Why your electrician website loses jobs it should win

I trained as an electrician, so I know how this goes. Someone says you need a website, you pay a few hundred quid, and a year later it has brought you nothing. The phone rings, but never from the website. The problem is rarely the trade - it is what the site was built for, and who it was written for.

It was built for a brochure, not for a job

Most small-business websites are written as if the visitor wants to read about you. They do not. They want to know three things: can you do my job, how much roughly, and how do I get you on the phone. If the answer to any of those is buried three clicks down, they leave and ring the next sparkie.

• No tap-to-call button at the top - most of your visitors are on a phone, sat on a job they need fixed
• The phone number is a picture instead of text, so they cannot just tap it
• The services page lists what you do, but not the jobs people actually search for
• There is no obvious way to ask for a quote without filling in a form

Search engines cannot read half of it

A site built as a fancy image or a slow page-builder is a site Google cannot read properly. If the words on your page do not mention the jobs people search for - 'consumer unit replacement near Southend-on-Sea' rather than 'electrical services' - then nobody finds you.

What actually wins the job

The fix is not a prettier site. It is a site built around the one action you want: the visitor picking up the phone and getting an answer. Real content written to the words people type, a phone number they can tap, and a way to book that does not feel like a job interview.