Electricians
At 11 p.m. with half the house dark, the homeowner asks an assistant, and it names three electricians.
Half the house is dark and the homeowner types 'emergency electrician near me open now' into a chat window. In the morning the same person asks what a 200-amp panel upgrade should cost and who installs EV chargers. Each answer is built from the pages the assistant can read. Yours either says these things or it does not.
A homeowner's question about an electrician asks for what the site can state: the services by their plain names, the area served, one emergency number that is the same on every page, the license number, whether small jobs are welcome, and the range a common job falls in. An assistant cannot infer that you install EV chargers from a photo of a van. It can repeat a sentence that says you do.
How your customers ask
How homeowners ask, day and night
Two calls: the one at night and the one on Saturday morning
The night call is about three things: whether you answer after hours, roughly what a call-out costs, and how fast you come. The answer the homeowner wants carries 'after hours', 'emergency', a number, and hours that include the night, and an AI assistant can repeat them only where a page states them. If '24/7' lives in a banner image and nowhere in text, no sentence on your site says it.
The Saturday call is planned work: a panel upgrade, an EV charger, a rewire, a generator, a lighting job. The homeowner asks about a price range, permits, licensing and how soon. A third question gets asked because sites are so often silent on it: do you do small jobs. A sentence that says you do, and what the minimum charge covers, can put you in that answer.
The license is the credential this trade is chosen on. The number and the issuing state or province, as text on the site, is a fact an assistant can repeat and a homeowner can check. 'Licensed and insured' with no number is a phrase every competitor's site carries too, and a machine cannot tell one from another.
What has to be on an electrician's site, and in what form
The middle column is what your dispatcher says on the phone. The right-hand column is the form a machine can read.
| The homeowner asks | What your site states | Form |
|---|---|---|
| Can you come tonight | Whether you answer after hours, the hours you cover, the call-out fee range, typical response time in your area | Text on the homepage and contact page; one emergency number, identical on every page |
| What will it cost | A range for the jobs asked about most: a panel upgrade, an EV charger install, a rewire, a service call, and what moves each | Text next to the service; priceRange in the markup |
| Do you do this | Services by their plain names: panel upgrades, EV chargers, rewiring, outlets and switches, lighting, generators, troubleshooting, code corrections, smoke and CO detectors | A heading per service with two or three sentences; Service markup with serviceType |
| Are you licensed, and will you pull the permit | License number and issuing authority, the insurance you carry, whether you pull permits and arrange the inspection | Text on the about page and on every service page it applies to |
| Will you take a small job | Yes or no, the minimum charge, what fits inside it | One plain sentence |
| Do you cover my area | Towns and neighborhoods served, named | Text; areaServed in the markup |
| Who are you, and are you good | One business name, one address, one office number, one emergency number; reviews quoted as text with the job | Electrician, the LocalBusiness subtype, in JSON-LD; reviews as quoted text |
Electrician is one of schema.org's LocalBusiness subtypes; it carries address, telephone, opening hours, areaServed and priceRange, the properties Google's local business documentation reads, and each service can be a Service with serviceType. Google's structured data introduction recommends JSON-LD and asks that markup describe only what a visitor can see, so an emergency number in the LocalBusiness schema has to be the number on the page.
One emergency number matters more than any markup. If the number on the homepage, the number in the footer and the number on the contact page differ, an assistant cannot tell which to give at 11 p.m. Tracking numbers are the usual cause. If you use them, use one, on every page a crawler reads, and put the same one in the markup.
What the crawl found: a trade sold by phone, with too many phone numbers
In our audit of 9,483 small business websites (40 trades, 90 metros across the US, Canada, Europe and the UAE, late August to early September 2026), 36.9% of the sites published more than one phone number across their own three main pages, 43.1% were inconsistent about who and where they are, and 34.1% had no postal address a machine could parse.
61.5% had no question-and-answer content of any kind, and 50.7% had at least one heading phrased as a question with no answer under it a machine could isolate. 'Do you offer emergency service?' as a heading, with 'call us anytime' under it, is a question and a slogan, not an answer page.
Nearly two in three sites (64.7%) had no review a crawler could read; 8.9% carried rating markup. 17.8% had no schema.org markup at all; of the 82% that did, most of it described the website rather than the business, and a further 13.7% had business schema missing the fields that would make it usable.
When we put one buyer question per business to Claude, with web retrieval on ('Who are the best electricians in Brampton?' was one of them), 14.9% of 9,240 businesses were named. One question, one assistant, one day: a direction, not a rate.
What to fix first, in order
- One emergency number and one office number, identical on every page and in the markup, with the hours each is answered written next to it.
- The license number and issuing authority as a sentence on the about page, and a sentence on permits: whether you pull them and who inspects.
- A services page as text: a heading per service, a range with what moves it, the smallest job you take and the minimum charge.
- Electrician markup with hours, areaServed and priceRange, and a Service node per service, every value matching the page.
- Reviews on the page as text, with the job and the platform they came from; Google's review snippet rules give an electrician no review stars for reviews of itself, and say ratings from other websites are not to be aggregated into its review schema.
- The five questions your dispatcher answers most, as headings with the real answer in the first sentence.
- Check what a crawler receives with the crawler access check, then measure the same homeowner questions before and after, as our methodology describes.
Go deeper
Articles for electricians
Fundamentals
AI visibility for electricians: named for which job, with which number
Content & Answer Pages
What customers ask about electrical work, from booking to inspection
Strategy & Planning
A first-quarter GEO plan for a licensed electrical contractor
Content & Answer Pages
The EV charger page: what a buyer asks before booking an install
Local & Industries
Emergency electrician inquiries: the page a caller reads in the dark
What electricians ask
We do not want to publish prices, because every job is different. Do we have to?
Publish the range your dispatcher already gives on the phone, with what moves it: the amperage, the distance to the meter, whether the utility has to disconnect. A range with conditions is a fact an assistant can repeat, and the electrician whose page carries one can be named for the cost question. 'Call for a quote' takes you out of that answer and leaves it to a competitor's number.
We use a tracking number on the website for our ads. Is that a problem?
Only if it differs from page to page or from the markup. Pick one number for the site, use it in the text of every page and in the Electrician markup, and track attribution by which page the call came from rather than by which number was dialed. A crawler that finds three numbers on three pages has no way to know they ring the same desk.
Our license is on the truck and on every invoice. Why put it on the website?
Because the assistant reads the website, not the truck. A homeowner who types 'licensed electrician' is asking for a fact, and a page that carries the license number and the issuing authority gives the answer that fact to repeat instead of a phrase to take on trust. It is one sentence on the about page.
Does the assistant favor the big franchise over a two-person shop?
We cannot say what any assistant prefers; no agency can see inside these systems. What we measured is that the businesses named in our probe were, on inspection, the ones whose sites carried answer-shaped text and a consistent identity, whatever their size. A two-person shop can write one emergency number, a license sentence and five ranges in an afternoon.