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A homeowner thinking about solar has often already had three calls from cold-callers and filled in a form on a comparison site. They're wary, and rightly so. When they finally look for an installer near them, they want a name, an address, roofs fitted in their town and clear explanations. My job is to make sure they find all that with you.
15 years in SEO
4 books on SEO and GEO
200+ sites tracked every day
1M / month visits to my e-commerce site
They trusted me with their visibility
Darty
Eurofins
Cegid
EBP
CNP Assurances
Ingram MicroSeven results, only one installer
Type “solar panels” followed by your town. The first six lines are comparison sites, national networks and directories. The seventh is yours, and you're the only one who goes up on roofs. Climb the page.
Fig. 1. Seven results for solar panels. Only one owns a ladder. (The first six sell your phone number. The seventh sells installed panels.)
What this means for you. I work on the searches where a local business can rank: those containing a town, a type of roof or a specific question.
SEO for a solar PV installer is the search optimisation of their business for the searches homeowners make before installing panels: an installer in their town, a price, a question about payback or paperwork. It relies on the Google Business Profile, a page per type of installation, dated and located jobs, and up-to-date explanations of grants and qualifications. The goal is to receive serious survey requests directly, without buying them from a middleman.
The problem
For “solar panels” followed by a town, the first results are often comparison sites. They then resell the contact to several installers. You pay for an enquiry that three competitors received at the same time as you.
Many homeowners have been called by pushy, sometimes dishonest, sellers. They arrive on your website looking for proof that you're a real local business. If the site looks like a lead seller's, they leave.
Between the first search and the signature, several months often go by. The customer reads, calculates, compares, asks their neighbour. A website offering nothing but a “free quote” form is no use to them during all that time.
An audit, for real
The site below doesn't exist, but its flaws do: they're the five I spot most often. Hover over a number.
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Simulate my projectFig. 2. Fictional site, reconstructed. Any resemblance to yours would be a good reason to call me.
What your customers type
Here are six plausible searches. They're illustrations, not measurements: the audit establishes yours and their real volumes.
What works
For a local search, the map appears before the websites. The category, the services, the service area and the photos of your installations decide whether you appear among the businesses shown. It's also where the customer checks that you have a real address.
House roof, farm building, car park solar canopy, ground-mounted system: these aren't the same customers or the same searches. Each type you want to sell needs its own page, with its constraints, its steps and its examples.
An installation described with the town, the output fitted, the type of roof and the commissioning date reassures more than a long speech. It also gives Google precise, local text that platforms can't write.
Payback, equipment lifespan, maintenance, insurance, selling the surplus: customers ask themselves these questions for weeks. If your pages answer them simply, they come back to your website at every stage, and you're the one they call at the end.
Qualifications, insurance, guarantees, the owner's name, photos of the team: in a market where cold-calling has left bad memories, these must be visible from the first page. They count for the customer, for Google and for the AI tools that describe your business.
What costs dearly
The home page asks for an address and a phone number before saying who you are. Visitors recognise the lead sellers' method and leave.
“Halve your bill”: customers have read it everywhere and no longer believe it. A real example, with its assumptions written down, beats a promise.
The rules change, the page stays. A customer who finds outdated information on your site concludes that the rest is outdated too.
The manufacturer's panels against a blue sky are on every website. Your own roofs, photographed on installation day, are the only images nobody else has.
The method
Order matters. I start with what brings in direct enquiries, then deal with what makes them more serious.
One-minute test
Five frank questions to find out whether support makes sense in your situation. Sometimes the answer is no, and I'll tell you.
What it brings in
A ranking doesn't pay a salary. What counts is what it brings: enquiries, customers, revenue. Move your page up and see what it could bring in.
Example assumptions, open to challenge: 700 searches a month for a solar PV installer in your area, 3% of visitors make an enquiry, one enquiry in three is signed (this varies a lot from one trade to another), €9,000 per customer. Click-through rates by position are orders of magnitude, and they've been shifting since Google started showing AI answers above the results. Redo the calculation with your own figures
Possible revenue€0
Close to home
Charente has two urban areas, Angoulême and Cognac, and a large number of small towns and hamlets. There are detached houses and farm buildings, so roofs of very different sizes. The owner of a house and the operator of a farm building don't type the same words, and both want to know where the business comes from. Your address, the towns where you install and your located jobs must be readable on the website and on the profile. I live between Cognac and Paris, I know the département and we can meet there.
A house near Angoulême and a farm building in the north of the département aren't sold with the same page. The homeowner wants a lighter bill. The farmer wants a useful roof and someone who understands their business. I separate the two on the website.
Wine estates and businesses in the trade have cellars, sheds and storage buildings. A page dedicated to commercial roofs, with examples from the area, answers searches that consumer-focused websites leave aside.
Homeowners rarely type the name of the département. They type their commune or the neighbouring town. Your job pages, sorted by town, show Google and the customer that you've already installed near them.
Beyond Google
Solar is a topic people ask an AI like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or Mistral a lot of questions about. They write, for example: “I have a house with a south-facing roof near Cognac, are panels worth it and who should I contact?”. The AI answers with an explanation, a list of points to check, and more and more often a few business names.
It picks the businesses it finds described the same way in several places: the website, the Google Business Profile, reviews, trade directories, the local press. An installer who writes clearly what they install, in which towns and with which qualifications, has a better chance of being cited than a website that only talks about “the energy transition”. I check what AI tools currently say about your trade in your area, then fix what's missing.
Question put to an AIWhich solar panel installer near Angoulême can fit a house and handle the paperwork?
Three possible answers for this request:
Fig. 3. Reconstruction, names hidden. This is the spot we aim for: on the list, with the most precise description.
Three typical cases
These three situations are examples made up to show the method. None describes a real client.
They buy their leads from a platform and sign few quotes.
They're known for general electrical work, not for panels.
Its clients are farmers and business owners, and projects take a long time.
In practice
Pricing
The fee depends on four things. I give you a precise amount after a free first thirty-minute conversation.
Fancy a game?
The big chain has sat up there for years, hogging every click. Grab the piece and slide it into the slot.
INSERT COINSLIDE THE COIN INTO THE SLOT
Fig. 4. Sixteen seconds to topple a giant.
Together, let's devour your competitors.
One by one, and in order. Every spot gained makes the next one easier to take: that's why it keeps growing. See the method
Who you're talking to
My name is Kévin Papot. More than fifteen years in the job, four co-written books, and the Newp agency, co-founded in Charente. I also run my own online shops, in France and internationally: one of them went from zero to a million visits a month.
Before we talk tags, we talk margin, average basket and profitability. When you book a call, I'm the one who picks up.
FAQ
On national searches, rarely, and that's not the goal. On local searches, it's a different story: the map shows businesses, not comparison sites, and a precise page about your town can rank alongside them. I don't promise a position. I target the searches where a local business has a real chance.
Not straight away. First we grow direct enquiries, then we compare the cost of a job signed through each channel. You then decide with your own figures.
Yes, as long as you present them as examples and write down what they include. Customers are looking for a ballpark figure. If they don't find it on your site, they'll get it from a comparison site, along with the form that comes with it.
By describing the grants currently available from official sources, showing the date of the last update, and rereading the page whenever something changes. I set up the structure and the review schedule. The regulatory information is yours to approve.
Your Google Business Profile usually responds faster than the website, whose pages often take several months. It depends on your area, your competitors and where you start from. I give you a ballpark after the audit, not before.
Demand rises and falls with the news, that's true. Core pages stay useful either way: when interest picks up again, they are already in place and already known to Google. That's what people who start at the peak are missing.
No, one website is enough. You do need separate pages, though, because a farmer and a homeowner don't search with the same words and don't expect the same proof.
Only where you have installations to show. A few area pages filled with real jobs do better than dozens of identical pages where only the town name changes.
With an address, a name, faces, located jobs and reviews you reply to. These are simple things, and they're exactly what a passing salesman can't display.
Ads bring in contacts quickly, and they're useful for filling a schedule. In your sector, clicks are often expensive because the platforms are bidding too. SEO is slower, but the enquiries don't stop when the budget does.
See also
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