SEO (search engine optimization) (SEO), as well as paid search advertising, are two essential digital marketing tactics for electricians. Both require the use of relevant keywords to reach your targeted customer.
While an effective website design is a must, your website must also be set up to drive a potential client to your site when they do a local search for an electrician service you offer. From there, you can where you can then turn them into a paying customer for your services.
An effective electrician SEO campaign will require that you have unique content on your company website that is constructed around keywords that relate to the services that your company offers. Each services page on your site must be focused on one relevant keyword directly related to your service offering.
Digital marketing for Local SEO involves attracting local customers through search engines by appearing high up in the search results or in the Google Map Pack. You can develop great content around your keywords that your prospective customers will find useful. You can use these keywords to effectively describe your services in your Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) that is associated with your Google Map listing.
Search advertising on Google and Bing search engines involves the creation of pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns to help you get your advertising message in front of potential customers exactly when they're seeking your electrician services. A potential customer will do a Google search for services you offer, and they'll see a Google Ad for your services.
Both methods can drive traffic to your electrician website where you'll have the opportunity to convert leads into customers for your electrical business.
Locate Your Own Keywords
In this article, I will first go over the methods and tools that you can utilize to pinpoint more keywords to use in digital marketing for your electrician business.
Use Our Keyword The List
At the end of the article, I'll provide you with 80 terms related to electrician services that you are able to review, modify and then use in your own paid search marketing campaigns. You can also use the keywords for SEO in order to attract more customers to your website.
In each of the examples below I'm using a single seed keyword with the keyword research tools such as "electricians". You’ll want to try different keywords that are based on the services you offer. “Surge protection”, “electrical panel installation”, and “outlet installation” would be just a very few example keywords that you can use with these keyword research tools.
This is a paid program that begins at around $29 per month. KWFinder has a trial (for free) of 10 days.
With Mangools, you'll enter your keywords, location, and language, and it will deliver a lot of important information for SEO as well as PPC. Although the actual figures won't be completely accurate (only Google has access to the most accurate data on search results) the information will assist you in selecting the appropriate keywords.
Mangools KWFinder results for "electricians"
In this case we have selected "electricians" as the keyword, and then set the location as "Tampa" (1). By default, it shows Related Keywords (2).
Also, you can switch between "Autocomplete" or "Questions". Creating website content around Google Autocomplete or Questions people ask is a fantastic SEO Strategy. These are usually lower volume keywords that have little in terms of competition, giving you the chance to receive organic traffic (free) for your electrical contractor company web page.
Keyword Table (Left Panel)
Keywords (2) - These are the keywords you may want to look over to be used in paid search as well as SEO campaigns.
Search (3) - This is the monthly average search volume over the last 12 months , calculated based upon the parameters used to search (searches that include "electricians" within Tampa). We can see that roughly 550 individuals per month search on "electricians" to search in Tampa.
CPC (4) - CPC is how much you will pay per search on the keyword for Google Ads paid search. If you use CPC (5), using the electricians example, you'll see that the estimated cost per click would be approximately $15.40. This is an estimation however, the price per click for your advertisement campaign will vary based on many factors including where you’re running ads, the competitors you’re advertising against, and the position of your ad on the page. Based on the information available, it's safe to say you can bid on "electricians" at an estimated CPC of $15.40 will probably be higher than bidding on "electrical installation" with a CPC of $3.94.
PPC (5) - PPC shows how difficult the competition is for paid search ads. 100 is higher and indicates extremely competitive bidding. 0 indicates very little competition and likely much lower click costs. The 50 for the “electricians” keyword seems to indicate that the advertiser competition is pretty average.
KD (6) - this is keyword difficulty and it serves as a SEO tool. For electrician the keyword difficulty is 40 - which they claim to be "Possible". Possible menas while you can rank, you really need to have great content on your site and have an extremely good SEO gameplan.The higher the number higher, the more difficult it is to get near the top of the search results. The KD for many of the keywords isn’t shown - to reveal the actual difficulty, you’ll just click on the magnifying glass.
Keyword SEO Data (Right Panel)
The right-hand side of the panel has SEO data on the keyword that is highlighted in the left panel. In this panel, we can see the keyword difficulty highlighted once more (7) and an overview of the Search Engine Results Page (8) overview of the keyword based upon our keyword search parameters. The top search result is owned by angi.com. This gives you great information about the companies you'll face when you decide to rank for the selected search term.
Create Lists and Export Your Results
You can make lists and export data through this interface to do a keyword analysis with offline tools (like spreadsheets).
Ahrefs is a tool that can be used for many SEO purposes including keyword research. The capabilities of the tool make the prices of plans (starting at $99/month) a good value for marketing agencies. For electricians, it may be viewed as a bit of a steep price tag unless you have a very large electrical contracting company with multiple locations.
In ahrefs, you’ll go to the keywords explorer and enter a seed keyword. The keyword we've chosen is "electricians" (9) - and then used the default settings of Google for our search engine and the USA as our geographical search location.
Enter your seed keyword within Keywords Explorer - then click on "Related Terms"
On the page with results, you can click "Related Terms" (10) to get your list of keywords to explore.
In the following results, you can see that we have 5,134 possible keywords to select from. You can save these keywords to an excel spreadsheet or export them for offline analysis on your spreadsheet of choice. Here's a brief overview of the columns that might be helpful when analyzing keywords for your electrician marketing campaigns.
ahrefs Returns a Lot of SEO and PPC Data for Each Keyword
Keywords (11) - Alist of keywords that you can use for search engine optimization or search engine advertising on the major search engines
KD (12) - This is the difficulty of keywords as estimated by ahrefs using their in-house metrics. Higher numbers are more difficult to rank than lower numbers. The KD is on a logarithmic scale. This means that the ranking for keywords with KD20 is more than two times as difficult to rank as KD10 keywords.
Volume (13) - This is the monthly average search volume for the specified keyword based on the search parameters from our original search.
CPC (14) - Approximate cost per click you can be expecting if you're running PPC ads on Google for this keyword. Ahrefs basing this on Google data, but as mentioned previously, cost per click varies based on many different factors. This is to be used as a guide only.
SERP (15) - Here you will see the search engine results for the term. Clicking on this will show the competitors and where they appear in the search results. This allows you to know who your competitors will likely be should you choose to compete on that keyword.
Export (16) - You can export ahrefs data to perform an offline analysis using a spreadsheet or keyword analysis tool.
Keyword Sheeter was called something a little bit more racy - it was also free. It appears that they're moving to more of a fee-based model, however, you can still use it for free.
What it does is offer you a list of Google autocomplete suggestions based on the keywords that you have entered. In this case, using the "Keyword Ideas Tools" tab (17) along with accepting the default settings for search (18), I provided the keyword "electrician" (19) and then clicked “Sheet Keywords” (20). A list of keyword variations are then provided. Applying both positive and /or negative filters to further refine your results is also possible.
Keyword Sheeter provides a variety of results for “electrician” that are based on Google Autocomplete
At the moment it is possible to copy the results to spreadsheets. Subscriptions start at $9/mo.
Keywords can also be found using the Google Keyword Planner tool within Google Ads. Note we have an upcoming article on Google Ads for Electricians, which will be a must-read for electrical contractors.
If you've already signed up for Google Ads, you can access Google's Keyword Planner by going to "Tools and Settings" (21) then after that, selecting "Keyword Planner" (22)
Accessing the Google Keyword Planner from the Main Menu
Once you're in the keyword planner, you'll likely need to begin by entering keywords (23) You can enter as many keywords as you'd like (24) In this case, we put in "electrician". You’ll want to enter many more keywords in this space that are related to the electrical services that you offer. When you're ready to go on, click the "Get results" option (25).
Entering seed keywords in Google's Keyword Planner
As you can see below, Google shows 376 keywords in a result set. In the table below, you will find keywords (27) and average monthly Google searches per keyword (28), and how much you’ll need to bid for your ad to be near the top of the search results (29) and (30).
You can expand your search results by broadening your search (31). You can also edit / refine your keywords and download your results by clicking on the appropriate link near the top of the page (32).
Keyword planner results for "electrician"
Google offers these results and permits you to integrate them directly into your search ads.
Based on experience and using the tools listed above, here is a starting list of 80 SEO keywords for electricians that can also be used for PPC purposes.
It's not a complete list. You must conduct your own analysis to find phrases that fit your company. Fortunately, I provided a few tools to aid with your keyword research efforts earlier in this article.
For paid search campaigns, you will want to add qualifiers to some of the terms below.
Location qualifiers
For instance, lots of people are searching for "near to me", "my area" or their location (e.g. "Electrical Company Denver"). So, for certain keywords, you could want to include city names that you service as well as the "near to me" qualifier.
Negative Keywords
Many of the terms below are fairly popular in searches. If you do not offer the product or service, then make it one of your negative keywords. Note - for more details regarding negative keywords, read our separate post that is coming up which will cover negative keywords for electricians.
Now that you have all these keywords, if you need help utilizing them in your marketing efforts let us know. You can use these keywords for content creation and bidding on keywords in Google Ads.
If you're a local electrician not affiliated with a franchise, use the form to reach out to me. I - or some of my agency partners - may be able to find an seo expert that can implement an electrician SEO Strategy that meets your needs.
