The SiteRoot team6 min read
The safety switch in a Bentleigh townhouse has tripped four times since Thursday and now it will not reset. There is nothing on the floor and nothing to mop up. What there is instead is a question the owner does not really want to say out loud, which is whether the house is about to catch fire.
That is the difference between an electrical enquiry and a plumbing one, and it drives everything on the site. Nobody is worried about the carpet. They want to know whether this is dangerous, whether you can make it safe, and whether you are actually licensed to say so. An electrician's website has to answer those three, and then it has to do a second job entirely, because a decent share of the people reading it are not homeowners at all.
What an electrical enquiry is actually asking
Three questions, in this order.
Is this dangerous. A burning smell at a power point, a switchboard that is warm to touch, a light that dips when the fridge kicks in. People search those exact phrases. A page that names the symptom, says it should be looked at rather than lived with, and explains what you do when you get there, is worth more than any amount of copy about your commitment to quality. You are not diagnosing anything from a web page. You are telling somebody they are not imagining it.
Can you make it safe, and when. Fault finding has its own shape: time to find it, then a repair that may or may not happen on the same visit. Saying that plainly on the site saves you explaining it on the phone for the ninth time this week.
Are you licensed. This is the one that separates electrical from nearly every other trade. A homeowner who would never ask a painter for credentials will absolutely check an electrician, because they have been told to their whole life.
Your licence number is not a boast, it is the check
Put it in the footer of every page, in plain text, at the size you would write a phone number.
In Victoria that is your registered electrical contractor number. Other states have their own, under their own name. Somebody who wants to look you up on the regulator's register can do it in thirty seconds, and the sort of person who bothers usually has a bigger job in mind.
While you are in there: electrical work gets signed off with a certificate, and the name changes by state. A certificate of electrical safety in Victoria, a certificate of compliance for electrical work in New South Wales. If you issue one as a matter of course, put that in a sentence. It matters to anybody selling, renting out or insuring the property, and it is the thing the cheapest bloke on Marketplace is not doing.
What you are required to display is your regulator's business, not ours. This is about what people look for.
The jobs people search for, one page each
Electrical work splits into problems and projects, and the site needs both kinds of page, written differently.
The problems, where somebody is already worried:
- Power out to part of the house, or a safety switch that keeps tripping.
- Burning smell, hot power point, scorch marks around a plate.
- Fault finding generally, including the fault two other sparkies could not find.
- Storm damage, and the private pole or overhead line that belongs to the owner rather than the network.
The projects, where somebody is planning:
- Switchboard upgrades, including the ceramic fuses in a place from 1965 that nobody has touched since.
- Safety switches and smoke alarms, especially for rental properties.
- Downlights, LED changeovers and outdoor lighting.
- Ceiling fans, extra power points, power out to a shed.
- EV charger installation, which people research for weeks before they ring anybody.
- Data cabling, television points and network runs.
- New builds, extensions and shop fitouts.
Two lists, in the words a customer would actually say. Not electrical solutions.
Half the people on your site are not homeowners
This is the part that gets missed. A plumber's emergency work comes overwhelmingly from the public. A working electrician's diary has builders, shopfitters, property managers, strata managers and other trades in it, and those people read a website completely differently.
They look on a desktop, on a Tuesday at eleven, with three other electricians open in other tabs. They are not deciding whether you are frightening. They are deciding whether putting your name forward is safe for them, because if you do not show up on day one it is their problem, not yours. What they want is boring and specific: licence number, insurance, the size of job you handle, whether you have done commercial or only domestic, how you invoice, and an email address at your own domain rather than a free one.
Give them a page. One page, plainly titled, saying what you do for builders and property managers, the work you take, your area, and where to send a scope or a set of plans. It is not a glamorous page and it gets read by the people who bring repeat work.
The quote form is the workhorse here
Plumbing runs on the tap to call button. Electrical runs on both, because half the work is planned and a quote needs information you will never get in a thirty second phone call.
Keep the form to four fields and one useful question: name, phone, suburb, and a box asking what is happening and roughly when the place was built. The age of the house tells you more about the job than three paragraphs would.
Then put your mobile next to the form and invite a photo of the switchboard by text. A photo of a switchboard answers questions a form never will, and it costs the customer ten seconds.
What to leave off
- An electrical safety guide written like a compliance document. Nobody has ever finished one.
- Claims about being the cheapest. The searches you want are about danger and certificates, and cheapest is a bad answer to both.
- A hero photo of an open switchboard with no context. Put a photo of yourself there instead. People choose a person.
Where SiteRoot comes into it
Describe the work and the site gets built around it, which for an electrician means problem pages and project pages that read differently, plus somewhere sensible for the licence number to live. It is free to build, takes about 15 minutes, and then it is A$16.50 a month including GST if you keep it.
Your number is a tap to call link on every page. The enquiry form emails you directly, so a quote request at nine at night is in your inbox and not behind a login. Images load as the visitor reaches them, so the page works on a phone on site. Your trade, your suburbs and your hours go onto the site in the form search engines read, including the business category they publish for electricians specifically, and the same facts sit in a plain file that AI assistants can read. Uptime and certificate monitoring is on, and if either breaks the alert comes to us.
None of that is a promise about your position in a search result, and nobody can honestly sell you one. It is the twenty seconds between a worried homeowner tapping your name and deciding to ring you rather than the next one down the list.
