If you have searched this, Google has probably shown you a bunch of articles about how to become an electrician. Career advice, apprenticeship routes, NVQ options. That is not what you need. You are already qualified. You have your Part P, your test equipment, and your van. What you need is a steady pipeline of work — so you are not chasing the next job every time you finish one.
The demand for electricians in the UK is not slowing down. Consumer unit upgrades, EICR certificates, rewires, EV charger installations, smart home setups — the range of work has never been broader. The question is whether the people who need these things can actually find you when they pick up their phone and search.
Here is what works, starting with what you probably already do, and building up to the strategies that generate leads while you are on a job and cannot answer the phone.
Word of mouth is brilliant — until it is not
Every good electrician has a core of loyal customers and a network of people who recommend them. A landlord who has used you for three properties. A builder who brings you in on every project. A homeowner who told their whole street about you after you sorted their fuse board.
This is the foundation of most electrical businesses, and it works well — right up until it does not. A quiet patch hits, the builder’s next project gets delayed, and suddenly you are looking at an empty diary wondering where the next job is coming from.
The issue with word of mouth is that it is entirely passive. You cannot control the timing, the volume, or the type of work that comes in. It is brilliant as a baseline, but it is not a growth strategy. If you want leads coming in consistently, you need to add other channels on top.
We covered a lot of the general principles in our article on how to get more work as a plumber. Most of the marketing fundamentals apply across all trades. But electricians have some specific advantages worth exploring in more detail.
Your accreditations are a competitive advantage — use them
Here is something that sets electricians apart from most other trades: you have formal, verifiable accreditations that customers and search engines both care about.
NICEIC, NAPIT, and Part P
If you are registered with NICEIC or NAPIT, you are already in a stronger position than the electricians who are not. These are recognised trust signals — homeowners check for them, letting agents require them, and Google sees them as credibility markers when they appear on your website and business listings.
The problem is that many electricians treat accreditations as a compliance exercise. They have the certificates in a drawer and the logos somewhere on their van, but their website barely mentions them, and their Google Business Profile does not reference them at all.
Fix this. Put your NICEIC or NAPIT registration prominently on your website — ideally on every page. Add them to your Google Business Profile description. If you are on the Competent Person Scheme for Part P, say so clearly. These are not just badges. They are the reason a homeowner chooses you over the next electrician in the search results.
How this helps with Google
When someone searches “NICEIC electrician near me” or “Part P registered electrician in [town],” Google is looking for pages that contain those exact terms. If your competitors do not mention their accreditations on their website, and you do, you pick up search traffic they are missing entirely. It is a small thing that adds up to real leads over time.
Build recurring revenue into your marketing
One of the biggest advantages electricians have over many other trades is the potential for repeat, scheduled work. Plumbers get emergency calls, but the recurring revenue opportunities for electricians are genuinely excellent.
EICR certificates for landlords
Since 2020, landlords in England are legally required to have an Electrical Installation Condition Report every five years. That is not optional — it is the law. Every rental property in your area needs one, and they need it redone on a regular cycle.
This is a massive, predictable source of work. But most electricians wait for landlords to come to them. The ones who actively market EICR services — with a dedicated page on their website, a mention on their Google Business Profile, and direct outreach to local letting agents — build a client base that generates work on a five-year cycle without additional marketing spend.
A single letting agent managing fifty properties could mean fifty EICR jobs over the course of a year or two. And once you are their go-to electrician for EICRs, you get first call on every other electrical issue across their portfolio.
PAT testing for businesses
Portable Appliance Testing is another recurring revenue stream that many electricians overlook. Offices, shops, pubs, restaurants, salons — any business with electrical equipment needs regular PAT testing. It is not the most exciting work, but it is steady, predictable, and often leads to other jobs when you spot issues during testing.
Create a page on your website that targets “PAT testing [your town].” Most of your competitors will not have one, which means you will rank for those searches with relatively little effort.
Annual inspections and maintenance contracts
Some electricians offer annual inspection packages to homeowners — a yearly check of their consumer unit, wiring, and smoke alarms. It keeps you in the customer’s mind and leads to upgrade work when you spot aging installations.
Emergency callouts — the highest-intent search you can win
“Emergency electrician near me” is one of the most valuable search queries in the trades. Someone typing that into Google at nine on a Tuesday night is not comparison shopping. They have no power, or a socket is sparking, or their fuse board has tripped and will not reset. They need someone now, and they will call the first electrician they find.
Why you need a dedicated page for this
If your website does not have a specific page targeting emergency electrical work, you are invisible for these searches. Google matches search queries to relevant pages, and a generic “Services” page that mentions emergencies in passing will not compete with a dedicated page titled “Emergency Electrician in [Your Town]” that specifically addresses power outages, tripping fuse boards, burning smells, and other urgent issues.
The page does not need to be long. It needs to be specific, include your phone number prominently, and cover the common emergencies you deal with. That single page could be the most valuable page on your entire website in terms of revenue per visit.
Our article on whether tradespeople need a website covers the wider case, but for electricians, emergency search visibility alone justifies having one.
EV charger installation — a growing market worth targeting
The EV charger market is still growing rapidly. Every new electric vehicle sold means another homeowner searching for “EV charger installer near me” or “home EV charging point installation.” If you are OZEV-approved (or working towards it), this is a market you should be actively targeting.
The search opportunity
EV charger installation searches are relatively new, which means the competition in Google results is often weaker than for traditional electrical services. Many electricians who install EV chargers have not bothered to create a dedicated page for it on their website. If you do, you have a genuine chance of ranking on the first page in your area without years of SEO groundwork.
Include the specific charger brands you install, mention the OZEV grant if applicable, and cover both home and commercial installations. People searching for this service do more research before choosing an installer, so a detailed page works well here.
Smart home installations and consumer unit upgrades
While you are creating service-specific pages, consider the other searches people run that many electricians do not target. Smart home wiring, smart lighting installation, consumer unit upgrades, full and partial rewires — each of these is a search query that represents a potential customer.
The electricians who rank well in Google are almost always the ones with individual pages for each service. Not because any single page is magic, but because twenty service pages catch twenty different search queries, and each query is someone looking for exactly what you do.
Getting on Google properly
If you take one thing from this article, let it be this: the majority of your future customers will find you through Google. Not through Facebook, not through Checkatrade, and not through word of mouth. Google. That means getting your online presence right is not optional — it is the core of your marketing strategy.
Your Google Business Profile
This is the listing that appears in Google Maps when someone searches “electrician near me.” It is free to set up, and it is the single most impactful thing you can do for local visibility. Claim it, fill in every field, choose “Electrician” as your primary category, add your service area, and upload real photos of your work — consumer unit upgrades, rewires, EV charger installations, neatly run cables.
Our full Google Business Profile guide for tradespeople covers every step, including the details most guides skip.
A website with service and location pages
Your website structure matters more than its design. A clean site with thirty well-targeted pages will outperform a flashy one-page site every time. Each service you offer should have its own page. Each town you cover should have its own page. This is how you match the searches people actually type into Google.
If someone searches “electrician in Guildford,” Google wants to show them a page that specifically mentions electrical services in Guildford. If your website only has a generic homepage and a contact page, you will not rank for that search — no matter how good your work is.
For a detailed look at how this works, our article on how to get on Google Maps as a tradesman breaks down the entire process.
Reviews
Reviews determine two things: whether Google shows you in the map results, and whether the customer actually calls you once they find you. An electrician with seventy reviews averaging 4.9 stars looks objectively more trustworthy than one with four reviews, regardless of who does better work.
Ask every satisfied customer for a Google review. Send them a direct link via text right after the job while the experience is still fresh. Consistency matters more than volume — two reviews a week is better than twenty in a month followed by silence.
Directory listings and citations
When your business name, address, and phone number appear consistently across directories like Yell, Thomson Local, FreeIndex, and the NICEIC or NAPIT online registers, Google treats your business as more established and trustworthy. These citations are a background ranking factor that most electricians either ignore or do once and forget about.
The key word is consistently. Your details need to match exactly across every listing. “M. Jones Electrical Ltd” on Google but “M Jones Electrical” on Yell creates a mismatch that can actually hurt your rankings.
Where to start if you are doing none of this
If your online presence is minimal right now, here is a sensible order of priority:
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Claim and complete your Google Business Profile. Free, immediate impact, and it is where most local searches start.
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Start collecting Google reviews. Ask after every job. A text message with a direct review link is the simplest method and gets the best conversion rate.
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Get a website with dedicated pages for your key services. At minimum: general electrical work, consumer unit upgrades, rewiring, EICR testing, EV charger installation, and emergency callouts. Add location pages for every town in your service area.
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Put your accreditations front and centre. NICEIC, NAPIT, Part P, OZEV — wherever they appear, they build trust and catch searches your competitors miss.
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Build out your directory listings. Start with Yell, Thomson Local, FreeIndex, Checkatrade, and your accreditation body’s own directory. Then work through the smaller ones.
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Market your recurring services directly. Contact letting agents about EICRs. Reach out to local businesses about PAT testing. These do not require Google at all — just a targeted email or a knock on the door.
Getting help with the online side
Most electricians would rather be on a job than updating their Google profile or building directory listings. That is completely reasonable — it is not what you trained for, and your time is worth more on the tools.
If you want someone to handle the online side — the website, the directories, the Google Business Profile optimisation, the review system, and the rank tracking — that is what we do at Localengine. Everything is included for £300 per month with no setup fee, and we only take on one electrician per county so you are never competing with another client for the same searches.
You can check availability to see if your county is still open.