Solar Fast SEO Case Study: 0 to 13,000 Organic Visitors in 8 Months

Summary

Digital Media Partner took Solar Fast, a UK residential and commercial solar installer, from effectively zero organic visibility to more than 13,000 organic visitors a month in eight months. The campaign combined technical SEO, a large body of expert content and, above all, a sustained digital PR and outreach programme that earned the site links from the biggest publications in renewable energy.

Solar Fast was competing in one of the most contested markets in the UK. Solar and renewable energy search results are dominated by national energy suppliers, price comparison sites, manufacturers and government-backed resources, all with established domains and years of accumulated authority. A new site with no backlink profile cannot rank against that on content alone, however good the content is.

Our assessment was that authority, not content, was the bottleneck. So we built an in-house editorial and outreach operation around Solar Fast, positioning the brand as a genuine expert voice in solar rather than another installer chasing links. Between February and September 2023 that programme earned 99 live links across 87 separate domains, 28 of them from sites with a Domain Rating of 70 or above, including PV Magazine, CleanTechnica, Power Engineering International, Renewable Energy Magazine and a UN-affiliated sustainable development publication.

The traffic followed. Search Console recorded 79,200 organic clicks and 2.71 million impressions across the period, with daily clicks rising from around 20 to a consistent 500 to 700. Rankings moved with it: keywords in Google’s top three went from 1 to 59, top ten from 0 to 313.

Crucially, the growth was not limited to informational searches. Solar Fast finished the campaign ranking first for commercial terms including “solar inverter price” and “best solar inverters”, and on page one for the business-facing searches that supported its commercial installation arm, including “solar for construction”, “solar for universities” and “solar for public sector”.

SEO growth highlights

The Client

Solar Fast is a UK solar panel installer working primarily in the residential market, fitting solar PV, inverters and battery storage for homeowners, with a smaller commercial arm handling installations for businesses, construction projects and public sector buildings.

When the campaign began, the website had 184 indexed pages, a Domain Authority of 25 and almost no organic presence. Search Console was recording around 20 clicks a day. One keyword ranked in Google’s top three and none in the top ten.

The commercial objective was straightforward. Solar Fast needed organic search to become a reliable source of homeowner enquiries, and it needed to happen in a market where demand was rising fast and competitors were consolidating their positions.

The Challenge

UK solar is one of the most competitive organic search markets we have worked in. Three things made it unusually difficult.

First, the competition was not other installers. It was British Gas, EDF, Octopus, MoneySavingExpert, Which?, the Energy Saving Trust and the government’s own guidance pages, all of them with domains Google has trusted for decades. No amount of on-page optimisation closes that gap.

Second, the market was moving quickly. Energy prices, the Smart Export Guarantee, the zero-rating of VAT on solar installations and changing government grants meant search demand was rising month on month and the terms people searched for were shifting with it. Publishing the right content mattered less than publishing it before everyone else did.

Third, Solar Fast had no backlink profile to build on. With a Domain Authority of 25, the site could publish genuinely excellent content and still be invisible, because it had no authority to rank it with. We could see this clearly in the data: pages were indexed, technically sound and simply not moving.

That led to the decision that defined the campaign. Rather than treat link building as a supporting activity, we made digital PR the centre of the strategy and built everything else around it. The target was to establish Solar Fast as a recognised expert voice in renewable energy quickly enough to compete before the market matured further.

The SEO Strategy

1. Build an in-house solar expert, not a content mill

The first decision was to deploy a copywriter dedicated solely to Solar Fast and to turn that writer into a genuine subject matter expert in solar and renewable energy. Not a generalist producing keyword-led blog posts, but someone who could write a piece on agrivoltaics, tandem solar cells or the duck curve and have an energy trade editor publish it under their own byline.

That distinction is the reason the campaign worked. Editors at PV Magazine and CleanTechnica do not publish supplier content. They publish expert commentary. Over the campaign, that writer was published on third-party energy, environmental, business and home improvement titles more than 60 times.

2. Map the publication landscape before pitching anything

We researched and qualified 129 target publications across renewable energy trade press, environmental media, solar industry bodies and specialist blogs, scoring each on Domain Rating, organic traffic, referring domains and editorial fit.

What that research surfaced was the opportunity the strategy rested on. Renewable energy has an unusually dense trade and enthusiast publishing ecosystem, far denser than most industries, and many of those titles have high domain authority and an active appetite for expert contributions. Most solar installers were not pitching them at all.

3. Publish thought leadership, technical papers and original commentary

We ran a rolling editorial calendar of commissioned pieces written for specific publications and their specific audiences. The work spanned technical explainers, industry analysis, policy commentary and forward-looking opinion. Published topics included:

• Solar power in the Arctic and Antarctica
• Agrivoltaics and the future of farming
• Floating solar panels and tandem solar cells
• Solar-powered airports, and solar power in space
• How many solar panels would be needed to power the UK
• How green is the UK government, and what UK solar could expect from a change of government

These were not link-building filler. They were pieces an energy journalist would commission, which is precisely why they were published and why the links carried weight.

4. Convert authority into commercial rankings

Authority on its own does not sell solar panels. Alongside the outreach we built out the commercial and high-intent side of the site inverter pages, battery storage, costs and quotes, SEG and export tariffs, VAT and grants and used internal linking to channel the authority earned by the editorial work into the pages that generate enquiries.

We also built out the commercial and B2B content supporting Solar Fast’s business installation arm, covering solar for construction, universities, the public sector and solar farms.

5. Technical SEO and site foundations throughout

Running underneath all of it: crawl and indexation management across 184 pages, metadata and on-page optimisation, internal link architecture, site speed and Core Web Vitals, and structured monitoring of ranking movement so that content and outreach could be redirected towards whatever was gaining traction.

Content writing, outreach, digital PR and technical SEO were all managed and executed in-house, with no third-party agencies or link vendors involved in the editorial programme.

The Links That Built the Authority

Between February and September 2023 the campaign earned 99 live links across 87 separate domains. The profile was weighted heavily towards high-authority publications rather than volume.

Where Solar Fast was published

Every placement listed above was earned editorially on the strength of the writing.

Alongside the trade press, the profile included high-traffic consumer and community platforms where UK homeowners actually research solar, including MoneySavingExpert (DR 83), Mumsnet (DR 77), Screwfix Community (DR 77), AVForums (DR 72) and GreenBuildingAdvisor (DR 73).

The Results

Organic traffic began climbing from April and did not stop, rising month on month for the rest of the campaign rather than spiking and settling.

Traffic. Solar Fast went from effectively zero organic traffic to more than 13,000 organic visitors a month within eight months. Google Search Console recorded 79,200 organic clicks and 2.71 million impressions across the period, with daily clicks rising from around 20 to a consistent 500 to 700.

Rankings. Keywords in Google’s top three grew from 1 to 59. Top ten rankings grew from 0 to 313.