Local SEO vs MyBuilder, Checkatrade and Rated People for Electricians
This is not search against advertising. It is owning your visibility against renting it, where the arithmetic works better than the argument. You already know what a lead costs you.
What The Platforms Actually Are
Three different products, discussed as though they were one thing. They charge in three different ways. That difference matters more than which is better.
Checkatrade operates as a vetted directory. Trades pay to be listed, customers browse and contact directly. Membership is the core charge, with per lead fees applying in many trades on top.
MyBuilder operates on job postings. A customer describes a job, interested trades respond, then a fee applies when a customer shortlists you and contact details are exchanged. No membership.
Rated People matches jobs to nearby trades, on a subscription with lead credits alongside.
Why we are not quoting prices. We cannot attribute them. Neither can anybody else.
Checkatrade in particular does not publish pricing openly. A trade wanting to know what it costs goes through a sales conversation. Figures circulating online are third party estimates rather than published rates, varying enormously by trade, region and package.
That is worth noticing rather than complaining about, since it has a practical consequence. You cannot compare these platforms against each other, nor against anything else, without first getting a quotation from each. Any comparison you read that presents confident prices is presenting somebody's estimate as a fact.
Which is why the rest of this page is a method you run with your own numbers.
Why Trades Use Them
These are legitimate businesses and many electricians do well on them. Anybody telling you otherwise is selling you something, as you would know from experience.
Work from day one. The advantage that matters most. Search work cannot match it. Join on Monday, quote on Wednesday. Nothing we do produces that.
No waiting period. Search visibility accumulates over quarters. A platform produces immediately, which for a business needing work this month is not small.
No website required. A trade with no site and no interest in acquiring one still gets enquiries. A real answer for somebody who wants to fit sockets rather than run a marketing operation.
Somebody else does the finding. The platform spends the advertising money and brings the customer. You buy the outcome rather than build the machine.
Vetting as a credential. For a business with no history, being listed somewhere that vets its members provides credibility that would take years.
All five are real. Nothing here argues that platforms do not work, since they plainly do for a lot of people.
What the rest of it does is look at what the same money buys over three years, plus what you are holding at the end, which is a different question from whether the thing works.
The Arithmetic
Most trades know what they spend. Very few know what a won job costs them. The gap is usually larger than expected.
Four inputs, all of which you already have.
What you pay for a lead. Including membership divided across the leads it produced, since a fixed fee is part of every lead's cost whether charged that way or not.
How many you quote for. Not how many arrive. How many you pursue.
How many you win. Your own conversion rate, which most trades estimate high until they count.
Whether the lead was shared. The input that changes everything, since a lead sold to four trades is a one in four proposition before you say a word.
The calculation. Total spend over a period divided by jobs won in it. Not leads received. Jobs won.
A worked example, illustrative only. Every figure is an assumption demonstrating the method rather than a claim about any platform or a prediction about your business.
Assume twenty leads at £20 across a month, which is £400. Assume you pursue fifteen and win three, a one in five conversion on what you pursued. That is £133 per won job against an advertised lead price of £20.
The number that matters is the second one. It is nearly seven times the first. Whether that is good or bad depends entirely on what those three jobs were worth to you, which is why this is a method rather than a verdict.
Run it with your own figures for the last three months. Most electricians are surprised.
What You Own At The End
Take the same monthly figure forward three years down each route. The jobs may be comparable. What you hold at the end is not.
After three years on a platform. You have paid for jobs and done them. The arrangement sits exactly where it did on day one. Stop paying next month and next month produces nothing.
After three years of search work. A website that exists, a profile with standing, reviews attached to your business, plus positions that took time to build.
Now the qualification, since this argument is routinely oversold.
Rankings are not owned the way a van is. They move. Competitors invest, results pages change, so a business that stops maintaining visibility loses ground rather than holding it indefinitely.
Anybody promising you a permanent asset is overstating it. Be as sceptical of that as of anything a platform salesperson tells you.
What is true is narrower and still decisive. Search visibility decays slowly. Platform access stops immediately. One is a position you defend, the other a subscription you pay.
A business pausing search work for three months still gets enquiries in month three. One pausing a platform gets nothing on day two. That difference, rather than any claim about permanence, is what owning means here.
The Review Problem
Reviews earned on a platform stay on the platform. Almost every trade using one underestimates that, since it looks like a technicality until the day it matters.
What it means in practice. Five years of good work, rated by pleased customers, producing a rating you are proud of. Then you leave, at which point none of it comes with you.
Not the score, not the reviews, not the count. You start from nothing elsewhere, having spent five years building something for a company you no longer pay.
Why this determines whether anybody leaves. A trade with a strong rating is not merely paying for leads. They are paying to keep access to their own reputation, which is far harder to walk away from.
Not an accusation of bad faith, simply how the arrangement works, worth understanding before the rating gets large.
Why your own profile behaves differently. A review on your Google Business Profile is attached to your business. It appears when somebody searches your name, contributes to how you rank in map results, then stays with you regardless of who you pay.
What to do if you are on a platform now. Ask for reviews in both places. One extra sentence, so five years of goodwill accumulates somewhere you keep rather than only somewhere you rent.
Competing Against Yourself
Here is a figure from our own pull of 10,003 UK electrician keywords in July 2026. It is the most useful number on this page.
In that July 2026 pull, terms carrying a platform name accounted for 16 terms and 2,760 searches a month, being 0.3% of workable demand.
Almost nobody searches for a platform. They search for an electrician.
What that tells you. Their value does not come from customers seeking them by name. It comes from platform pages appearing for generic searches, meaning electrician plus a town, above the trades who serve that town.
The customer wanted an electrician. They found a platform. The platform sold you the introduction.
A legitimate model, worth understanding rather than resenting. The platform earned that position by investing in it. The trade did not.
The awkward case is the customer who would have found you anyway, because you already rank for that town, so you paid for an introduction to somebody heading for you regardless.
How to tell whether that is happening. Search the terms you want, from a location in your patch rather than your yard, then see whether platform listings sit above you. Then check whether the enquiries you buy come from towns where you already appear.
Where those overlap, you are paying for your own visibility twice.
When The Platforms Are The Right Answer
Four situations where we would tell you to use one. We mean it.
A new business with no history. No reviews, no rankings and a need for work now. Search work is a bet on next year. A platform is an answer this week. Start there and build the other alongside.
Filling a quiet period. The tap opens and closes. Search visibility does not offer that, since you cannot rank harder in a slow February.
Testing a new service or area. Before committing to pages and coverage, buying a few leads tells you whether the demand converts at a price you can live with. Cheap research, which we would recommend.
A trade with no interest in running a website. Some electricians would rather pay somebody to hand them enquiries. A legitimate way to run a business, with nothing to argue with.
What the four share. Speed, flexibility or simplicity worth more than accumulation.
If two describe your situation, a platform is right for now. Block three is something to revisit in a year rather than a reason to change anything today.
When They Stop Making Sense
Four things to look for. Any two together is usually the point at which the arrangement stopped working for you rather than with you.
The cost per won job is rising. Not the lead price, which may be unchanged. The block three figure, tracked over time. It moves quietly, since each lead still looks reasonably priced.
Leads are shared more widely. More trades responding to the same job means a lower chance on each, which is the fastest route to the first sign without anything visible changing.
The customers are price led. Three trades quoting against each other produces customers optimising on price, which is a different customer from somebody who found you and rang. A high win rate on a thin margin is usually this.
Nothing is accumulating. Year three costs the same as year one and produces the same, since none of the spend built anything that keeps working.
What to do, which is not necessarily to leave. All four are reasons to start building the other side rather than to cancel a subscription this afternoon.
Cancelling on Monday when nothing else produces yet is how trades end up with a bad quarter and a conclusion that search does not work. Block nine avoids that.
Running Both
Almost nobody should switch. For most electricians this is a sequence rather than a decision, taking about a year.
Keep the platform exactly as it is while search work starts. Change nothing. Your enquiries are paying for the work you are about to do. Removing income to fund marketing is a poor way to run anything.
Start recording both properly from month one. Block ten, which makes the rest possible.
Wait. Profile and map work can move inside a month. Pages and coverage take quarters. Reduce nothing before you see enquiries arriving from the other side.
Then reduce gradually, as the numbers say. Not on a date decided in advance. Step down, watch for a month, then step again if nothing suffers.
Stop where it settles, frequently not at zero.
Many electricians keep a platform permanently at a reduced level, using it for the flexibility in block seven, while most of their work comes from their own visibility. That is not a failed transition. It is two channels doing different jobs.
The mistake worth avoiding is treating this as a loyalty question. It is about what produces work at what cost. The answer is allowed to be both.
How To Compare The Numbers Properly
Most trades compare these by feel. Feel favours whichever produced the most recent good job. Recording it properly takes minutes a week.
Record five things on both sides, over the same period.
Total spend, everything included. Membership, lead fees and subscriptions on one side. The monthly fee on the other. A comparison missing a fixed cost is not a comparison.
Enquiries received. Counted the same way, so a platform lead and a telephone call are one each.
Jobs won.
Value of those jobs. Most often left out and most likely to change the answer, since the two channels produce different kinds of work.
Cost per won job, plus cost as a share of the revenue it produced.
Two conditions that make the comparison real rather than flattering.
Run it over six months at least. A quarter is noise for a business winning a handful of jobs a month.
Count from the same start date. An established platform account against three months of search work always favours the platform, telling you nothing except that one had a head start.
Do that for six months and the decision stops being opinion. Which is the point, since neither we nor a platform salesperson should be telling you what your own numbers say.
Keep the platform.
Start the other thing.
We would not ask anybody to cancel a working channel to pay us. Keep what produces work, record both properly for six months, then let your own numbers decide what happens next.
What is included every month:
£350 per month, one target area. No setup fee, nothing billed separately.
Nine guides.
One trade.
This guide covers the lead platforms. The rest of the series covers the whole picture, emergency work, multiple towns, vehicle chargers, rewires, board work, inspections and certificates and commercial work.
