THE SHORT ANSWER
For solar panel installers, local SEO carries no media cost per enquiry, but takes three to nine months of work before the first one arrives, and it still takes 3 to 5 enquiries to sign one customer. Worth doing for solar panel installers and not enough on its own. The map pack matters, but the wider category is held by national comparison sites that no single installer will outrank.
A channel that is a bargain for one trade is a money pit for the next one along, and the difference is arithmetic rather than opinion. This page runs local SEO specifically for solar panel installers: the modelled cost, the volume ceiling, the skill it demands, and a plain verdict at the end.
The relevant economics for this trade: a typical project is worth EUR 7,000 to EUR 14,000, the buyer is a homeowner comparing three quotes for a roof-mounted system, demand peaks spring and early summer and bottoms out in November to January, and it takes 3 to 5 genuine enquiries to sign one customer.
The numbers, at a glance
What one enquiry costs once it works: nothing in media spend, against a permanent cost in review collection, photography and page upkeep
The resource this consumes instead of money: about two hours a week for six months on reviews, photography and area pages, dropping to a lighter routine that never quite stops
Time from a standing start to the first enquiry: three to nine months, assuming you begin with nothing in place
Straight answer for solar panel installers: Worth doing for solar panel installers and not enough on its own. The map pack matters, but the wider category is held by national comparison sites that no single installer will outrank.
How local SEO behaves in this trade
Local SEO and the map pack produces enquiries whose intent is as high as paid search, and the click is free. Once it works it is the cheapest enquiry source that exists, and it compounds rather than stopping the day you stop paying.
The constraint nobody mentions in the sales pitch: a verified address in the service area, which excludes anyone running a genuinely virtual operation. For a solar panel business working a single metro, that is the thing to check before anything else.
Against that, the cost of being wrong. It is slow, it is hostage to review velocity and proximity, and none of it puts a job in the diary this week. Skill required: Moderate but relentless. Reviews, service-area pages and photographs, forever.
Profile categories, service area and review motion for a solar business
Set the primary category to solar energy contractor. Add solar panel installation and, only where you genuinely hold the qualification, electrician. The services list underneath should name system sizes, battery retrofit, inverter replacement and vehicle charger installation as separate entries, because each is searched as its own job.
Service area: list only the municipalities you will actually travel to for a survey. The profile still ranks from your registered address, so a wide declared area buys nothing and dilutes relevance
When to ask for the review: at commissioning, in the hour the monitoring app first shows generation, not at scaffold-down. That is the peak of household enthusiasm in this trade
What to prompt the review to mention: the suburb, the system size in kilowatt peak, and whether the installation ran to the quoted day
Photographs: roof-level shots of completed arrays on local housing stock, plus one image of a tidy inverter and board installation, uploaded monthly
Reviews: recency and specificity beat total count
A profile with forty reviews, several from the last month, naming the suburb and the work performed, outperforms a profile with two hundred reviews that stopped arriving eighteen months ago. Review velocity is a live signal rather than a stock. The operational implication is that collection has to be a step in the job completion process owned by a named person, not a campaign that runs when somebody remembers.
How a solar enquiry behaves before you ever speak to it
By the time a homeowner submits a solar form they have usually spent six to ten weeks reading, run at least one payback calculator and settled on a rough system size in kilowatt peak. The first call is an audit rather than an education. The installers who win are the ones who can confirm or correct the homeowner's own figures inside two minutes, because those figures are already written down on a kitchen table somewhere. Arriving with a generic benefits pitch signals that you did not read what they sent.
The timeline, and where the cost really sits
Local SEO has no cost per enquiry, which makes it look free and makes it easy to under-resource. The real cost is time and it is paid up front against a return that arrives months later.
The first two months: complete the profile properly, load genuine photographs of solar panel work on local properties, and write one page per service plus one for each suburb that actually matters to you.
Months two to six: a review from every completed job, naming the area and the work. Velocity and recency count for more than the running total.
Months three to nine: traction appears, and in this trade the first sign of it is calls asking whether you cover a specific street, usually within a few kilometres of your registered address, from households who have already read your review text.
From month nine: enquiries arrive at no marginal cost, which makes this the one acquisition asset that gains value instead of losing it.
The honest caveat for solar panel installers: this will not fill next month. Every contractor who has tried to build local visibility in response to a quiet diary has discovered the timing mismatch the hard way. Start it when you are busy, not when you are not.
Who signs a solar contract and who quietly blocks it
Solar is close to a joint decision in nearly every household. One person is driving it on payback and energy independence, the other is weighing scaffolding, roof penetrations and what the array will look like from the street. Quotes that answer only the financial case lose at the second conversation, which happens after you leave. Send two pages with every quote: the return assumptions on one, a photograph of a comparable roof in the same postcode on the other. The second page is the one shown to the sceptic.
Service and suburb pages work right up to the point they become doorways
A page per service and a page per meaningful area works when each one carries something that could only be written about that combination: a completed job, a photograph, a local constraint, a price reflecting local conditions. The same page with the place name swapped is the exact pattern search engines penalise. Ten genuine pages outperform eighty templated ones and take roughly the same total effort to produce.
Measure the channel in your own system, not in the channel's own dashboard
The only number that decides anything is cost per signed solar panel job calculated from your own records: what you spent, and which jobs you signed from it. Everything upstream of that is diagnostic.
Set it up before you spend, not afterwards. A source field on the enquiry, an outcome field on the job, and a monthly reconciliation between spend and signed revenue takes an hour to build and settles arguments that otherwise run for years.
Before you spend anything on local SEO
Start with your gross margin on a typical solar panel job as a percentage. Not turnover, margin.
Hold that maximum against what you would otherwise pay for an enquiry. Local search earns top priority precisely when every paid alternative prices above your ceiling.
Commit to a fixed test volume and a fixed review date before you start, so the decision to continue is made on data rather than on hope.
Name the person responsible for the first call attempt and the target time. Every number on this page assumes contact inside minutes rather than hours.
How these figures were built
These figures are a benchmark model, not a survey. They combine an industry base range observed across Western European home-improvement campaigns with a country multiplier for local auction pressure. Treat them as a band to negotiate against, not a quote.
How Flock Leads prices this
For comparison, this is what exclusive solar panel enquiries cost outright, with no retainer and no contract term:
Starter - 10 leads for EUR 750, which is EUR 75 per lead
Growth - 25 leads for EUR 1,750, which is EUR 70 per lead
Scale - 45 leads for EUR 2,925, which is EUR 65 per lead
Pro - 70 leads for EUR 4,340, which is EUR 62 per lead
Max - 90 leads for EUR 5,400, which is EUR 60 per lead
No retainer, no contract term, and no lead sent to a second business. Unused volume rolls over under the Flock Lead Promise.
Want leads like this in your pipeline?
Flock runs the campaigns, screens the enquiries and hands you only the ones that match your service area, job size and capacity. You pay per lead, not per month.
Book a 15-minute fit check | See lead package pricing
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Frequently asked questions
How much should a solar panel business budget for local SEO?
There is no media budget, which is exactly why it gets under-resourced. Budget time instead: roughly two hours a week for the first six months, mostly on reviews, photographs and service-area pages. If nobody in the business owns those two hours, it will not happen.
How long before local SEO produces a signed job?
First enquiries take three to nine months. A signed job takes that plus your own sales cycle, which for solar panel work runs from a few days on urgent jobs to several months on planned ones. Judge the channel on cost per qualified enquiry early and on cost per signed job only after a full cycle has completed.
Should solar panel installers use this channel or a different one?
Worth doing for solar panel installers and not enough on its own. The map pack matters, but the wider category is held by national comparison sites that no single installer will outrank. The wider point is that these are not competing options. Local search is the long-term asset, purchased leads cover the gap while it matures, and paid advertising is the accelerator you switch on once you know your numbers well enough to calculate what a click is worth.
What is the single biggest mistake in local SEO for this trade?
Treating it as a project rather than a habit. Reviews and local pages decay in relevance, so a burst of activity followed by nine months of silence produces almost nothing.
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