Proven success in SEO for electricians
We’ve done it for Briggs Electrical:
#1 for ‘electrician Melbourne’
#1 for ‘emergency electrician Melbourne’
#1 for ‘commercial electrician Melbourne’
We can get you great results too…
Electrician SEO – a case study
We believe that SEO is the best form of digital marketing for any tradie. (You can find out more about this here.) And we always say that you should always work with an Agency that has a proven track record in getting results. So in this case study we delve into the SEO Strategy that has worked wonders for one of our clients, Briggs Electrical – an Electrician in Melbourne.
What you’ll find out in SEO for Electricians case study
This isn’t just a case study about one of our clients. It’s a look at the challenges of SEO for Electricians and helps
In this study you’ll find out:
Why Briggs Electrical has stayed with us for nearly 6 years
The challenges of SEO for tradies and especially electricians
How we chose the right keywords for Briggs’s strategy
How we implemented the strategy
What was required to sustain great rankings for 6+ years (and counting)
Briggs Electrical
Key Results
Top rankings
#1 ‘electrician Melbourne’
#1 ‘emergency electrician Melbourne’
#1 ‘commercial electrician Melbourne’
#1 ‘domestic electrician Melbourne’
% increase in traffic
1509% traffic increase data from Jan 2016 to now
Growth in team
From 1 person to 5 people
Enquiries
55 calls/month | 35 forms/month
Project overview
Briggs Electrical originally came to us because:
They felt they weren’t getting the results promised by their former SEO agency
They were not seeing enquiries coming through
Rank had started to decline
So they asked us to review their SEO and see what we would recommend. We did this in 2015 and they have been with us ever since.
Strengths
- A well-designed website
- A simple menu structure
- Some decent ranking for suburbs
Weaknesses
- A poorly optimised website
- Missing important meta data
- A focus on suburbs only
- Poor quality content
- No helpful content, other than suburb pages
- No optimisation for specific services such as ‘domestic electrician’ or ‘switchboard repairs’
- An over-reliance on link building
The diagram below shows a snapshot of their rank in September 2015. We can see:
- There are only 8 phrases in the top 10 of Google
- Their rank was declining for most of the phrases being targeted
- The phrases they rank for are mainly suburbs (which was an outcome of only having suburb-related content on the site)
At the time, the site was generating about 100 visits per month organically. This was not sufficient traffic to generate enough enquiries to help grow the business.
It was clear that Briggs Electrical needed to make some important changes:
- Perform a full SEO strategy to identify what people search for
- Assess the market and competitors to see what we need to do to be successful
- Create helpful content that is optimised for these searches
- Correctly optimise the website
- Improve the technical aspects of the website
- Set immediate and long term goals
It’s all very well setting goals – but in order to be successful you need to know the market you are getting into. In SEO, for example, we can’t just say to an electrician, “let’s go for ‘electrician Melbourne’”.
There is so much more to consider!
The challenges of digital marketing and seo for electricians
All trade-based services are competitive but ‘electrical’ is a particularly competitive space. There are many big
businesses chasing this marketing for SEO.
If we search for ‘electrician Melbourne’ we get 86.8 MILLION results:
And everyone wants to be in position #1!
This is a huge challenge.
We first see ‘paid’ results:
If someone clicks on these ads, the electrical companies running Google
Ads will pay about $10 per click.
Then there are the organic results:
It’s important for any tradie to look at who they are up against when doing SEO…
In results we often see:
Franchises like Jim’s
Big businesses like RAC
Directories like Yellow pages
Quoting websites like ‘service seeking
So trying to beat these kinds of companies can be very difficult as they usually have established authority and large budgets.
Even if a phrase is ranked as low competition – once you get into the top 10, the competition is usually fierce.
The shift from 10 to position 1 becomes more
This means that any electrician trying to get found faces a big challenge – especially if they go for big cities like ‘electrician brisbane’ or ‘electrician sydney’.
Step 1 – Choosing the correct keywords
An important step in SEO is to analyse and then choose the correct keywords to target as part of an effective SEO Strategy.
The keywords / suburbs Briggs was already targeting were good. But we wanted a lot more.
We looked at some important ‘broad’ keywords knowing that this would be a highly competitive area:
This chart shows:
- ‘Electrician’ was searched (in 2015) 8,100 times per month
- But it is very difficult to rank for because it has high competition
- This also does not imply intent to find an electrician in melbourne – it is too ‘broad’
- So we did not choose this to optimise for
- ‘Electrician Melbourne’ is searched 1,300 times per month
- But has much less competition
- This is a great phrase to go for but it is not something we could do immediately
Any website needs to build ‘domain authority’. This is a term used to predict how likely a website is to rank in search engine result pages (SERPs).
Without any established authority it is not easy to target a phrase like ‘electrician melbourne’.
So we chose ‘electrician melbourne’ as a medium-long term goal to rank for.
This was an ambitious phrase to go for immediately
Briggs’ site did not have any established authority
We knew it would take time to rank for this – but we knew it would be a worthwhile goal
Step 2 – Selecting ‘broad service’ phrases
We then looked at other keywords we could target that we (iformat) class as ‘broad services’ all related to electrical.
These phrases show good search volumes and much lower competition than ‘electrician melbourne’.
We selected these as a ‘medium term’ goal to rank for.
Step 3 – Selecting ‘specific service’ phrases
The next step was to find phrases for very specific services. We were specifically looking for low competition phrases that we could gain rank for rapidly.
These phrases / services are:
- Ones Briggs Electrical like to do
- Services they could easily facilitate with the equipment they had
- Were all quick and easy / in-out jobs that could be completed and invoiced rapidly
Best of all they were phrases we could quickly rank for in order to help getting more enquiries – fast!
Search Engine Optimised Content
The first thing we did was to create content that was optimised for the services and locations we wanted to go for.
We created more effectively optimised content
Ensure the content was more helpful to the reader
We expanded existing content, raising the word count of the content from about 300 words to about 800
Created better MetaData Title Tags and Descriptions
This was then implemented to the site and correctly optimised.
Website Design
We reviewed the website and felt that the ‘conversion’ strategies could be improved as well.
Homepage Design
The Home Page below has some issues:
It does not say the area Briggs operates in
It does not have an image of the team
The page feels impersonal
There is no contact form link
It does not include important key solutions
There are no ‘Trust’ icons
Home Page – Before
Home Page – After
About Us Page – Before
About Us Page – After
Inner Page Designs
The inner pages had the same issues as the home page but in this example, the About us page, has very little content and is very impersonal – especially for an About Us page.
The new page is not only more effectively optimised – it is much more personal looking and more likely to connect with the potential customer.
We can also see that we have increased the content and used imagery within the page to offer much more impact.
Web Development
In addition to this we reworked some of the technical aspects of the site:
Increased speed
Moved the site to a faster server
Improved Code to Content ratio
Reduced coding errors
All of which helped to increase the site’s SEO.
What do all these strategies do for tradies?
The outcome of a strategy like this is that the client had a much more effectively optimised website with:
Improved content
Improved conversions
A faster site
A technically improved website
This resulted in an immediate boost in ranking.
But this is just the start of the SEO journey.
What do you need to do next for Electrician SEO?
Once your website is optimised, or if it is a new site, it is launched, you then need to
focus on ongoing growth strategies.
Ongoing technical updates to the site
- 2 new blog articles per month
- Month-in month-out
- Regularly, with consistency and constancy
Ongoing content updates and tweaks
In addition we focused on other SEO Strategies:
Ongoing technical updates to the site
Ongoing SEO updates and changes
Directory submissions and listings
Link building
What was the outcome of seo & digital marketing?
Within 6 months Briggs’ rank rocketed:
Briggs’ Original Rank Taken in Nov 2015
Briggs’ Rank Taken in Feb 2016 – 2 months after launch
In the graphic below we can see that:
We increased rank dramatically
- We rank for more suburbs
- We rank in the top positions for suburbs
And we are starting to get found for ‘emergency electrician’ and ‘domestic electrician’ phrases.
In the first weeks of launch ‘visibility’ rose sharply and then starts
to grow more incrementally.
SEO rank increase over time for ‘electrician seo’ related phrases
Over the years we have seen steady growth in ranking. This is something tradies should be aware of with SEO. It is not usually an easy climb
to the top of the rankings. You need to invest in content and SEO strategies to gain ‘authority’ and rank.
We launched the newly
optimised site in
Jan 2016
In March 2019 Briggs hit #1 for emergency electrician
Briggs broke the top 10 for ‘electrician melbourne’
In March 2020 Briggs
hit #1 for ‘electrician
melbourne’
How does Briggs rank look now?
After almost 6 years of SEO Briggs’ rank is doing very well for lots of ‘electrical’ related phrases.
Key Achievements
- Briggs is in Position # 1 for ‘electrician melbourne’.
- But this is a constant battle to retain.
- In the last 6 months we have dropped to position 3 and then returned to position #1.
- It is something we are always battling to keep as so many other businesses target that phrase
Briggs dominates emergency and 24/hr Electrician Melbourne
For the last 3 years or so we have dominated phrases related to emergency:
emergency electrician - Emergency electricians 24 hr
- electrician melbourne 24 hr
- electrician moorabbin 24 hr
- electrician prahran 24 hr
- electrician richmond 24 hr
- electrician south yarra 24 hr
- electrician st kilda emergency
- electrician brighton
Targets Achieved
We set immediate, medium and long term goals and achieved them all. Along the way we tracked rank and adjusted the strategy accordingly.
- The first goal was to be found in suburbs and get more calls.
When Briggs started to rank for ‘emergency electrician melbourne’ – this became our focus.
When Briggs started to rank for ‘electrician melbourne’ – this became the #1 focus.
Any good SEO agency will set and achieve realistic goals depending on what stage you are in. But they will also adjust your strategy to achieve greater growth for your business.
What now that we’ve achieved great SEO results?
The #1 challenge now is to retain the great rank. With specific focus on retaining ‘electrician melbourne’.
This is our biggest challenge.
The #2 goal is to retain rank for established suburbs.
If we do this Briggs will continue to grow.
Can we help you improve your SEO electrician strategy?
If you’re an electrician in any city other than Melbourne and North Sydney – we can help.
Contact me, Declan Reynolds on 1300 88 64 50 to discuss your strategy.