Sample layout. Not a real client.
Trade, city: the problem in one line
- Starting point
- Rank grid before any change
- What changed
- The one or two changes that moved it
- Result
- Rank grid after, and the change in calls
Google Ads for San Diego electrical companies.
One campaign aimed at the word electrician pays for every kind of click, including the ones you don't want. I split search ads by job type and track which calls become booked work.
No long contracts. You talk to Simon.
Map pack: emergency electrician Chula Vista
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- 17 years in SEO
- Engineering degrees
- 85% of clients in San Diego County
- No long contracts
Where electrical ad budgets leak
- One campaign bids on electrician and buys every click
- Ads show for electrician jobs, training and DIY searches
- Nobody knows which ad produced which booked job
How I test ads for an electrical company
Scientific SEO
- 1 Measure I work out cost per call and per booked job for each electrical job type.
- 2 Change one thing A single change follows, for instance a separate campaign for panel upgrades.
- 3 Measure again I read the same numbers about two weeks later against the jobs you booked.
- 4 Keep what works You keep funding the campaigns that paid for themselves, and the rest lose their budget.
What the work covers
- Search ads by job type
- Negative keywords for electrical searches
- A landing page per job
- Call tracking to the job
- Local Services Ads eligibility check
- Ad schedules for urgent calls
How search ads work for electrical jobs
Run Google Ads for an electrical company as separate search campaigns, one for each kind of job, because an urgent repair, a panel upgrade and an EV (electric vehicle) charger installation are searched by different people with different amounts to spend. The rest of Google Ads management is built on top of that split.
Why one “electrician” campaign wastes money
Someone with a dead outlet, someone planning a whole-house rewire and someone looking for electrician jobs can all type nearly the same thing. In one campaign, one budget and one bid cover all of them, so you pay the same way for clicks worth very different amounts and can’t tell which ones paid. Split by job type, each search campaign has its own keywords, ad text, landing page and cost per call.
Urgent repairs: schedule and distance
Ads for urgent work should run only when someone will answer the phone, and only where a truck can reach in reasonable time. “No power in half the house” at 8pm is a valuable click if you take evening calls and a wasted one if you don’t. I set the ad schedule to your real dispatch hours and limit the area to the cities you’ll drive to for a small job. A company based in El Cajon may want urgent calls from La Mesa and Santee and none from Oceanside.
Planned jobs: the ad leads to answers
Panel upgrades, EV chargers and rewiring are researched before anyone calls. The person searching “EV charger installation National City” wants to know whether the panel has room, who deals with the permit, and what the job involves. A panel upgrade typically involves a permit and the utility, and a page saying you manage that is worth more than a slogan. So I send each campaign to its own job page, where those questions are answered.
Searches to exclude
Electrical keywords attract people who will never hire you, and negative keywords keep your ads away from them. Typical examples are job seekers and students (electrician salary, apprenticeship, how to become an electrician), people doing the work themselves (how to wire a three-way switch), and shoppers looking for parts or a supply house.
I read the actual search terms your ads appeared for and build the exclusion list from that.
Local Services Ads
LSA (Local Services Ads) are the pay-per-lead listings Google shows above the regular ads for some trades. Whether they are available to you depends on the trade and the area, and Google changes that list, so I check eligibility for your business before planning around them. Where they are available, they involve Google’s own screening of the business and are managed differently from search ads.
Knowing which ads produced work
An ad account can only be judged by booked jobs, which means tying each call to the campaign that produced it. With call tracking, a call from the panel upgrade campaign is recorded as that, and you tell me which calls became work. If a campaign isn’t paying, I’ll say the money belongs elsewhere. What a click costs is set by the auction and by your competitors, so I promise no number of calls.
What a result looks like
Every engagement starts and ends with the same measurement.
Electrical ads across San Diego County
Are electricians eligible for Local Services Ads in San Diego?
Google's current list for the trade and the area decides that, and it has changed over time, so I check it for your business instead of assuming. If it's open to you, I measure it against your search ads as one more paid channel.
Should I advertise small jobs like outlet repair?
Only if the numbers work for you. A small job can lose money on its own once the click and the drive are paid for, and still be worth it if those customers come back for larger work. I'd want to see your own figures before spending. If they support it, I limit the area to the cities you'll drive to for a small job. If they don't, I leave small jobs to the map pack.
Can ads run only for EV charger installation?
They can, and a single campaign for one job is a clean way to start, because the keywords, the ad and the landing page all say the same thing and the result is easy to read. If it pays, you raise the budget or add another job type. If it doesn't, you have learned something specific at a limited cost.
Do I still need SEO if the ads are working?
It depends on how much of your work you're willing to rent. Ads stop the day the budget stops, and the cost of a click is outside your control. Map pack and organic rankings take longer to build and keep producing calls afterward. For most electrical companies I'd run both, with ads on the jobs where rankings are weakest.
See which electrical jobs need ads and which do not.
Before any ad money is spent, I measure where you already rank for the jobs you want more of, in the cities you cover.
- A rank grid showing where you appear, and where you don't
- The technical and Google Business Profile issues that matter most
- What I'd change first, in plain English
Prefer to talk? Call (619) 675-7678, 9am to 6pm.