Mandeep Singh, FounderI do the solar marketing work personally. No junior handoff.

The short answer: what solar marketing costs

If you only read one section, read this one. Here is what the solar marketing market actually charges, with my numbers beside it so you can compare.

Every figure above marked est. is a market estimate, not a promise. The unmarked figures are my published prices, which you can verify any time on my pricing page. The rest of this page explains why the cheapest-looking option in that table is usually the most expensive per closed install, and where the real money goes in solar lead generation.

Why lead generation feels broken for solar installers

Solar is a strange trade to market. The ticket is huge, the research cycle is long, and the demand curve swings with seasons, incentives, and utility policy. Most of the frustration I hear from owners traces back to three structural problems.

The shared-lead treadmill. The big aggregators sit at the top of Google for the exact searches your future customers type, capture the homeowner’s details, and sell that single form fill to several installers at once. You pay est. $30 to $150 for the privilege of cold-calling someone who is simultaneously being called by your competitors. Close rates on shared solar leads commonly sit in the single digits (est.), which is how a “cheap” $80 lead becomes an est. $2,500 to $5,000 cost per closed install once you do the division. The aggregator wins every month. The installers split what is left.

Speed-to-lead decides who gets the appointment. When a homeowner fills a form, the first installer to call usually sets the sit. Industry studies of inbound leads have consistently found contact rates collapse within minutes of the inquiry (est.). If your leads go to a shared inbox that gets checked after the afternoon’s installs, you are paying full price for leads your competitors are closing. Any marketing program that does not account for how fast your team picks up the phone is solving half the problem.

Seasonality and policy whiplash. Solar demand surges in spring and summer, slumps in winter, and spikes unpredictably around incentive deadlines and net metering changes in your state. Buying leads and ads means paying the most exactly when everyone else is bidding too. Owning your local rankings means the seasonal surge flows to you without an auction, and the winter slump still delivers the smaller but steadier stream of homeowners researching for a spring install. Solar buyers research for weeks or months before signing (est.), which is precisely why the company that owns the local search results keeps showing up at every stage of that research.

If you want to know which of these three is bleeding your specific company, book a free 30-minute audit and I will look at your profile, your site, and your market live on the call. No pitch deck, no pressure, useful either way.

What actually works for solar companies, in order

I do not sell every channel to every installer. I sequence by cost per closed install, cheapest and highest-intent first. For a typical residential solar company with a defined service territory, the order looks like this.

1. Google Business Profile and the Map Pack, first and always. When a homeowner searches “solar companies near me” or “solar installers [your city]”, the local three-pack gets the calls. Most solar profiles I audit have the wrong or missing primary category, no posts in months, and a thin photo gallery with no real install shots. Fixing the categories, posting weekly, loading genuine install photos with the crew and the roof, and wiring a direct quote link is the highest-impact work per dollar in this trade. These are also the searches the aggregators cannot fully own, because the Map Pack shows actual local businesses.

2. Review velocity, timed to the install. In solar, the homeowner is about to make a five-figure decision about their roof with a company they found an hour ago. Review count, recency, and detail are the trust bridge. I build review requests timed to the moments customers are happiest: system activation day and the first real electric bill after turn-on. A request that lands when the customer is staring at a tiny utility bill converts far better than a generic blast (est.), and reviews that mention the city and the install specifics do double duty in local rankings.

3. City and service pages built for how homeowners actually search. Real pages for the towns in your territory where demand exists, plus service pages for the queries that signal a buyer: cost questions, battery storage, panel brands, net metering in your state, roof types. Not a hundred spun suburb pages, which Google demotes, but genuinely useful pages where volume justifies the work. I keep my full methodology for this in my guide to SEO for solar companies if you want the long version.

4. Speed-to-lead plumbing. Marketing that generates an inquiry your team answers tomorrow is marketing you paid for and a competitor closed. I make sure every lead from the profile, the site, and the pages rings a phone or hits an inbox someone owns within minutes, with a simple follow-up cadence. This costs almost nothing and routinely matters more than another thousand dollars of spend.

5. Paid ads, only when there is a reason. A new company with no organic footprint, a territory launch, or a sprint before an incentive deadline. Ads are a faucet you rent. Rankings are a well you own. I will tell you honestly which one your situation calls for, including when the answer is neither yet.

My solar marketing pricing, published

I publish my prices because most agencies in this space do not, and that opacity costs you two weeks of discovery calls before you even learn whether you are in budget. Here is how I work with solar companies. No contract on anything.

Full details for every service live on my pricing page. There are no setup fees hiding behind the monthly number and no auto-renew trap. If your budget genuinely cannot support $1,500 a month yet, the honest answer is that you should fix your Google Business Profile yourself first, and I will tell you exactly that on the call instead of selling you a program you are not ready for. I also keep a set of free marketing tools on my site that you can use without signing up for anything, because useful-before-paid is the whole model here.

The real math: buying leads vs renting ads vs owning rankings

Here is the comparison I walk every solar owner through, using est. market figures and your own close rates wherever you have them.

Buying shared leads. At est. $80 per shared lead and an est. 5 to 10 percent close rate, you are paying est. $800 to $1,600 in lead cost per closed install, plus the sales hours burned chasing homeowners who are fielding five calls. The deeper cost is strategic: every dollar you send an aggregator funds the rankings that keep them above you in your own city.

Renting ads. Managed paid search for solar can produce real installs, but cost per lead in competitive metros commonly runs est. $100 to $400, and the pipeline stops the day the spend stops. Ads are the right tool for sprints. They are an expensive permanent address.

Owning rankings. A $1,500 a month program is $18,000 a year. If your average residential install carries est. $4,000 to $8,000 in gross margin, the program needs roughly three to five extra closed installs a year to break even (est., run it with your real margin). Everything beyond that is yours, and the asset compounds: the reviews, the pages, and the profile keep producing whether or not you keep paying me, because there is no contract and you own all of it.

Want me to run this math with your actual numbers, your territory, and your current rankings? That is literally what the free 30-minute audit is. Bring your close rate and your average install value, and you will leave the call with the comparison done, whether or not we work together.

Where solar companies waste marketing money

I audit solar sites and profiles most weeks. The same expensive mistakes repeat, and none of them are about the quality of your installs.

Paying aggregators forever instead of competing with them once. The lead sellers rank because they built the local pages and the reviews you have not built yet. Every month of lead buying that could have been a month of building extends the dependency.

The wrong or missing Google Business Profile category. A solar company listed under a generic contracting category is invisible for the searches that matter. This is free to fix and routinely worth more than a month of ad spend.

A brochure site with no city pages and a buried phone number. A homeowner on a phone wants a number to tap and proof you work in their town. A homepage full of stock panels and mission statements gives them neither.

Review requests sent at the wrong moment, or never. Asking on contract-signing day, before the system even works, converts poorly. Asking after the first small electric bill converts well (est.). Most companies ask at neither moment.

Slow lead response. Spending thousands generating inquiries that wait until tomorrow morning. The first caller usually wins the sit, and it is often not the company that paid for the lead.

Twelve-month contracts for unverifiable work. If an agency will not publish pricing, will not show exactly what was done each month, and needs a year-long lock-in, the contract is doing the retention the work should be doing.

Who I am NOT for

I would rather lose the inquiry than waste your month. I am the wrong fit if any of these describe you.

You need installs this week. Local SEO compounds over months. If your crew is idle right now, purchased appointments or ads are the honest short-term answer, and I will say so on the call rather than take your retainer.

You run a door-to-door sales org and want lead lists. I build inbound systems where homeowners find and choose you. I do not sell data, dialers, or canvassing support.

You want a guaranteed number of installs. Nobody honest can guarantee that, because nobody controls your close rate, your market, or your state’s net metering politics. Anyone offering a guarantee is pricing in your gullibility.

You are a national brand needing a 15-person team. I am founder-led on purpose. Multi-state brands with big paid budgets need infrastructure I deliberately do not carry.

Your service territory is too small to feed the math. If your area has a few thousand rooftops, $1,500 a month may never pay back, and I will tell you that instead of taking it.

What working with me looks like

Owners fear the black box, so here is the process with no mystery in it.

Month 1: Audit and foundation. I audit your Google Business Profile, site, reviews, and territory, fix the profile completely, map how homeowners in your area actually search, and clean up the citation and on-page issues quietly suppressing you. You get a plain-language picture of where you stand against the companies winning your searches.

Months 2 to 3: Build. Review velocity goes live, timed to activations and first bills. City and service pages go up where the demand justifies them. Schema, internal links, and the weekly profile cadence run. Map Pack movement often shows in this window when the profile was weak to start (est.), and I show you the leading indicators every month.

Month 4 onward: Compound. Rankings, reviews, and pages stack on each other. We review real numbers on a monthly call: calls from the profile, quote requests, movement across the territory. No contract means you stay because the pipeline is worth more than the fee, and you can verify that math every single month.

On trust: I will not show you fabricated solar case studies or invented client names, because I do not fabricate anything. What I can show you is public and checkable. My Upwork profile carries 37 five-star reviews, Top Rated Plus status, and a 97% Job Success Score across 222 completed jobs. And this page itself reached you through search, which is the product doing its own demo.

Frequently asked questions