Questions solar installers ask about marketing

Purchased leads run $100 to $500 depending on state, exclusivity and whether the buyer already had a proposal. Shared leads sit at the low end and are worth roughly what you pay. Exclusive appointments with a verified homeowner, a credit indication and a south-facing roof sit at the high end. Owned channels are different math: Google Ads in most markets produces a form or call in the $80 to $250 range, and reviews plus organic search produce leads at close to zero marginal cost once the process is running. Nobody escapes the fact that this is an expensive lead in every channel.

Because nobody wakes up needing solar. A homeowner with a burst pipe searches, calls and buys inside an hour. A homeowner considering solar searches, reads for six weeks, talks to a neighbor, gets three proposals and then decides. You are paying to enter a consideration process, not to answer a need. That is also why a lead you paid $250 for and never followed up with past day four is the single most expensive mistake in this business.

More than whoever appears next to you. Across 32,440 solar listings the median is 18 reviews and 40.7% have fewer than 10. Companies winning local searches in a real metro are usually past 100, which only 22.7% of solar companies have reached. Target one review per completed install, requested at permission to operate or after the first full production month. See the reviews guide.

You market on the exact opposite of what they do. Publish your local address and how many years you have installed in this county. Show install photos with recognizable neighborhoods. Put your service and warranty policy in writing on the site, including who answers the phone when a panel underperforms in year seven. Never use countdown urgency. The homeowner who slammed the door on a knocker is looking for the local company, and right now they usually cannot find one because 13.1% of solar companies have no website. The website guide covers the pages that do this work.

Yes. Storage search demand has been climbing steadily and it draws a different buyer: someone who has already lost power, or who is watching their utility change how exports are credited. Storage searches also convert faster than panel searches, because the trigger is an outage rather than a payback calculation. Build a dedicated storage page and a separate ad group. Do not bury it as a bullet on the panel page.

By being accurate and letting the fact do the work. Incentive programs have expiry dates and step-down schedules, and utility export rules change on published timelines. State what the actual deadline is, link the homeowner to the primary source so they can verify it, and tell them how long your permitting and interconnection queue currently runs so they can do their own math. Never invent a number, never imply an incentive is ending when it is not, and never put a countdown timer on the page. Accurate urgency is the only kind that survives a homeowner checking.

The data says yes and the deal size says yes twice. Solar companies with a website carry a median of 24 reviews. Those without carry 2. On a five-figure purchase, the site is where a homeowner verifies your license, your warranty, your financing options and your equipment before agreeing to a consultation. It is also where Google and the AI answer engines read what you actually do.

Start at $3,000 to $5,000 a month in a mid-size metro. Below that you cannot gather enough conversion data in a category with a long cycle, and you will turn it off in week three based on noise. Run exact and phrase match on service and storage terms, exclude the finance-shopping and DIY-panel queries, and measure on booked consultations rather than form fills. The Google Ads guide has the negative keyword list.

The answer engines read the same signals Google does plus plain website text they can quote. A complete Google profile, one consistent name and address everywhere, service and city pages written in direct sentences, reviews that name the system size and the town, and a few mentions on local news or association sites. The AI search guide walks through the setup.

It is public data collected at scale, so it is good to within a point or two, not to the decimal. Solar is harder to measure than most trades because companies list under several categories and defunct listings stay up for months. Listings are deduplicated by Google place and refreshed monthly. Google publishes none of this itself, which is why we do. The method is on the about page.

Public Google Business Profile listings found through Google Maps searches for solar companies in every state. We keep only public business fields: review count, rating, website link, hours, category and location. No reviewer names, no personal data.

Any one of the services we run, or several at once: Google Ads management, Meta ads, AI search optimization, local SEO and Google Business Profile work, website design, social media management, review generation, missed-call text-back and follow-up, email and SMS campaigns, bookkeeping, and cold-call appointment setting. Setup, management and reporting are included. Ad spend paid to Google or Meta is yours.

You decide. Keep the service at the monthly price we quote before the trial starts, switch to a different service, or stop. Nothing renews on its own and nothing is charged during the trial. We will also tell you plainly that 14 days will rarely produce a signed contract in solar. What it produces is booked consultations and a clear read on lead quality.

No. There is no card on file at any point during the trial. We ask for access to the accounts involved and 20 minutes for a setup call.