SEO for Electricians: What 37 UK Electrician Websites Actually Do

Three out of thirty-seven. That is how many UK electrician websites show their registration number.

Most advice on SEO for electricians starts with a checklist and hopes you recognise yourself in it. We went the other way. We rendered 37 electrician homepages that rank on page one across nine UK cities, measured them, and then compared the results against the 43 plumber sites we measured a fortnight earlier. The technical findings were duller than expected. The trust findings were not.

What SEO for Electricians Actually Involves

Three things decide whether a homeowner finds you: your Google Business Profile, your reviews, and your website. According to Whitespark’s Local Search Ranking Factors survey published in November 2025, Google Business Profile signals account for 32% of local pack ranking weight, review signals 20%, and on-page signals from your own site 15%. Between them that is more than two thirds of what decides whether you appear in the map.

Which means most of the work is not on your website at all. But the on-page share is the part you fully control, and it is the part we can measure from the outside, so that is what this study looks at. Most electrician SEO advice skips that part, because nobody can invoice you for a free profile.

Where the Other 85% of Local Ranking Lives

If on-page signals are 15%, the obvious question is what the rest is. Whitespark’s November 2025 figures break the local pack down as Google Business Profile 32%, reviews 20%, on-page 15%, behavioural signals 9%, links 8% and citations 6%. So the single biggest lever is a free profile you fill in yourself, and the second biggest is asking customers to write something.

That is worth sitting with, because it inverts the usual pitch. Nobody sells you a Google Business Profile, so nobody talks about it, and it is a third of the weight. Your categories, your service list, your opening hours, your photos and your posts are all things you control today without paying anyone.

The website still matters, and not only for its 15%. Behavioural signals at 9% are things like whether people click your result and stay, which is decided by your page. Citations at 6% are your name, address and phone number matching across directories, which starts with what your site says. Get the site wrong and you leak from three categories, not one.

The Technical Basics Are Already Done

If you have been told your website needs fixing because it is not mobile friendly, that pitch is about four years out of date. All 37 sites we measured carry a mobile viewport tag. 95% have a tap-to-call phone link. 86% have schema markup. 89% have a meta description. The floor has risen, and being merely competent no longer separates you from anybody.

Where Electricians Lose Is Trust, Not Technology

Here is the gap. 26 of the 37 sites name a registering body somewhere on the homepage, whether that is NICEIC, NAPIT, ELECSA in England and Wales or SELECT in Scotland. That leaves 11 sites, nearly a third, where a homeowner cannot tell from the front page whether the person about to open their consumer unit is registered at all.

Naming the body is easy. Anyone can put a logo in a footer. Publishing the number is the bit that can be checked, and three sites out of thirty-seven do it. If you want one change that separates you from 92% of the electricians already ranking on page one, that is the change.

Reviews are the better half of the story. 62% of the electrician sites show a review or a rating on the homepage, against 49% of the plumbers. And 17 sites show both a review and a credential. But 5 sites show neither, which means a visitor arrives with nothing to go on except the design.

Electricians Against Plumbers, Measured the Same Way

We ran the identical checks on 43 plumber homepages on 2 August. Same nine cities, same method, same code. The only difference was which registering bodies we looked for, Gas Safe for the plumbers and NICEIC, NAPIT, ELECSA and SELECT for the electricians.

Four of those rows are effectively identical. Mobile, schema, meta descriptions and pricing land within three points of each other, which is a finding in itself: two unrelated trades have converged on the same technical standard and the same reluctance to publish a price.

Where they diverge, electricians are ahead on reviews and behind on credentials. Plumbers are more likely to name Gas Safe and more likely to show the number. Neither trade is close to good on the number, but 14% beats 8%.

Electricians Are Markedly Less Social Than Plumbers

We ran a second pass over the same 37 sites, this time recording which outside platforms each homepage links to. All 37 rendered, none blocked us.

13 of the 37 link to no social account at all. That is 35%, against 18% of plumbers. The median electrician site links to one platform. The median plumber links to two. Facebook is the clearest split: 80% of plumbers link to it against 62% of electricians.

TikTok is 2 sites out of 37. That is marginally ahead of the plumbers at 1 in 40, and it is still effectively empty. Electrical work is visibly satisfying, a fuse board rebuild or a car charger install films well, and almost nobody in the trade is doing it. Whether that is an opportunity or a signal that the audience is not there, we cannot tell from a webpage. But the space is unoccupied.

The directory finding contradicts the received wisdom again. Only 24% of these sites display any trade directory badge. Checkatrade appears on 16%, Yell on 11%, TrustATrader on 5%, MyBuilder on 3%, and Rated People on none of them. Three quarters of the electricians ranking on page one show no directory badge at all, so whatever Checkatrade is doing for its members, it is not how these businesses are winning search.

Two more gaps worth naming. 41% run a blog but only 11% ask for an email address, so most of them are earning readers and then letting them go. And not one of the 37 has a live chat widget, against 2% of plumbers. In a trade where the enquiry is usually urgent, that is either a missed trick or a sensible decision that a ringing phone beats a chat box.

Your Site Is Probably Twice as Heavy as It Needs to Be

The median electrician homepage weighs 2.8MB. Only 4 of 37 come in under 1MB, and 7 are over 4MB. The lightest was 651KB. The heaviest was 16MB, which on a phone on mobile data is close to unusable.

Almost all of it is images. The median site carries 17 of them. Compressing them properly and serving WebP typically takes a site like that under 1MB without touching the design, which is the cheapest performance work there is.

What To Change, In Order

1. Put your registration number on the homepage. Not just the NICEIC or NAPIT logo, the number. 92% of your page-one competitors do not.
2. Get a review onto the front page. Reviews are 20% of local pack weight and 38% of the sites we checked show none.
3. Say what something costs. A call-out fee and an hourly rate is enough. 70% say nothing, and saying nothing sends the visitor to whoever did answer.
4. Compress your images. Median 2.8MB is roughly three times what it needs to be.
5. Then work on your Google Business Profile, because that is 32% of the weight and none of it lives on your website.

If you want that done rather than explained, our SEO service for electricians covers the lot from £249 a month, our local SEO for electricians handles just the map pack from £99, and if the site itself is the problem we build electrician websites from £349.

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