Photo: Beshef/Flickr.
To attract the high quality traffic that a residential solar installer or commercial solar developer needs to turn visitors into leads and ultimately, into new customers, a solar marketer must think of search engine optimization holistically.
While off-page SEO is hugely important, don’t forget about on-page SEO. This consists of placing your most important keywords within the content elements of your actual pages. These on-page elements include key parts of a web page’s content:
- Headlines
- Sub-headlines
- Body Text
- Image Tags
- Links
Often, on-page SEO is referred to as “keyword density.”
And the good news is, unlike off-page SEO, which relies on attracting other websites to link to yours and can be hit-or-miss, a solar marketer has more control over on-page SEO and thus can see positive results almost right away.
It’s very common that businesses will do too little on-page optimization or too much (keyword stuffing). While it’s important to include your keyword as many times as necessary within a page, you don’t want to go overboard with keywords either. For on-page SEO done right:
- Pick a primary keyword (such as “solar power system” or “solar PPA”) for each page and focus on optimizing that page for that word. If you oversaturate a page with too many keywords on one page, the page will lose its importance and authority because search engines won’t have a clear idea of what the page is about. This is very common on homepages in particular, where too many keywords are used.
- Place your primary keywords in your headline and sub-headline. These areas of content carry greater weight with search engines.
- Include the keywords in the body content but don’t use them out of context. Make sure they are relevant with the rest of your content.
- Include keywords in the file name of images (e.g. mykeyword.jpg) or use them in the ALT tag.
- Include the keywords in the page URL and keep the URL clean.
- And lastly, write for humans first, search engines second. Always prepare your content for your audience and then look to optimize it for search. Content written in the other order won’t read naturally and your visitors will recognize it.
For a good example of effective solar SEO on-page that uses keywords but keeps the text sounding natural, check out a recent post on SolarCity’s blog, “Joining the Solar Movement,” an invitation to join the company’s Solar Ambassador program of citizen solar advocates.
The word “movement” appears in the headline but also a few times throughout the text. Yet, it never sounds forced or artificial. What it does sound is inspiring. And if you care about solar power, of course you want to be part of the movement, don’t you?
— Erik Curren, Curren Media Group
