What should an electrician’s website have? I read 38 West Michigan electricians’ sites, and not one prints its electrical licence number

An electrician’s website does a narrow job. Someone’s power is out, a breaker keeps tripping, or they have just bought an electric car, and what they want to know first is simple: do you do this, are you licensed, and how do I call you. The lists on page one show good-looking sites from across the country, but they cannot tell an electrician in Kentwood what the other electricians a Kentwood homeowner will compare them with actually show. That can be counted. This page counts it for West Michigan, then says what I would put on an electrician’s site as a result.

The measurement: 60 electricians, 7 towns, one page each

The source is Brave Search’s local results for “electricians <town> MI”, read 23 September 2026 between 12:50 and 12:52 UTC — not Google’s map pack. I took the first ten listings in each of the eight towns I track: Grand Rapids, Wyoming, Kentwood, Grandville, Walker, Holland, Muskegon and Kalamazoo. They are the electricians one search engine shows for each town, not a ranking. Walker returned no local listings, as it did for every trade I swept that day, so it is not in the numbers. The other seven towns gave 70 listings; an electrician listed in more than one town counts once, which leaves 60 businesses (9 of them appear in two towns). 41 of the 60 listings name a website and 19 name none. Of the 41 sites, 38 could be read. Two answered with a firewall challenge (HTTP 403) that turns away automated fetches, which usually means a firewall rather than a dead site. The third is drawn entirely by script: the HTML a crawler or an AI engine receives carries a title and not one word, so to anything that is not a person that business has no services, no phone number and no town.

I fetched the page each listing links to once with curl, as a search crawler or an AI engine does — the homepage for 36 of the 38, a town page and a plumbing-services page for the other two — and counted each signal exactly as the code tests it: a tel: link; LocalBusiness-family schema; an FAQ (FAQPage schema or an FAQ heading); a phone viewport; a contact form in the page; a review widget, a printed rating such as “4.8 stars” or a printed count such as “85 Google reviews”; a scheduling widget or a book-online or schedule link; and phrases — “free” before estimate, quote, inspection or consultation; financing or monthly payments; “emergency”, “24/7” or “24-hour”; “licensed and insured”, with or without “bonded”, in its comma and ampersand forms; a number printed after “license” with #, no., number, ID, info or a colon; a warranty or guarantee. Two are for electricians only: the word generator or the brands Generac or Kohler, and EV charging, electric vehicle or car charging. I re-read the emergency, generator, EV, licence and review matches by hand, and every dollar figure. The raw files are in the receipts.

What the site has (38 electrician sites, read 23 Sep 2026)	Sites	Of 38
HTTPS	38	100%
A phone viewport (built for mobile)	38	100%
A tap-to-call link	30	79%
Mentions emergency, 24/7 or 24-hour service	18	47%
Mentions a generator (or Generac, Kohler)	14	37%
A contact form in the page’s HTML	12	32%
“Licensed and insured” (with or without “bonded”)	11	29%
LocalBusiness-type schema markup	10	26%
Mentions EV charging or electric vehicles	9	24%
A free estimate, quote or consultation offer	8	21%
A book-online or schedule link, or a scheduling widget	7	18%
A warranty or guarantee mentioned	4	11%
An FAQ	3	8%
Financing or monthly payments mentioned	3	8%
Reviews shown (widget, printed rating or count)	2	5%
A price or price range	0	0%
A Michigan electrical licence number	0	0%

Town (23 Sep 2026)	Businesses	No website listed	Sites read	Tap-to-call	Emergency or 24/7	Generators	EV charging
Grand Rapids	10	4	6	4	5	3	3
Wyoming	10	1	8	7	2	2	1
Kentwood	10	1	9	6	4	2	3
Grandville	10	1	8	7	0	1	1
Holland	9	3	6	5	4	3	1
Muskegon	10	5	5	4	3	1	1
Kalamazoo	10	4	5	4	3	4	2
Walker	no local listings returned — not measured

Every town but Walker gave ten listings. Holland’s ten were nine businesses, one listed twice; Wyoming and Kalamazoo each had one site that refused the fetch, and Grandville one drawn entirely by script. The town rows count an electrician once per town, so a business listed in Wyoming and Grandville appears in both rows; the first table counts it once. Two towns stand apart: in Muskegon half the listings name no website, and in Grandville none of the eight sites read mentions emergency or 24-hour service, where five of the six in Grand Rapids do.

One listing in three names no website

The listings said something before any site did. 19 of the 60 name no website: 5 of the 10 in Muskegon, 4 in Grand Rapids, 4 in Kalamazoo, 3 of Holland’s 9 businesses, and one each in Wyoming, Kentwood and Grandville. On the roofers’ listings, read the same morning the same way, it was 2 of 54. That is what the listing names, not proof the business has no site: some of the 19 may have one the listing does not link to, and I did not go looking. But a searcher sees the listing, and a listing with no website link leaves them two choices, the phone or the next listing.

The top of Google’s map looked different. On 15 September I checked the first ten Google Maps listings for “electrician grand rapids mi”, and all ten carried a website link, as did the thirty for plumbers, roofers and HVAC companies (the Business Profile article). Different engine, different day, different list, so the contrast proves nothing on its own; it does say that none of the ten electricians Google put first in Grand Rapids was missing one. If your listing names no website and you have one, fix the listing first — it is the cheapest change on this page.

The licence number: required to trade, printed by none

Michigan’s Skilled Trades Regulation Act says a person shall not engage in the business of electrical contracting unless they hold an electrical contractor’s licence (MCL 339.5737), and the state issues that licence only to a master electrician, or to a business with at least one full-time master electrician who lives in Michigan and is responsible for the code compliance of its installations (MCL 339.5711) — both read on legislature.mi.gov, 23 September 2026. “Licensed and insured” is a phrase any site can print. The licence is a number the state publishes: LARA’s public licensee search, linked from its online-services page under “Find / Verify a Licensed Professional or Business”, searches by licence number or business name and lists Electrical Contractor, Electrical Master and Electrical Journey among its licence types (michigan.gov/lara/online-services, read 23 September 2026).

Reading every mention of a licence by hand, 18 of the 38 sites say they are licensed in some form; 11 of them use the stock phrase “licensed and insured”, with or without “bonded”, which is the tool’s count. Not one prints its electrical licence number. The tool, which looks for a number printed after “license” with #, no., number, ID, info or a colon, found none, and neither did I when I also checked every long number on the 38 pages. The only homepage that prints licence numbers at all belongs to a firm that also does plumbing and heating; the numbers in its footer, for its plumbing, boiler and mechanical trades, fit on one line.

Michigan requires a licence to run an electrical contracting business. Not one of the 38 sites prints its electrical licence number.

So the cheapest improvement on an electrician’s site is also the most checkable: print the number — “Michigan electrical contractor licence no.” and the number — in the footer of every page, and again on each service page. If the master electrician behind the licence is the owner, say so by name; the law ties the contractor’s licence to one. I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice: it is what two sections of the Act say and what 38 sites do.

Emergency, generators and EV chargers: what is particular to electricians

Emergency. Where roofers lead with a free estimate (40 of the 46 roofer sites I read the same morning offered one), electricians lean on the emergency line: 18 of the 38 mention emergency, 24/7 or 24-hour service, and only 8 offer a free estimate, quote or consultation. The words are not always an offer, so I read all 18. Twelve state an emergency or round-the-clock service of their own; in the other six the words come from customer reviews (three), the name of a generator service, a security-monitoring service and a 24/7 answering line. Two of the twelve have no tap-to-call link, so the visitor most likely to be on a phone and in a hurry has to copy the number by hand. If you take calls at night, say the hours in words at the top of the page, next to a tap-to-call link.

Generators. 14 sites mention a generator — the word itself, or the Generac or Kohler brands. Two mention one only inside a customer review, so 12 present generator work as a service, from a line in a list to a section of its own. It is the commoner of the two electrician-specific signals, and the town rows show it most often in Kalamazoo (4 of 5 sites) and in Holland and Grand Rapids (3 of 6 each). It also falls under the licence: the Act’s definition of electrical wiring includes “generating equipment” in or on a building or residence (MCL 339.5701, read 23 September 2026), so a standby-generator page is exactly where a licence number earns its place.

EV chargers. 9 sites mention EV charging or electric vehicles, all nine as a service or a page of its own; 7 of them also mention generators. 16 of the 38 mention at least one of the two jobs and 22 mention neither. If you install either, a page for each — what the job involves, roughly how long it takes, whether it needs a permit (in a municipality that provides inspection, the Act requires one: MCL 339.5731, read 23 September 2026) and your licence number — answers what a homeowner searching for that job wants to know.

Reviews, prices and the rest of the gaps

Reviews. As the tool counts them — a review widget, a printed rating or a printed review count — reviews appear on 2 of the 38 sites. Reading the pages by hand, at least 11 more quote a customer in the page text, usually a sentence and a first name, with no rating or count beside it; I found no customer’s words at all on the other 25. A quoted sentence is better than nothing, but a visitor cannot check it. A star rating and a count linked to your Google profile they can, and the honest ways to show them are on the reviews page.

A price. No site shows one. Three print a dollar figure, and I read each by hand (read 23 September 2026): a coupon for $35 off any repair and one for $20 off drain cleaning, both from firms that also do plumbing, and a customer review saying the work cost $700 less than another electrician’s quote. Two offers and a compliment; none tells a homeowner what an outlet, a panel upgrade or a charger installation costs. A starting price for your three most common jobs, with what moves it, would make you the only electrician in this set that shows one (the case for prices).

Schema, forms, FAQs and booking. 10 sites carry LocalBusiness-type schema, the markup that tells a search engine what the business is and where (what it does). 12 have a contact form in the HTML and 30 a tap-to-call link; 5 have neither that a crawler can see. 7 offer a book-online or schedule link. 3 have an FAQ, the cheapest place to answer what every caller asks: whether the job needs a permit, how long it takes, and whether you come out for small jobs (why and how). 3 mention financing and 4 a warranty or guarantee.

Where you work, and page weight. The sites name a median of 1 of the 8 towns they were listed in; 7 name none and 3 name four or more. A homeowner in Holland wants to see Holland, so name the towns you serve on the homepage and in your schema. The median page is 155 KB of HTML before images and scripts, and the largest almost 1 MB.

Verdict: what an electrician’s website should have

Element	West Michigan electricians (of 38)	Verdict
HTTPS and a phone-ready layout	38 and 38	Table stakes: every site read has both.
A tap-to-call link	30	Yes. 8 have none a crawler can see, including 2 of the 12 that offer emergency work.
Emergency or after-hours work, stated plainly	18 mention it; 12 offer it	If you do it, say the hours in words next to the tap-to-call link.
Your Michigan electrical licence number	0	The biggest gap, and free. Required to run the business, and anyone can search it on LARA.
Generator work	14 mention it; 12 as a service	Yes, if you do it: its own page, with the licence number on it.
EV charger installation	9	Yes, if you do it: its own page. 22 of the 38 mention neither job.
A review rating and count	2	Yes. At least 11 more quote a customer; a rating and count linked to Google can be checked.
LocalBusiness schema	10	Yes. Cheap, and it tells search engines what and where you are.
A contact form	12	Yes, for the job that is not an emergency.
An FAQ	3	Yes: permits, timing, small jobs.
A starting price for common jobs	0	Worth it. No site in this set shows one.
The towns you serve, named	median 1 of 8	Yes, on the homepage and in your schema.
Book or schedule online	7	Worth testing against the phone and the form.

What this reading does not prove

• Brave’s listings, not Google’s map pack. These are the electricians one search engine lists for each town on one day. They are not a ranking and not every electrician in the region.
• Not all of them wire houses. The listings include industrial contractors, an electric-motor repair shop, an electrical supply house and two firms that also do plumbing and heating, one of whose listings links to a plumbing page. I kept every one, because a homeowner comparing sites sees them too — which is itself a reason to say plainly on your homepage that you work on homes, if you do.
• One page, HTML only. The page each listing links to, fetched once. A licence number on an About page, a price on a service page, or a review widget drawn by script after the page loads is invisible here, so every count is a floor, not a ceiling.
• Words, not substance. “Mentions generators” means the word is on the page, not that the work is good. I read the emergency, generator, EV, licence, review and dollar matches by hand, not every signal, and I did not look any licence up.
• Correlation, not cause. Nothing here says which element wins jobs. It says what a homeowner comparing these sites will and will not find.
• The law is summarised, from the sections of the Skilled Trades Regulation Act linked in the receipts, and I am not a lawyer.

How we build it

An electrician’s site we build starts from this list rather than a template: the baseline three, a tap-to-call link beside your hours if you take emergency calls, your licence number in the footer and on every service page, a page each for generators and EV chargers if you do the work, reviews pulled from your Google profile, an FAQ that answers permits and timing, and the towns you serve by name. The Starter Site is from $999 for up to three pages, or $149 a month for twelve months; the Business Site is $2,499 starting for five to eight pages, which is where a page per service fits (how many pages a contractor site needs). None of this depends on hiring us: the list works with any builder.

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