Forty Solar Homepages, One Line Nobody Wrote

Last Tuesday night I bookmarked forty solar company homepages in a row.

Not read them. Bookmarked them, one after the other, and copied down the name my browser dropped into the little box each time before I pressed save.

It took about an hour, and I’d happily surrender another Tuesday evening to it, because forty companies in a row produced almost exactly the same result and I wanted to be certain I hadn’t imagined it.

What the browser suggested

The name a browser offers you when you save a page is the title tag, the clickable line at the top of your listing when a stranger goes looking for you. Someone typed it into a field in your website software, most likely years ago, most likely in a hurry, and most likely on the same afternoon they were also picking a shade of blue.

It sits on the checklist I work through before a site goes live, and it’s the line that gets ticked fastest on the days everybody is in a hurry.

Do you remember that afternoon? Neither does anyone else.

Twenty-nine of my forty were the company name and nothing else. Seven added the word solar somewhere in there. Four said something a person might have typed into a phone on purpose.

Every last one of them had a line, though. Not a single blank in the batch, which is why the check where solar comes to rest 47 of 47, 97.4% of these sites carrying a title tag, tells you so little on its own.

Across every trade I run the same check on, the figure is 99.1%. Finishing last on that check and finishing last on a check that matters are two very different kinds of last, and only one of them is worth an afternoon of anybody’s time.

Manufacturers win the same check outright, the one thing the cheapest quote in the pile gets right, and not one owner I asked had written the line himself.

Which of my three piles would yours land in? Have a guess before you go and look, because the guess is usually the more interesting part of the whole exercise.

So I stopped arguing about the ranking, and started writing down what owners say to me when I bring the line up. Five of them, weakest first.

1) “Nobody reads that line”

Your rep sat at a kitchen table at six on a Thursday. He was good. He left a folder on the counter and a phone number written on the folder.

At nine, with the dishwasher running and the kids finally upstairs, she typed your company name into her phone to find out whether the man who had been sitting in her kitchen worked for a real business or for a clipboard.

The first words she got back were the ones in that box. Your rep isn’t there for that part of the evening, he’ll never know it happened, and nothing he said gets a second turn at her.

Has anyone at your company ever laid eyes on the screen she made her mind up in front of?

Verdict: doesn’t hold up at all. She reads it. She just doesn’t know the thing has a name.

2) “We don’t get work from search anyway”

This one I believe, mostly. Plenty of good installers I know get almost nothing from a cold search, and their whole month comes off paid ads, referrals and doors, which is a perfectly sound way to run a company.

But the people your ads bring you are the same people who go and check you out afterwards, usually within the hour and usually on a phone. Nobody hands over that kind of money on the strength of a folder.

When did you last let a stranger up onto your own roof without typing his company name into something first?

Verdict: half holds up. Search isn’t where they find you. It’s where they decide about you, which is the more expensive of the two.

3) “The agency handles that”

Maybe they do. Settling it takes one email.

Ask whoever looks after your site to send you a list of every page and what each page is called. Not a screenshot of the homepage. Not a call about strategy. The list.

If it lands in your inbox by Friday, they handle it, they’re worth what you pay them, and you can stop reading here. If what comes back instead is a meeting invitation, you’ve got your answer and it cost you nothing to find out.

When was the last time anybody sent you that list without being asked for it twice?

Verdict: sometimes true, and the easiest of the five to settle. If nobody sends you that list, send me the address and I’ll read the lines back to you myself.

4) “They’re already filled in”

They are. That’s the trouble with them.

A decent theme with a plugin bolted on top will write that line by itself, out of the page heading or the business name or whatever else it can reach, and it never once asks whether the result means anything to a human being. My crawler can’t tell a written line from a generated one either, and neither can any tool you’re ever going to be sold.

So the box being full is the exact reason nobody has opened it since 2019.

Chiropractors leave almost no blanks anywhere in their trade, and the words sitting inside those lines are a different story.

Do you know which of those two things happened on your own site, and would the person who built it be able to remember either way?

Verdict: true, and beside the point. Filled in and written are two different jobs, and only one of them ever got done on your site.

5) “It’s a small part of the score”

Correct, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise to win an argument. Of the ten checks I add up this one sits down at the cheap end, and the trade already lands at 72 out of 100 overall with every one of those lines exactly as the software left them.

If you’ve got one free morning this quarter and a Google profile with three reviews sitting on it, go and get reviews instead. I’d rather you did, and I’ll say so on a call even when it costs me the bigger job.

Verdict: holds up completely. I hand this excuse back to the owner every single time.

It also costs a morning and no money whatsoever, and there is nothing else on my entire list I can honestly say that about.

What I write instead

When I take on a solar website, the lines get written last, after I’ve sat in an office and listened to the owner answer his own phone a couple of times.

Not because the wording is difficult. Because the words worth using are the ones his customers already say out loud, and I don’t know a single one of them on day one.

One installer wrote his down and his appointments got shorter, which is the same trick aimed at a different part of the site.

What do your customers call the thing you sell them, in their own words, when nobody from your office is standing there listening?

She isn’t searching for a brand. She’s searching for whether a north-facing roof is a waste of her money, or what your outfit intends to do about the panel that stopped reporting back in February.

Which of those two is written across the top of your services page tonight?

Do this before you go to bed

Open your own homepage on the laptop that’s already in front of you and save it as a bookmark.

Look at the name your browser offers you in that little box before you press save. Don’t change it, don’t tidy it up, just read it.

That’s your title tag, word for word, exactly as a homeowner gets it three hours after your rep has driven away and the folder is sitting on her counter.

Say it out loud, the way a neighbor would say it over a fence. If it turns out to be your company name followed by a legal suffix and nothing else, you found the problem in about ninety seconds, and you never needed a report or an agency or a consultant to hand it to you.

Now go and do the second page. Go on, I’ll wait.