Solar Coaster

Content for Solar InStallerSPCr SoCIal | 2018

Property owners are spoiled with solar information. HomeAd-visor, EnergySage, and similar platforms provide price-com-parison tools and bid listings in every State. With last month’s electric bill and your home address, you can get free, rough estimates of future cost savings using tools like Google Proj-ect Sunroof. The States have estimate tools, too. Complex government information, like tax credits and net metering policies, is boiled down and distributed by partnerships, as-sociations, and foundations. Most solar rebates & incentives are indexed online in the Database of State Incentives for Re-newables and Efficiency. The database comes complete with an API to share that data everywhere else. Big fishies – Tesla / SolarCity – develop even more helpful tools & information. Speaking of tools, tool aggregators (and while we’re at it, so-lar installer aggregators). Equipment & warranty ratings are a click away. Even utility information, like electricity prices, is available online. Plus, solar is always in the news – Gigafacto-ry, tariff, new records.

Motivated property owners can have fairly accurate cost-sav-ings estimates, future utility cost savings data, a familiarity with current federal, state and city incentives, and a job list-ed for nearby installers to bid on in less than an hour. By the time an installer contacts them, the lister will have a working knowledge of what they will likely be asked and be prepared to answer.

For buyers in that environment, as commenter Beasley7 put it in the EnergySage forum, “If you remove the hype from the salespeople and ignore the grandiose claims of the market-ing people, you can make an informed and profitable deci-sion .”

Solar Content

So how should solar installers utilize content? Beasley7 said it best – by helping area homeowners and commercial buy-ers make an informed and profitable decision. Content that hypes or makes grandiose claims doesn’t do you or your communities any favors. Don’t bother.

Here’s what “informed and profitable” looks like for a few U.S. installers:

• “What’s the installation process in my area?”• Helping homeowners understand what help is available• FAQ for pre-install and post-install• Drone footage of each finished project

Your role is to provide better and more accessible local in-stallation information than any other organization, including utilities, the State, foundations, solar startups, and lead gen-eration sites.

What’s Behind 40+ installer WeBsites?I checked out the platforms & and software behind about 40 U.S.-based solar installers. I’m happy to share the spreadsheet with you, but here are the im-portant bits:

• 30+ of them use Wordpress. A few use SquareSpace. Of those on WordPress, Yoast SEO is a popular plugin.

• Only 2 use any sort of remarketing software. Remarketing campaigns can be a cheap way to reach evangelists.

• A couple use Live Chat software (“speak to a representative now”). • Almost all of them are very active on social. • Only 1 or 2 feature any sort of downloadable content. Most installers

make all of the information immediately accessible to any visitor.

“BETTER” INFORMATIONBetter means accurate and presented in a way that audi-ences are receptive to. As mentioned, there’s no shortage of helpful solar information online. It’s likely that anybody that buys from you will have been helped along by some of those tools before ever contacting you. Your service area cosntraint is your information advantage as homeowners will lean on your content to learn about the local nuances of go-ing solar.

“ACCESSIBLE” INFORMATIONIs it finadable and is it finding your audience? Accessibility has 2 sides: building it to be found and delivering it well. I noticed a number of installers using Yoast or similar SEO plugins to make the content more findable, but I didn’t see much on the promotion or delivery side. E-mail newsletter and Facebook promoted posts are an effective way to reach the most receptive audience, but more needs to be done to reach the community on the outskirts of solar fandom. Re-marketing is a useful tool, and guest blogs or partnerships are usually effective, sometimes even free.

Other accessibility issues to consider:

• Are your details up to date on lead gen sites? • Is your site optimized for mobile? Check your analytics

to see the breakdown of mobile visitors vs. desktop. • Is your site structured well & easy to navigate?

side note: Free or Premium on lead gen. sites?Some lead generation sites offer a paid membership for installers that want to stand out in a particular county or region. The price goes up with each new county that you sponsor. Price varies, but it can easily cost a few hundred dollars per county. You should always be signed up for the free version of these sites. When the rep calls you to sell you on the premium mebership, you should ask:

• How many queries for solar projects in that county per month (last 12 mo.) • Avarage cost per lead • # of other premium members in the area

Ideally, you want to speak with a solar installer in another part of the country to get a feel for how they’re enjoying the paid program. Whether or not you should buy or keep the paid plan depends on your budget and the memberships performance or expected per-formance compared to your other campaigns (which you should always track).

• In recent history, the Solar Eclipse on August 21 and Tesla sit atop the solar search charts.

• Measured by average monthly searches, the most common U.S. monthly searches regarding solar on Google are Solar Pan-els, Solar Energy, Renewable Energy, Solar Power, and Solar Power Cost, Solar Generators, Solar Panels for Sale and Solar Powers for Home.

• Go ahead and search something regarding residential solar on Google right now. Those results at the top are probably paying between $2-$6 per click, depending on the search.

• Most popular content is either related to solar basics / FAQ or solar prices. Price includes rebates, incentives, etc.

• I thought it was interesting that Google’s default search query for Project Sunroof referrals (after you search your home ad-dress you can click the “find a provider” button at the bottom the app) is “solar provider near me”, not “solar installer” or some other choice of words.

• Organizations like the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renew-able Energy have great information. Depending on their por-tal’s popularity, there could be an opportunity to “piggyback” guides like this to develop local answers to these same ques-tions.

• Most solar installers use a mix of WordPress/ Squarespace + Google Analytics. Only a few of the 40 or so I checked were us-ing re-marketing or live chat software.

• Downloadable content isn’t unheard of, but most solar install-ers make all of the information available on the surface – no e-mail submissions required.

Solar on the Web

our Pitch to solar installers We want to help drive solar adoption with better infor-mation. We put together a few packages for installers.

Package #1: Content Strategy & Foundation

Package #2: Education

Package #3: All Included

See the next page for details of each.

1

2

3

3 recommended Packages

The all included is the 3-course meal. For installers who are looking for a long-term solution to content development, distribution, and tracking – order up. It carries a 6-month minimum commitment (my only package with a minimum). You can learn some more about this package here.

all included

This package is for installers who are having trouble reaching the right audience. Solar is important to some for the efficiency, others more for the cost savings & investment. How do you address both audiences without breaking the bank? The answer varies by region. I’ll help you sort it out with a plan that includes free promotion, paid promotion, and new content design & development.

education

This package is for installers who haven’t sorted out their content just yet. You probably have some good information on your website, but it’s not doing anything beyond answering frequently asked questions and letting people know what it is you do and don’t do. I’ll help you make a bed of content that positions you as the master of all things solar in your service area. Beyond organizing the content and optimizing it for search, we’ll build out some new pages to help property owners understand the nuances of your region. We’ll figure out how to promote solar in your area and how to measure its performance.

content strategy & Foundation

or vieW our PoPular Packages

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office of energy efficiency And reneWAble energy

Information taken from.....