marketing strategies and share this with other electricians in your network who need to boost their visibility. Remember, in this business being the best, doesn't matter if nobody can find you, combine. Quality work with strategic visibility both online and offline, that's when your business truly shines. Again, I'm Leonard Parker from Destiny Marketing Solutions, helping you light up your local market, one search result at a time. Until next time.