Contractors · Electrical
The tripping breaker is not the job.
Electrical is three businesses sharing a van. Small service calls pay for the day, planned upgrades pay for the year, and subcontract work answers to nothing you can buy. Advertising all three the same way is why the numbers never settle.
A decade around the trades before the marketing · Service, upgrades and EV
How a small call gets large
The call
A breaker keeps tripping
Worth a couple of hundred dollars on paper.
On site
The panel is full and original
And it has been that way for forty years.
The quote
A service upgrade, not a breaker
Ten times the invoice, and it needed doing.
Six months on
They buy an electric car
And they call the electrician they already trust.
What is different about marketing an electrical contractor?
Electrical work splits into three revenue streams that behave nothing alike: small service calls, planned upgrades like panels and EV chargers, and subcontract work on new builds. Only the middle one rewards advertising. The licence you already hold is the strongest trust signal available, and almost nobody puts it in the ad.
That last point is worth sitting with. In most trades the differences between one contractor and the next are hard for a homeowner to verify. Here there is a registry, a number and an authority behind it — a fact that can be checked in thirty seconds and that a cash-rate competitor simply cannot produce.
The second thing that separates a strong electrical account from a weak one is what happens after the van leaves. Every house you attend tells you what is still original in it, and no other trade gets that information handed over so completely. Most electricians record it on a work order and never look at it again.
Five streams
Where the money actually comes from
- Service and troubleshooting calls
- Worth buying, but understand what you are buying. A dead outlet or a nuisance breaker is a small invoice and an hour of drive time. Its value is the front door it opens, not the ticket it produces, and an account judged on this work alone always looks unprofitable.
- Panel upgrades and service changes
- The centre of the business. A sixty-amp panel in a post-war house is a known quantity, the homeowner has usually been told twice already that it needs doing, and the search intent is explicit. If one campaign deserves its own budget, page and phone script, it is this one.
- EV charger installation
- A genuinely new line, and one where the buyer researches before they call. Most of them have a car on order and a deadline. They are also the single most likely customer to need a panel upgrade first, which turns a modest install into the job above.
- Knob-and-tube and aluminum wiring
- Driven by insurance and by closing dates rather than by desire, which makes the urgency real and the timeline short. In older Ontario housing stock this is steady work, and almost nobody writes an ad that speaks to the person holding the insurer letter.
- New construction and subcontract
- Won on relationships, pricing and who answers the general contractor at seven in the morning. Advertising has almost nothing to do with it. Money spent chasing this online is money taken from the two streams above that actually respond.
Budget spread evenly across all five produces a number that describes none of them. Split it, and it usually turns out two lines carry the year while a third quietly consumes it.
How it works
Licence first, then the split, then the pages
Put the licence where people can see it
Week 1Your ECRA/ESA number is a licence to trade that your unlicensed competition cannot display. It belongs in the ad copy, the headline of the landing page and the business profile — not buried on an about page where nobody reads it.
Split the upgrades away from the service calls
Weeks 1–2Separate budgets, separate pages, separate targets. Blended together, a month of cheap troubleshooting calls hides a month with no upgrade work in it, and the account looks fine right up until the revenue does not.
Build the two pages that actually sell
Weeks 3–4One for panel and service upgrades, one for EV charging. Both answer the same three questions a homeowner has before calling: what it costs, whether permits and inspection are handled, and how long the power is off.
Make the next job come from this one
OngoingEvery property you have worked in has a record of what is still original. A note six months after an EV install, or a reminder to the customer whose panel you deferred, costs nothing and converts better than any click you can buy.
Fit
Where we help and where we do not
This is a good fit if
- You hold a contractor licence and want that to count for something in the market.
- Residential upgrade work is something you want more of, not just more call-outs.
- Somebody can quote a service change without three visits and a week of silence.
- You are willing to record what you saw in a house and use it later.
This isn't the right fit if
- Almost all your revenue is subcontract. Advertising is a poor tool for winning a general contractor, and we would rather tell you that now.
- You want the cheapest possible service calls and nothing else. That is a bidding exercise with a ceiling, and it does not need us.
- Permits and inspections are handled informally. The whole argument of this approach is that you do it properly, and it has to be true.
Other trades
The economics change by trade
Three revenue streams is an electrical problem. The others break down along completely different lines.
Roofing
Demand arrives in bursts after weather, the homeowner collects three quotes, and the fastest responder usually wins.
HVAC
Two businesses in one: emergency no-heat calls, and planned replacements sold months before the season turns.
Plumbing
The highest search volume in the trades and the widest ticket range, which is exactly why one campaign cannot cover it.
Handyman
Small tickets and short drives, where filtering the work and getting called back decides more than lead volume ever does.
What it takes
The parts of the system
Google & Meta Ads
Search, Local Services and paid social, judged on one number: what it costs to put a booked job on the calendar.
Local SEO & Google Business Profile
The map pack is where most local service work is actually won. Category, services, photos, reviews and a profile that stays current.
Lead response & follow-up
Enquiries answered in minutes at any hour, quotes chased for a month, reviews requested automatically. Email sequences included.
Analytics & attribution
Call tracking, conversion import and one dashboard that answers what a booked job costs — the number almost nobody can produce.
Questions electricians ask
Do Local Services Ads work for electricians?
They do, and the Google Guaranteed badge carries unusual weight in a trade where the homeowner is choosing who to let near their panel. The limitation is control: you get less say over which jobs trigger them, so they suit service work better than they suit a targeted push on upgrades.
How do we get more upgrade work and fewer nuisance calls?
Mostly by changing what you bid on and what the page says, not by spending more. Phrases naming panels, service size, amperage and rewiring behave completely differently from phrases about a light that will not turn on, and the offer on the page has to match the job you want.
Is EV charger work worth advertising on?
Yes, and it is currently one of the few places in the trade where demand is growing faster than the number of contractors chasing it. Treat it as a lead-in rather than the whole job — a large share of those homes need capacity added before anything gets installed.
What should an electrician put on their Google Business Profile?
Licence number, the specific services as separate entries rather than one generic listing, and photographs of finished panels and completed installs. Reviews that mention the type of work done are worth more than reviews that only say the electrician was polite.
We work mainly as a subcontractor. Does any of this apply?
Less of it, and we will say so rather than sell you something. If most of your revenue comes from two or three general contractors, your risk is concentration rather than lead flow, and the useful work is building a direct residential line slowly alongside it.
How do we compete with unlicensed operators on price?
Not on price — on the things they cannot offer. Permits pulled, inspection passed, insurance intact and a licence that can be checked. Say it plainly in the ad. The customers who leave over price on that basis were never going to be good customers.
Read next: the contractors hub ·working out what a booked job costs you
How much of your spend is buying the wrong stream?
The free audit separates your current enquiries into service, upgrade and EV work, checks whether your licence appears anywhere a customer would see it, and looks at what an upgrade job is costing you to win.
You talk to Mathew.Not an account manager, and not a sales team.