A good business nobody could find

A family-run Perth solar installer had 14 years of happy customers and its own expert crews. But on Google, they were stuck on page three. To keep the phones ringing, they bought leads at $55 each, and every one of those leads also went to up to three competitors. Their previous SEO provider charged $990 a month and never touched the website. Organic search brought in just 136 enquiries a quarter.

Our audit found a slow, outdated website: almost five seconds to load on a phone, 137 empty pages and over 300 broken links. But the biggest discovery wasn’t on the site. New federal and WA battery rebates were launching in July 2025, and home batteries were about to become the most-searched product in the industry. National brands were already moving in. We couldn’t outspend them, but we could be faster and more local.

We rebuilt the site to load in under two seconds. Then we published a plain-English rebate guide a week before the rebates launched, and updated it within hours of every official change. It reached #2 on Google within six weeks, ahead of national competitors. A free rebate calculator earned coverage from local news. Suburb pages with real local jobs, hundreds of new reviews and honestly earned links did the rest.

Eighteen months later, organic search was bringing in 832 enquiries a quarter, six times more than before. That one quarter delivered 143 installs worth $1.61 million, about $484,000 in gross profit against $19,500 in SEO fees. Spending on shared marketplace leads dropped by 67%.

The rebate boom helped, but it doesn’t explain it all. Searches for solar panels alone fell 4% across the market, yet the client’s clicks on those searches rose 87%. That growth came from the SEO work.