What should an electrical contractor's website show general contractors and facility managers?

General contractors check your licenses, safety record and bonding before they invite you to bid, and facility managers want a number they can tap. Here is what an electrical contractor's website should show, where it goes and who keeps it current.

An electrical contractor's website has two main readers. One is a project manager or estimator at a general contractor, checking whether you belong on the bid list. The other is a facility manager with a tenant fit-out next quarter or a dead panel right now. Both skip the slogan on the home page. They look for proof and a fast way to reach you.

This post covers what to show and where to put it. If you're a general contractor trying to get on owners' bid lists, read our post on building a construction website that wins bids instead. This one is for the specialty trade.

Put your license numbers and states on every page.

A GC checks your license before inviting you to bid. In some states the law also expects it in your marketing. Texas rules say that all advertising by electrical contracting companies designed to solicit electrical business must include the contractor's name and license number. In California, the license board says BPC 7030.5 requires a license number in all forms of advertising for work that needs a contractor's license, and its list includes electronic transmissions. Rules differ by state, so a state by state list of contractor advertising laws is a good place to start a conversation with your lawyer.

What to do: put each license number, its state and its class in the site footer. Then add a Licenses page that lists every state you hold a license in, with a link to that state's public lookup so a GC can verify it in one click.

Show where you work and what kind of work you do.

Name the states, metro areas and counties you cover. "Serving the region" tells a GC nothing.

Then split your work into separate pages for commercial, industrial and service work. A GC bidding a hospital wing and a plant manager who needs a motor control center repaired search with different words and want different proof. Each page should say what you self-perform (power distribution, switchgear, lighting and controls, fire alarm, low voltage), the project sizes you take on and the crews you can put on site.

Give GCs the prequalification facts before they ask.

Most prequalification forms ask for the same things. A typical questionnaire collects financial statements, safety data (EMR, OSHA 300A), certificate of insurance, trade licenses, bonding capacity and project experience. The safety number carries a lot of weight. Many general contractors and government agencies set a maximum EMR, often 1.00 or lower, and a high mod rate can keep a sub from bidding at all. Platforms such as ISNetworld, Avetta and ComplyWorks also ask subcontractors to submit their EMR.

A prequalification page saves the GC a phone call and puts you on their shortlist sooner. Publish what you're comfortable sharing: your EMR history, the insurance you carry, the certifications you actually hold and your bonding capacity or surety's name. Never post policy numbers. Offer the full pack as a download or on request. If your EMR is above 1.00, leave the number off and say it's available on request. The GC will ask anyway, and you can explain it on the call.

One GC prequalification template asks for EMR for the past 3 years, OSHA recordables for the last 3 years, the states where a sub is licensed and its general liability, workers' comp, auto and umbrella coverage. It also notes that many GCs treat an EMR of 1.0 or below as a hard threshold. On bonding, GCs are advised to request a letter from the surety that states single-job and aggregate capacity plus current usage. We turned those items into a page by page plan, and added the facility manager and hiring items that prequalification forms leave out.

Group project pages by market.

A GC bidding a data center wants to see data centers. Sort your projects by the markets you want more of: data centers, healthcare, industrial, education and commercial interiors. Give each project its own page with the owner type, the GC, your scope, the size of the job, the schedule and the hard part. Shutdown windows in a live plant, work in an occupied hospital and phased cutovers all tell a buyer more than a photo of finished conduit. Our guide to turning a project list into pages that win work walks through the format.

Make the service number work on a phone.

A facility manager with a power problem is usually on a phone. Put the service number in the header of every page as a tap to call link, written as text so it isn't trapped in an image. If you run a separate emergency line, show it apart from the office number. Say "24/7" only if someone really answers at 2 a.m. Keep the service request form to a handful of fields: name, site address, phone and what's wrong.

Write a careers page electricians will read.

For many electrical contractors, hiring is half the reason the site exists. Show the locations you hire for, the kinds of work crews do, whether you're union or open shop, how your apprenticeship works and how people move up. Post pay ranges if you can. Make the application short enough to finish on a phone at the end of a shift.

Send each inquiry to the right person.

A bid invitation that lands in a general inbox can sit for days. Start your contact form with one question: what do you need? Give options for a bid invitation, a service call, a prequalification request and a job application, and send each one to estimating, dispatch, your safety or office lead or HR. Let GCs attach drawings or paste a plan room link. Send an automatic reply that says who will respond and by when.

Where to start.

Check what you have first. Our free Website Health Check shows how outdated and exposed your current site is. The free Search Check shows whether Claude names your firm when buyers ask for an electrical contractor in your area, who it names instead and whether AI tools can read your site.

If the site runs on old WordPress with a stack of plugins and shared hosting, a website rebuild on Next.js, Payload CMS, Neon and Vercel lets your office staff update licenses, EMR and projects without calling a developer. We rebuilt iknow.us on that stack and launched it in September 2026. You can read more about how we build and run sites on Next.js and Payload, see what goes into construction website design and check typical budgets in our construction website cost guide.

Once the pages exist, our SEO Growth Program works month by month to bring inquiries from Google and AI search. Nobody can promise rankings, and we won't. What we can do is make sure every page a GC or facility manager needs is there, accurate and easy to find.