Solar lead generation without shared leads.

A solar company stops sharing leads by earning inquiries through its own website, Google Business Profile and ads, so the homeowner makes contact directly and nobody else is sold their name. Part of that is ordinary local SEO, and part is working out what the bought leads really cost you.

How a shared solar lead reaches you

A homeowner fills out a form on a site that looks like a comparison service. That site sells the details to several installers at once. Each of them calls, often within minutes, and a homeowner who expected information gets a run of sales calls. Your salesperson begins as one of several interruptions and ends up competing mostly on price.

The lead seller owns the website, the ranking and the ad. You rent the result, at a price that depends on how many other installers want it.

What an owned inquiry is

Here the homeowner found your company and chose to contact you. They might have read your page on batteries, seen your profile in the map pack, clicked your ad or been given your name by an AI assistant. In solar they have usually read a fair amount first, so the first conversation starts further along. The page or profile that produced the inquiry, and the reviews behind it, belong to you and are still there next month.

The timeline and the reach

Organic search is slower than buying a list. A page published this month can take weeks to rank, and the homeowner who reads it may take weeks more to ask for a quote. A number of leads can’t honestly be quoted in advance, and I’d distrust anyone who quotes one. Lead sellers and national installers also hold many of the results for broad searches such as “best solar companies”, and a local company may never outrank them there. The realistic ground is narrower: searches that name a city, specific services such as adding a battery, and the pre-quote questions covered on your website.

Don’t cancel the lead contract on day one

Keep the bought leads running while I work on the owned sources, and compare all of them by cost per signed contract. A bought lead can look cheap until you divide its price by the share that sign. For a fair comparison, every inquiry needs its source recorded when it arrives: a tracked phone number for each channel, a hidden field on each form, and a label for bought leads in your sales records. After a few months you can see what each source costs per contract and decide from the figures. Sometimes the right answer is to keep buying some leads.

Where owned solar inquiries come from

I start with whichever of these sources the measurement shows to be weakest.

• The map pack and your Google Business Profile, for installer searches near your office.
• A separate page for each pre-quote question, for the weeks of research.
• Searches for your company name, which tend to follow a salesperson’s visit or a neighbor’s recommendation, and which should lead to your own site and reviews.
• Paid search that sends clicks to your own pages, for searches the organic results won’t reach soon.

Referrals from past customers sit outside search, but they pass through it, because the person referred usually looks you up before calling.