Subsidy search is the demand curve
PM Surya Ghar: Muft Bijli Yojana, launched in February 2024, changed rooftop solar from a considered purchase into a subsidised one. That did something specific to search behaviour: it moved the decisive query from is solar worth it to how much subsidy do I get for 3 kW.
That second query is where the money is. A person asking it has already accepted the premise. They're doing arithmetic, and whoever answers the arithmetic well gets the site survey. Most installer websites answer it with a paragraph that says "government subsidy available, contact us for details", which is the search-marketing equivalent of a shrug.
Publish the slabs. Publish the process. Link the national portal so people can verify you.
| System size | Central subsidy | What the page still has to answer |
|---|---|---|
| 1 kW | ₹30,000 | Roof area needed, roughly how many units a day it makes, and whether that actually covers their bill. |
| 2 kW | ₹60,000 (₹30,000 per kW) | Why most small households land here, and what happens to the surplus in months they travel. |
| 3 kW and above | ₹78,000 — the cap | Why the subsidy stops rising after 3 kW, and when a bigger system still pays for itself without it. |
The process page that removes the fear
The second most searched thing after the subsidy amount is how the subsidy actually reaches the customer, because most people assume a government transfer means a year of chasing. Explaining the sequence plainly is one of the cheapest trust-building pages you'll ever publish, and it ranks for a long tail of process queries nobody else bothers with.
Walk through it in order: registration on the national portal, choosing the DISCOM and entering the consumer number, applying for feasibility approval, selecting a registered vendor, installation, applying for the net meter, DISCOM inspection and meter installation, the commissioning certificate, and then the subsidy landing in the bank account.
Then say what nobody says — where it typically stalls. Feasibility approval and the DISCOM meter visit are the two stages that add weeks, and how long they take varies by DISCOM. Being straight about that loses you no customers and wins you the ones who've been lied to elsewhere.
Every state is a different product
This is the structural reason solar SEO works, and the reason a single national page fails. Rooftop solar is regulated at state level by the electricity regulatory commission and delivered through the local DISCOM, and the details that decide a customer's payback differ across them.
So build state pages, and build them only for states you actually install in. Each needs an owner and a review date, because these rules genuinely change and a state page that's eighteen months stale is worse than no state page.
- Which DISCOM serves the consumer, and its actual application route. A Pune customer and a Nagpur customer may not be dealing with the same office.
- Net metering, net billing or gross metering — which the state permits, at what capacity, and how surplus is credited or paid. This changes the payback arithmetic more than panel choice ever will.
- Capacity limits relative to sanctioned load, and what a customer has to do to raise sanctioned load.
- Any state subsidy on top of the central one. Several states run their own top-up; amounts and caps move, so state the current figure with a source and a date rather than a number you memorised last year.
- Local electricity tariff slabs, because payback depends far more on what the customer currently pays per unit than on the hardware.
Calculators earn links and qualify leads at the same time
Solar is one of the few industries where a genuinely useful tool is easy to build and hard to ignore. A sizing calculator and a payback calculator do three jobs at once: they rank, they attract links from local news and community forums, and they collect the two data points your sales team needs before anyone drives anywhere.
Build them around what a customer already knows. Nobody knows their roof area in square feet; everybody knows their monthly bill.
Sizing rules of thumb are standard enough to publish honestly — roughly 100 square feet of shadow-free roof per kW, and roughly four units per kW per day averaged over a year, varying meaningfully with location, tilt, shading and season. Say the range and say why it varies; the installer who admits December output is lower than May output is the one who doesn't get a complaint in December.
Two technical notes. Render the surrounding page server-side with real text — a calculator that exists only as a JavaScript widget gives Google nothing to rank. And don't gate the result behind a phone number. Show the answer, then offer a free site survey; the people who came for the number are the ones who book.
Residential and C&I are two different websites
A homeowner in Jaipur and a plant head in Hosur are not the same buyer, and the vocabulary gap between them is total. Trying to serve both from one Solar Services page produces copy that persuades neither and ranks for a muddle of search intent Google can't resolve.
Split the site cleanly at the top level.
| What differs | Residential rooftop | Commercial and industrial |
|---|---|---|
| Typical query | pm surya ghar subsidy 3kw, solar panel installation near me, solar for home cost <city> | solar epc contractor <state>, opex solar model, open access solar, rooftop solar for factory |
| The decision | One household, weeks, driven by subsidy and monthly bill | A committee, months, driven by tariff arbitrage, balance-sheet treatment and shutdown windows |
| What convinces | Subsidy clarity, process transparency, local installs, reviews, a real phone number | MW commissioned, generation guarantees, O&M terms, PPA structure, safety and grid-compliance record |
| Conversion event | A free site survey booking | A feasibility study or RFP invitation |
Empanelment, the map pack, and the trust problem
Two distribution channels decide whether a residential installer gets found, and neither is your homepage.
The first is vendor registration on the national portal, where customers pick an installer from a list. Being on it is table stakes, and the details you supply there — name, address, phone — need to match your Google Business Profile and every directory listing exactly. Mismatched name-address-phone data is the most common reason a legitimate installer can't rank locally.
The second is the map pack for solar panel dealer near me and solar installation in <area>. That's won with a properly categorised profile, real installation photos with locations, review volume and review replies, and service-area pages only for areas where you've actually installed. Our local SEO work is mostly this.
Then the harder problem. This industry has a trust deficit — subsidy misinformation, fly-by-night installers, systems abandoned after commissioning. That's an SEO opportunity dressed as a reputational headache. Publish your warranty terms in plain language, separating panel performance warranty from product warranty from inverter warranty from your own workmanship warranty. Publish your AMC scope and price. Publish what happens if generation falls short. Name your service turnaround. Every competitor page in your city is silent on all four, and the customer who's been burned once reads exactly that far down.
Budget, timeline and what we guarantee
Our SEO starts at ₹75,000 a month, with smaller sites from ₹40,000, ex-GST. Solar tends to need the higher tier once you're across more than two or three states, because each state page carries regulatory detail that has to be verified rather than written. Full numbers are on pricing.
The honest timeline: subsidy and process long tail moves fast — often inside 60 to 90 days — because the competing pages are thin and frequently out of date. solar near me map-pack visibility depends on how neglected your profile is; a clean-up can show in four to eight weeks. Competitive national terms like best solar company in India take a year and bring tyre-kickers, so we generally don't chase them.
We freeze your trailing-90-day count of qualified enquiries from organic search on day one — for most installers that means booked site surveys, not raw form fills. Miss it in 90 days and we keep working free until we beat it. We never promise a specific ranking position for a specific keyword, because nobody controls Google's index. We take three clients a month, which is why the promise is one we can actually keep.