A Step-by-Step SEO Audit Framework Built for Electrical Contractors

Most electricians who contact us about SEO have already tried something — a website refresh, a few blog posts, a Google Ads campaign. What they haven't done is stop and measure what's actually working before adding more to the pile.

An SEO audit is a diagnostic, not a deliverable. Its job is to answer three questions before any money or time gets spent:

• What is broken and actively hurting your rankings?
• What is missing that your competitors have?
• What is working and should be protected, not changed?

Without those answers, SEO work becomes guesswork. A contractor might invest in new service pages while their site is still being penalized for duplicate content from a five-year-old web template. Or they optimize their homepage keyword while their Google Business Profile lists the wrong service category.

The audit framework in this guide is organized around the four areas that most directly affect how electricians rank in local search: technical health, on-page content, local signals, and domain authority. Each area is independent enough that a problem in one won't always surface in another — which is exactly why you need to check all four.

A note on scope: This guide covers a self-assessment audit — the kind an electrician or their office manager can run using free and low-cost tools. A professional audit goes deeper (crawl-level analysis, competitor gap mapping, historical penalty review), but this framework will surface the issues responsible for the majority of ranking problems we see across electrical contractor websites.

Technical SEO is the foundation. If Google can't crawl, index, or render your pages correctly, nothing else matters. The good news: most technical problems on electrician websites fall into a short list of predictable categories.

Core Web Vitals and Page Speed

Run your homepage and your top service page through Google's PageSpeed Insights (free, no account required). Pay attention to the mobile score specifically — that's what Google uses for ranking. A score below 50 on mobile is a meaningful disadvantage in competitive local markets. Common culprits: oversized images, render-blocking scripts from slider plugins, and hosting on shared servers with slow response times.

Mobile Usability

Open Google Search Console (free, requires site verification) and check the Mobile Usability report. If you see errors like "text too small to read" or "clickable elements too close together," those are documented signals Google uses to assess user experience.

Index Coverage

In Search Console, check the Coverage report. Look for pages marked "Excluded" or "Error." A common problem on electrician sites: old service area pages or blog posts that were deleted but never properly redirected, leaving crawl errors that waste Google's crawl budget.

HTTPS and Security

Your site should load on https:// — not http. Check your browser address bar. If you see a "Not Secure" warning, that's a trust signal failure for both Google and potential customers calling you about electrical work in their home.

Duplicate Content

If your site was built from a template, or if you have city-specific landing pages that use near-identical content, run a quick check using Screaming Frog's free version (up to 500 URLs). Duplicate title tags and near-duplicate page content are among the most common technical issues we find on contractor websites.

On-page SEO for electricians comes down to one question: does each page on your site give Google a clear, specific signal about who you serve, where you serve them, and what problem you solve?

Service Page Inventory

List every service you offer — panel upgrades, EV charger installation, whole-home rewiring, generator hookups, commercial electrical, emergency calls. Now check whether you have a dedicated page for each one. A single "Services" page that lists everything in bullet points is not a service page — it's a menu. Google ranks pages, not menus.

Title Tags and Meta Descriptions

Check your title tags in a browser by right-clicking and selecting "View Page Source" or install a free SEO toolbar. Each service page title tag should follow a pattern like: [Service] in [City] | [Company Name]. Generic titles like "Services — ABC Electric" give Google nothing to work with.

Content Depth

A ranking service page for a competitive keyword like "panel upgrade [city]" typically needs more than 300 words. It should explain the service, who needs it, what the process looks like, and include location-specific references. Thin pages — under 200 words with no supporting detail — are frequently outranked by competitors who put in the work.

Schema Markup

Electrician websites benefit from LocalBusiness schema and Service schema. Use Google's Rich Results Test to check whether your site has structured data. If it doesn't, you're missing a signal that helps Google understand your business type and service offerings without ambiguity.

Internal Linking

Do your service pages link to each other where relevant? A customer reading your EV charger installation page might also need a panel upgrade — if those pages don't link to each other, you're losing both the user and a ranking signal.

For most electricians, the Google Map Pack — the three business listings that appear above organic results for local searches — is worth more traffic than page-one organic rankings. The signals that drive Map Pack visibility are distinct from standard SEO, and they need their own audit pass.

Google Business Profile Review

Log into your Google Business Profile and check each of the following:

• Business name: Does it match your legal business name exactly? Keyword stuffing your GBP name ("ABC Electric — Best Electrician in Dallas") violates Google's guidelines and can trigger suspension.
• Primary category: "Electrician" should be your primary category. Secondary categories like "Electric vehicle charging station" or "Lighting contractor" can be added if relevant.
• Service area: Are the cities and ZIP codes you actually serve listed? Unserved areas inflate impressions but don't convert.
• Services list: Google allows you to list individual services with descriptions. Most GBP profiles for electricians leave this section incomplete.
• Photos: Profiles with regular photo updates (job site photos, team photos, completed work) consistently outperform profiles with no images or only a logo.

NAP Consistency

NAP stands for Name, Address, Phone. Run your business name through a free citation checker like BrightLocal's Citation Tracker or Whitespark. Look for listings where your address is formatted differently, your phone number is an old number, or your business name is truncated or misspelled. Inconsistent citations send conflicting signals to Google and suppress local rankings.

Review Velocity and Response Rate

Check your current review count and the date of your most recent review. In competitive markets, active review generation matters — not just total count. Also check whether you're responding to reviews. Google has confirmed that review responses are considered a relevance and engagement signal for local rankings.

Authority in SEO is built through backlinks — other websites linking to yours. For electricians, this isn't about mass link building. It's about making sure the most relevant and trust-building links exist: local directories, industry associations, supplier websites, and local press.

Backlink Baseline Check

Use Ahrefs' free backlink checker or Semrush's free tier to pull a sample of your current backlinks. You're looking for three things:

• Relevance: Are links coming from local businesses, contractor associations, building supply companies, or local news sites? These carry more weight for local SEO than generic directory links.
• Volume relative to competitors: Search your primary competitor in the same tool. If they have 3x more referring domains than you, that gap is a meaningful authority deficit.
• Toxic links: Links from spam directories, foreign gambling sites, or link farms. These are rare for local electricians but worth checking if you've ever used a low-cost SEO service.

Local Citation Quality

Beyond NAP consistency, evaluate where you're listed. At minimum, an electrician's citation profile should include: Google Business Profile, Yelp, Angi, HomeAdvisor, Houzz, Better Business Bureau, your local Chamber of Commerce, and your state electrical contractors association if they maintain a member directory.

License and Association Links

If your state licensing board publishes a public contractor registry with website links, that's a high-trust backlink you should have. Same for any electrical trade associations you belong to. These links carry authority signals that generic directory links don't — because the domains themselves are authoritative and relevant to the electrical trade.

In our experience working with electrical contractors, the authority layer is almost always the last thing to be addressed — and often the most significant gap between contractors ranking in position 4-7 versus the top three.

After running through all four layers, you'll have a list of issues. The question is priority. Not every SEO problem has the same impact, and fixing low-priority items first is a common way contractors stall their own progress.

Triage by Impact and Effort

Use this simple framework to categorize each issue you found:

• High impact, low effort (fix immediately): Wrong GBP category, missing HTTPS, broken redirect errors, NAP inconsistencies on top directories, missing title tags
• High impact, higher effort (schedule within 30 days): Missing service pages for core offerings, thin content on existing service pages, no schema markup, no review response strategy
• Lower impact, longer-term (plan for 60-90 days): Authority building through link acquisition, expanding citation coverage to secondary directories, adding FAQ schema

What a Self-Assessment Can't Tell You

A self-audit using free tools gives you a strong working picture, but there are gaps. Tools like Screaming Frog free tier cap at 500 URLs. Free backlink tools show a sample, not a complete index. And competitor gap analysis — understanding exactly which keywords your competitors rank for that you don't — requires paid tooling or a professional audit.

If your audit surfaces more than a handful of issues across multiple layers, or if you're in a competitive market (major metro area, multiple established competitors in the Map Pack), it's worth getting a professional audit before committing budget to implementation. A professional audit maps your full competitive gap, not just your individual site problems.

If you'd prefer to have our team run a structured diagnostic rather than working through this manually, you can request a professional electrician SEO audit and we'll tell you exactly where you stand and what to prioritize.