Electrician websites: what actually gets the after-hours call

An electrician's website wins the after-hours call when a stranger on a phone can see, within a few seconds, that you are taking calls right now, that you come out to their suburb and what a callout involves, and can then tap your number. Those three answers belong at the top of the mobile page and on your Google Business Profile, worded the same way in both places. Everything else on the site serves a different reader: the person comparing quotes for a switchboard upgrade or an EV charger, who needs a page for each job. This post covers both, with checklists you can work through tonight.

Two readers, one site

An electrician we work with sent us his call log one winter. It showed a long tail of calls between five and nine in the evening, from people with no power or a switch making a noise they did not like, and a separate cluster on weekday mornings from people organising a switchboard upgrade or a car charger. His site was written entirely for the mornings. It had nothing to say to someone standing in a dark hallway at seven o'clock holding a phone.

The phone part is not a guess. On one local service account we track, the site recorded 108 taps on a phone number link over a fortnight in September, and 106 of them were made on a mobile. Plan the top of the page for a small screen, patchy reception and a hurried thumb.

What should the top of the page say after hours?

Work through this list on your own site, on your phone.

1. A line stating your real hours. Who answers and until when, in plain words.
2. A phone number that is a real tap-to-call link, not text inside a logo. We once found a trade site whose number was part of the logo image, on a page that had been receiving paid ad clicks for most of a year.
3. Where you go after hours. The suburbs or councils you will drive to at night, if that differs from your daytime area.
4. The callout arrangement in outline. Whether there is a callout fee, whether it is waived if they go ahead with the work, and whether after-hours visits are charged differently.
5. What happens when they ring. A person, an on-call electrician, or a message service with a stated callback time.
6. Your licence number, which a nervous customer can check before letting you into the house.

All six fit in the first screen of a phone once the hero photo of the van is cut down to size. None of them needs a designer.

How should you word your hours?

"24/7 emergency service" is the least useful line on most electrician sites. Everyone writes it, plenty of them do not mean it, and a caller who gets voicemail at 8pm after reading it is less forgiving than one who was told the truth. An untrue claim is also a problem under the Australian Consumer Law, which covers your website as much as a written quote. Pick the row that matches how you actually work.

The daytime only row reads as a weakness and is not one. A customer who knows you will ring at 7am can decide whether to wait, and either way they do not remember you as the electrician who never answers. Whatever you write, make your Business Profile hours say the same thing, including public holidays.

Should you show a callout fee?

You do not have to publish a figure, but you should explain how the fee works, because the evening caller's next question is what this will cost them. Three plain sentences cover it: whether a callout fee applies after hours, whether it comes off the bill if they go ahead with the repair, and whether you confirm the amount on the phone before you drive out. If you quote a number anywhere, say whether it includes GST. The ACCC's rules on displaying prices apply to a website as they do to a quote on paper.

How far will you go at night?

Every emergency caller wonders whether you would really drive out to them at this hour. A site that never names a suburb leaves that unanswered.

Most of this job happens on your Google Business Profile, where the service area and hours live, and where the after-hours caller is probably looking anyway because they tapped the first map result. Get the profile right first. The website's job is to agree with it: one honest paragraph naming the councils and suburbs you cover, plus the line most sites leave out, which is how far you go after hours. That is usually a smaller radius than the daytime one.

Resist the urge to publish a page for every suburb. On a pest control site we look after, six near-identical suburb pages went up on the same day, and within a week the searches the site held in the top 30 had fallen from 43 impressions a day to 15. One clear service area page does more good than a stack of pages that differ only by the place name.

Does the after-hours caller even reach your website?

Often not. Plenty of evening calls are made straight from the Business Profile, which is why the profile comes first. Two checks tell you what is really happening:

• Compare taps with your call log by hour. If the site records phone taps, line them up against the calls you actually received. Make sure the tap count is real first. On the same account mentioned above, an old tracking rule also counted clicks into the phone field of the contact form as calls: 22 of 130 events in that fortnight. We wrote it up in phone click tracking that counts the wrong clicks.
• Match any ads to your hours. If you run Google Ads, schedule them for the hours someone answers. Paying for a 9pm click that rings out is an expensive way to lose a customer.

Give each daytime job its own page

Now the other reader: a switchboard upgrade, an EV charger, fans through the whole house, solar. These people collect three quotes over a fortnight and read every one properly. A Services page with a dot point saying "EV charger installation" cannot rank for that job or sell it. A page for one job, written the way you would explain it standing in someone's garage, can do both. Each should cover:

• what the job involves at a typical house, and what you check first
• whether the existing switchboard will cope, and what happens if it will not
• how long the power is off, and whether anyone needs to be home
• who handles any application to the network, where one is needed
• what changes the price, without inventing a number you cannot stand behind
• what the customer holds at the end, including the compliance certificate
• photos of installs you have actually done
• how to book a site visit or ask a question

Four of those pages, for the four jobs you most want more of, will earn more than any services list. Start with whichever job pays best for a day on site.

Use the paperwork as proof

Electrical work is one of the few trades where the compliance side reassures people, and hardly any sites use it.

Put your licence number where it can be read, near the phone number and again in the footer. A cautious customer can check it on the NSW licence register in about a minute, and every state has an equivalent. Say plainly that the customer receives a certificate of compliance for the electrical work when the job is done. In NSW that is the Certificate of Compliance for Electrical Work, and the name and rules differ from state to state. Many customers do not know the document exists, and the ones who do have often dealt with someone who never produced one. Stating what you already do feels too obvious to mention. It is not obvious to the person choosing between you and two other names.

What to leave off

• A generic electrical safety blog post. Nobody reads it, and it usually gets written instead of the job pages.
• A live chat widget. On a trade site it tends to intercept people who were about to ring.
• Claims you cannot prove. "Fastest response in town" needs evidence behind it or it needs to go.

A ten minute check for tonight

1. After dark, turn off wifi and open your site on your phone.
2. Time how long it takes to answer "will they come out tonight". Five seconds is the target.
3. Tap the phone number. Does it dial?
4. Compare your hours on the site and on your Business Profile.
5. Find where the site explains the callout fee and how far you travel after hours.
6. Check whether your best paying job has a page of its own.

Fix the hours line first, then the profile. The job pages can wait a fortnight.

Where we come in

We build and run trade websites on a monthly plan: $298 a month, GST inclusive, on a 12 month term with no upfront build fee. That covers the design and build, hosting on Cloudflare, security upkeep, a domain we manage, small edits when you ask and a monthly report. SEO and Google Ads management are optional add-ons at $549 a month each, month to month. We make no promises about rankings or call volume.

The details are on the pricing page. The wider guide is a website for tradies, and the design side for both trades is in plumber and electrician website design. When you are ready, get started.