A breaker trips twice in one morning, or the condo board finally approves the EV charger, and somebody opens Google and calls one of the electricians it shows. Which companies make that list was settled long before the search, by details on each website that nobody at the company has read in years.
Most advice written for electricians is a playbook: claim the Business Profile, pick the right keywords, build a page for every neighborhood. We did something plainer. We ran the same homepage check on every electrician in one city and counted what came back.
How we picked the sites
On October 5 we searched Google Maps for electricians in Honolulu. We took the open businesses with a website, five or more reviews, and a rating of 3.5 or better. That came to 10 companies.
All 10 sites let the check run, so every count below is out of 10. The checks are the ones our free audit runs on a homepage: title tag, description, headings, images, business markup, sitemap, analytics, and Google's PageSpeed test for phones. Here is the count of sites with each problem:
| What we checked | Sites with a problem |
|---|---|
| Images missing alt text | 10 of 10 |
| No analytics, nothing counts visitors | 5 of 10 |
| Sitemap missing or silent for a year | 5 of 10 |
| Title tag cut off in results | 4 of 10 |
| Footer showing an old year | 4 of 10 |
| Description missing or cut off | 2 of 10 |
| Main heading missing or duplicated | 1 of 10 |
| No business markup | 0 of 10 |
That last row is a first. So is the line you will read under the speed scores further down.
The cleanest basics of the four trades we have checked
This is the fourth Honolulu trade we have run through the same check, after the solar installers in September and the plumbers and air conditioning contractors in October. On the basics, the electricians come out ahead of all three:
- Business markup, the code that states electrician, this address, these hours: all 10 sites have it. Five of 15 solar sites, 1 of 14 plumbing sites, and 2 of 12 air conditioning sites had none.
- Every electrician site has a title tag, and 9 of the 10 have exactly one main heading, the best share of the four trades.
- Not one electrician site scored under 50 on Google's phone speed test. Eight of 15 solar sites did, 4 of 14 plumbing sites, 3 of 12 air conditioning sites.
Seven of the sites run on WordPress and one on Wix; two we could not identify. Ordinary builders, unusually tidy setups. Somebody set these sites up with care. What follows is what slipped anyway.
All ten have photos Google cannot see
The 10 homepages carry 178 images between them. 88 have no alt text, the short caption Google reads in place of a photo it cannot see. That is 49 percent, and for the first time in this series, every single site has at least one blank image. The worst homepage says nothing to search on 21 of its 26 photos.
Set against the other trades, that is the sore spot: 62 percent of homepage images were blank on the solar sites, 44 percent on the plumbing sites, 30 percent on the air conditioning sites, 49 percent here. The tidiest basics in the series, and nearly the worst photos.
A panel swap shot before and after, the clean conduit run, the finished charger on the garage wall: those photos are the most convincing thing an electrician's site has. Without the caption, each one is an empty square to Google.
Half the sites count nobody
Five of the 10 homepages carry no Google Analytics and no Tag Manager. Nothing on those pages counts who arrived, where from, or whether the visit turned into a call.
Half is actually the best share we have seen; in the other three trades, more than half of the sites counted nothing. It is still a coin flip that a given electrician in this city has no idea what the website does all day.
Analytics is free, and adding it changes nothing a visitor sees. Without it, the phone is the only meter, and whether last month was better than the one before is a guess.
Four titles run past the cut
The title tag is the blue headline a searcher clicks in a result. Every site here has one, but 4 of the 10 run longer than 60 characters, about where Google cuts a title to fit the screen. The shortest we found is 30 characters. The longest is 74, which shows up trimmed.
The description is the line under the headline. One site has none, so Google picks text off the page and shows whatever it finds. Of the nine that have one, one runs past 160 characters, at 178. Both lines are text somebody types once, and both decide whether the searcher clicks this company or the next one.
Sitemaps from 2023 and footers from 2024
One site has no sitemap, the file that lists which pages exist so Google can find them. Among the nine that have one, the newest date inside ranges from August 2023 to October 2026, and four have told Google about nothing new since last year or earlier.
The footers say the same thing to a human. Four of the 10 show an old year in the copyright line: two read 2024 and two read 2025. It is a small thing, and it is often the first date a visitor sees on the page.
Nobody in the red on speed, and nobody fast either
Eight of the 10 sites returned a phone speed score; two did not. The eight run from 57 to 80 with a median of 67, and none lands under 50, the range Google's tool marks in red as poor. That makes electricians the first trade in this series with no red score at all.
The ceiling is low, though. No site scored above 80, where the air conditioning set had a 100 and the plumbers a 99. Steady, not quick.
One number deserves a warning label. Google's own SEO check in the same tool gave two of these sites a perfect 100, and both still have problems from the list above, because that check does not look at analytics, alt text on every image, or business markup. A 100 there is not a clean bill of health.
What to do with this
Run the same check on your own site at the homepage check; the results show on screen and no email is asked for. If you want the whole thing looked at, every page, the Google listing, the reviews, the speed, and the competitors, there is the free audit.