How to get more customers as an electrician: Google, reviews, and a website that books estimates
Northern Light Studios: more customers for local businesses

KJ says: Northern Light Studios builds lead systems and websites for electrician and handyman. What I want to show you guys today is from start to finish what a good lead system looks like. Now, what I see every single day in working with electricians are they're great people, they have a great business, and they're great at what they do.

But the problem is they're almost invisible on Google, and that is where the customer who has all their outlets out or they got a new electric car and they need a new panel put in. That's where they're searching. Now, the other half of this is when they go to some of these electricians' websites, they all kind of have a common theme is which it's a great website in terms of the aesthetics, but it's basically a business card.

There's nowhere to really put their information. There's nothing really to notify you as the business owner that you have a new lead coming in. So when a customer really has an emergency, they're going to go to the first website that has something that they can fill something out, or they get a text or a call, or they can call in right away.

And get helped. So that is what most people are looking for, and I think that is what a lot of electricians and handymen are leaving out. I want to show you some real examples from Google itself because that is a discovery place where all your customers are going to find you. So if you're not doing good on there, chances are you're not going to get the ROI or the customers that you want.

So let me show you some things that you can put into your business right now today for free, and then show you some of the solutions that we can offer you as well.

All right, let's start in Google where your customers are going to find you. So let's look up electricians, tricians, in Tacoma, Washington. All right. And now the first thing you're going to see here is you're going to see sponsored electricians.

So now this is a way where you can pay to be at the very top of the results, and you can see a couple of these guys right here. So the cool thing is. When you're paying for results, you're paying to show up, right? You can see this first guy right here, Beacon Plumbing and Heating. They have 1.7k reviews, right?

4.7 stars. And then look at this guy right underneath him, MNT Electric. He got he only has 26 reviews. So this guy right here above him has 35 years in the business, and a guy right here who's only been 2 years in the business, which you can see, is competing right with him as a second search. Now, what typically happens with customers is they don't really go too far in the first page.

So being at the very top and sometimes paying for it, if you have the budget, is a really good way to start getting views and start to get seen. Now, another thing is when you are going to try to put yourself on top and you are going to put yourself with spend with advertising, you want to make sure you have a really clean listing.

And what I mean by that is when we go into show more, let's just see some of these businesses that are here. So some of these guys look great, five stars, 4.8, awesome. Let's just kind of keep going here. So it's going to open up into this view to start just seeing these are all just the sponsor people, people who are paying.

And what I often see, and let's see, I don't think it's going to take us too long to find one here, is people that are paying don't really fully optimize their profile. So let's just see one here. Keep scrolling, keep scrolling.

All right, this is a good example right here. So again, Jacob Electricians, I'm sure they're probably a great electrician company. But you see they have 4.1 stars. Now let's just see the reason why. I'm sure they probably don't even know that they have 4.1 stars. If you saw some of these other ones, they're all at 4.7, 4.8, 4.9. And let's just see what happens.

Let's click on their profile and we go to reviews. And you can see if we go to most recent, right? So five days ago they got a one-star review, but there's nothing written about this thing. Now I don't think a lot of business owners even know this, right? So this could be a fake review.

I mean it says something that says Hui Chao. So I don't know if this is a real person. Right, so we could, if this was a fake review, we could report this as a owner, and that would help us take this off. So if they have a history of maybe malicious reviews or a competitor that's just trying to bring you down, you know, we can get these ones taken off.

I mean, from what I see, just a couple other ones here, six days ago, all five-star reviews. Let's see some other ones here, you know, all great work. And then here's another one-star review. Again, what we can start doing though as a business owner is we can respond to these reviews. So again.

I mean, this person is just really talking more about, you know, personal things where the owner can probably give more context about what was going on in the situation. And again, as the customer was coming in, they're going to pretty much see that, you know what, this these people one they care about their business, they're answering their reviews, and you know what, the situation, I agree with the owner, not the customer, right?

So that's an easy way to do that. Now, I guarantee without even looking, and I have I've never been on these listings before, if I go to the top and I see one of these huge Like one of these type of places that have 1,690 reviews, I guarantee you they're probably responding to the reviewers. So let me just go to reviews here.

And look at this right right in the first one. I haven't even gone to newest yet, but even when you see the most relevant, you can see right boom boom boom. Even whether it's a five-star review or a one-star review, here is the owner. You know, thank you so much. Da da da da, et cetera, et cetera. The next one, they have some pictures. Another response from the owner, and again, you can see right from a week ago, he's already responding.

Another great thing that really helps reviews if you can get your customers to leave you guys pictures, because again, customers are visual, they want to see real people, they want to see what you can do for for for their work. But here's an easy win, like I said, it's literally free to do, just responding to the current reviews you already have.

All right, so now let's just say you don't want to pay for reviews, right? So let's just go back here. And right now, again, we're you know two years in the business. We don't have a big budget, but we want to start ranking organically and getting real customers into our business. What can we do? So if we scroll down, Google is going to now start showing you right here the local businesses, right, with the map pack here.

So we're going to see all the local businesses here, and what you're going to see is these are not sponsored, right? So the sponsors are above, and let's just go over here and let's click on some of these businesses. All right, so even within this map pack, you can see there is a another level of sponsorship, right? So you can now be sponsored within this map pack, and again, you can see again, electrician with seven reviews is already kind of ranking number one, quote unquote, with the sponsored listings, right?

Whereas some of these other guys, which I'm sure without it, this guy right here, Tacoma Electric, has 196 reviews, and he's probably the first organic one. So you can see he's our sponsor. He's the first organic one. Now customers don't always know that they may just click on the first website that they see. So for example, if I click on this guy's website, let's just see what happens.

All right, very cool. So he has a really cool website, right? A picture of himself, and then again, he's just kind of talking about a little bit of his business. Now, one thing I see over and over again with a lot of these electrician sites are they don't have a way for the customer to get in touch with them.

So right now you can see here, he's saying, you know, you can get a free estimate, and he's basically just saying, "Give me a call. Here's my phone number." So I'm going to show you a way of the way we build systems that is going to guarantee you start getting real leads that are yours. You own them and you can call them and you can really start growing your business without relying so much just on ads and things you can do organically.

So let me pull up a site we made here. All right, so this is a fictitional website here because I didn't want to use anyone's real information, but I just want to show you an example of. How we can build an electrician's handyman's website, and the first thing you're gonna see in my site, right?

So one, I'll put like a little, maybe like a video or an image of the place of things that are going on, just to give it some movement, right? Kind of get your attention. But the first thing you're gonna see right here is, boom, get your free estimate, and then you're gonna see a place where you can put your name, your email, and your phone number, and pretty much what you need done.

That's the first thing that you're gonna see, and so that's where we want customers to start putting in their information. Now the next I'm gonna put a little demo information here. Oops. So let's just say I put a little demo demo and I put demo at gmail dot com and I put one two three four five.

Put a fake phone number here. All right and then what do I need help with? I can just pick what type of thing I want. Let's just say I want an EV charger for this example. Now the next thing is once I press send my request, oh I need a 10 digit phone number. Let me add one more digit. Send my request.

I now can have the other option of picking a day and a time. So if I'm really motivated, and we can connect your calendar here, where if I know I need somebody, let's say today, for example, or tomorrow on Monday, I can pick a window where, let's say, we don't have a perfect timing. We can put a window here. So now you know there's a request to come in on Monday at 8 to 10 a.m.

Now what happens is where does that lead go? I'm going to show you the back end really quick. There's a snapshot here, and we'll come back to this. But boom, this demo, this lead comes into your back end. So we have a back end here as well. That's basically a CRM and gives you all the information of what that person wants. So you saw me right here. I'm the demo person.

You can see I need an EV charger. And since I put my phone number and email in, I can literally text this person back to their phone right from here. So you know I can say, "Great, you know, great, happy to hope.

We'll give you a call shortly." So now you can acknowledge you got the message if you'd like, right? We can call them, but I'll come back to this back end in a second. But I still want to show you still what we're talking about on the front end of the website. Let's go back to this front end.

All right, so now you can see, boom, a person can put in their information. Now you as the owner, what we just did was we are also texting you and emailing you at that specific time right away, so you can not miss, you know, a lead or not miss anything. You can pretty much message this person as it comes in.

Now other things that we do in the websites are we try to put all your services here, which this is also going to help us start getting listed in AI. So typically old websites can't be crawled or seen as well, I should say, with AI. Now you do get maybe listed in a few answers, but we can create websites that are structured in such a way where the information is just more readable to AI bots, which gets us into ChatGPT and Google Answers and all the other ones that are coming up.

And we know that's going to be a big thing coming up in the near future. So you can start now, and while it's still free and we don't have to pay for anything, it's a great time to take advantage of it. So we put their services, you know, we just try to put a visual of like the owner. We try to put the reviews, and again, if you notice, we also try to put surrounding cities and towns that you're close to.

So another easy way to get traffic is to just say, "Yeah, I don't just work in Tacoma, but I also work in Pierce County." And then we try to put all the local neighborhoods and local places as places where we also serve. So this is going to help us not only get into Google organically, which is free, right?

So now we can start populating in those areas as well. And then like I said, since in this case we have an electrician who's also a handyman, we can now start making dedicated pages to all the services that we do. So in this case, on the electrician side, we can talk about services we do here, right?

And we show pictures, pictures of our work, all the stuff that we do, et cetera, et cetera. Now let's show the handyman side. Right, so we can do all the services that this person would do. Again, kind of our rates for each of everything. So this again, these are things that are now starting to get picked up by AI answers by Google to just even say, "Hey, we do TV and shelf mounting.

We do drywall repair and paint. We do doors and hardware." So we're not just putting ourselves in one box. We're trying to get listed for many, many things, which will help us even if someone didn't type in electrician, they type in TV and shelf mounting. We would show up there as well. Now it's important as well to show your work.

Now this is really really easy. I mean just taking some pictures of the job, putting your phone out there just for a few seconds of a clip, and you know just putting that out out here on your website. That just gives again prospective customers a visual of what you guys can do. And I think it really helps you know in the world we're in rather than just saying text so we can do all this stuff.

Again people like reading reviews from real people so if you really have that or if you have videos as well you can always post these or we can pull them from Google and get these on your site. Now another thing that really helps with AI now that's going to be the you know the future coming up is getting a frequently asked questions page.

Now I see this a lot on older sites and they have the general idea, but what we pretty much want is one question and one answer. We want to say, you know, what are the commonly question common commonly asked questions by your customer? Like one of them would be, are estimates really free?

And then you can say, yeah, they really are free and say whatever you like about that. So we put common questions that we know. That people for these services will commonly ask. So then we have a section about estimates. We have a section about electrical. We have a section about handymen. We have questions about visits and hours. It seems simple.

You might say, "I already have that stuff on my website." No, when you have an AI crawler and you have AI bots trying to come to your site, you have to kind of lay out a site and the structure in a way that they can clearly kind of read this. So this is the front end from you, but it's also really, really important how we organize the back end. So it all gets read.

So you can now show up organically. This is all without ad cost. This doesn't cost you anything. This is the restructuring your website. All right, and then lastly, just a bunch of ways to contact you, right? So this contact us here. So you have your phone number. Ken, if they want to call you directly, if they want to fill out a form, again, if you want to get a free estimate, all things here that are just ways to keep getting the person to give you their information.

So you don't want to lead to just come into your website and then leave without giving you anything. Now, I did say I was going to show you the back end of like where these things start to show up. I want to show you that now. So if I go to the back end. We saw that little example of me that I was a demo person. Now, if you saw right when I texted myself back here in this example I showed you earlier, I texted myself back, and what happens is this now automatically moved into in contact with.

So this means you are actively talking to this customer, and you can see you don't have to do anything. This will just move by itself. Now that's pretty cool. Now let's just say we didn't get to message this customer. So we have Rachel here and we have Tom here, and we didn't get to them. We're at a job, we're busy, or it's the weekend, and we never got a way to text them.

So what we have is we have built-in automations that will text them for the next five days, right? And we can make this sound like it's coming specifically from you. So I can say, let's just pretend my name was Tom in this example. I can say, "Hi Tom, I saw that you wanted to, oh sorry, I say hi, I'm Tom.

I saw that you wanted to come in. Sorry, you know, I'm just working on a roof right now or I'm working in a garage. How can I help you and what time do you want to come in?" And then the next day you can send something up like, "Hey, I saw you fill out a form and I saw that you're interested in one of our EV chargers." Are you still interested? Is there a day or time you'd like to come in?

If they ever give you a response in any of these automations that sound like you, they will also populate back to your in contact with. So with these ones, you have a few different things, right? You can either contact them this way in this view, or you can simply go to this inbox, right? Like almost like an email or like your phone, and you can literally just go, all right, boom, this person is asking for something.

I just got a message to them back, and I can say, okay, great. You know, got your message. I will give you a call shortly, right? And we we add a texting line in here for you, so that way you can pretty much send this text, and that's gonna be a text right to their phone.

You can either keep the conversation going from here, or you can kind of bring it back to your phone. Now we have this board view here that is showing us all of our leads. We can also see this in a list view, right? So if if you have apprentices or just other electricians in there that have some free time, or you have some staff in-house in the office.

You always have all these people that you can contact, or maybe for future jobs, just because maybe they didn't do something with you today, they may want other things. And these are just people within your area that are interested in your basically in your things that you offer. So you should have a nice list of a way to always contact these people.

So we always give you that here with this list view as well. Now just going back to our board view. Now another thing is, let's just say Tom right here. He goes through our series. We never get in touch with him, right? So we're just going to put Tom and try again later. All right. So we put him there, or let's just say we have Carl over here who's just not interested in our services.

No worries. At this moment in time, we'll put Tom and we'll put Carl over here. What we also have is what we call a win back series. Now, what we'll do, I'm going to show you here, is we will set up a series of texts after a period of time. So what's going to happen is after 30 days, we're going to send those people in those try again or not interested at this moment.

A different offer to see if we can still help them after 30 days, after 90 days, and 120 days. So we can put in new offers here. So we can ask for anything that you can possibly think of in terms of anything you want to like show them a free estimate, you know a free winter winterizing of some sorts.

Anything that you can think of in terms of different offers and we can message them 30 days, 90 days, 120 days. And you can see some examples here. That we could run, and again, this does not take any of your manual work. This is automatic, so right. This is a great way to keep people engaged, and again, as before, if they ever do respond, they're going to come back into our in-contact with, right?

So it's a really great system where it's simple, right? You just have this little board that you got to really kind of work with. We have some automations on this side, and then again, you also have you know things like your calendar are also connected, so you can see like your appointments for the day if we had appointments here, or you can connect your calendar or anything else that you Already use you can connect it into the system.

Now, lastly, when you're managing your site, right, and like as I was telling you earlier, you're taking pictures of your job site. You can, you know, right now you may have a website person who's overseas and you send them a whole bunch of stuff and they take three weeks to probably make an update to your site. No, we make it kind of easy.

Just go right to site updates right here. So site edits. You can pretty much just say what you want to change. You can just upload your photos or videos and just press send request and in 48 hours, boom. That's all done for you, and now your site is updated. So this way, it's not like a whole thing, and you can do this on your phone. You can do this at 3 a.m.

You don't need to call somebody and do this whole thing. Everything is always included in what we do, from the front end to the back end of getting you more customers. So hopefully, this system helps and kind of gives you a visual of what it could look like. Now, if you're interested in having a site like this set up for your thing, or just want a preview of what it could look like for you, you can go to northernlightstudios.com.

Or I'll put a link below where you can go in there and you can just fill out and I'll just show you what it looks like. You can just fill out your information and we'll make you a preview. So if I go to the front here of our estimate, if I go make this my site, you can see we do the same thing.

This is our website. We ask you pretty much right for a lead form right here. You can put your information right here and we'll build you a preview so you can see exactly what it's going to look like for your business. And we can walk you through your city and town, and try to break down what the competition looks like there. Should we run ads? Should we go more organic?

Should we work on the site? You know, where we kind of need help. So we can just do a free strategy session with you at the very least. So you're going to walk away with some ideas and strategies that you can implement today. So hopefully this helps, and I'm sure I'll see you guys in the next one. Take care.