Page 5 to page 3. Position 4 for ‘solar panel cleaning’. Clicks up 140% in six months.
A Bristol-based electrical contractor with a renewables specialism
Six months ago this Bristol electrician was sitting at average position 43 in Google. Page five. Effectively unfindable. Today, organic clicks are up 140%, they hold position 4 for ‘solar panel cleaning’ and position 5 for ‘solar panel’, and the renewables side of the business has a clear digital home for the first time.
Where the bristol renewables electrician started
A Bristol electrical contractor with strong local trade reputation and a growing renewables capability: solar installation, solar maintenance, EV charger installation. The trouble was that the website read like a generic ‘we are electricians, here's a list of things we do’ shop window. The renewables specialism, which is where the most lucrative work was actually coming from, was treated as one bullet point on a services page.
The challenge for the bristol renewables electrician
Search demand for ‘Bristol solar panel installers’, ‘EV charger installation Bristol’, ‘solar electrician’ was meaningful and rising. The contractor was in a strong position to win that demand: established, locally trusted, doing the work to a high standard. But their website was telling Google they were a generalist, and Google was ranking them accordingly. Average position 43 for the renewables queries that mattered most.
There's a wider trades story here. As renewables installation becomes the growth segment of the electrical industry, the contractors who position themselves clearly as renewables specialists are going to win the higher-value jobs. The contractors who don't will compete in the commoditised general electrician market against everyone else.
What we did
We repositioned the website around the renewables specialism, while keeping the general electrical services intact for the local search demand they still wanted to pick up.
Renewables service pages rebuilt as standalone landing experiences. Solar installation, solar maintenance, solar cleaning, EV charger installation. Each one a proper landing page with the specific intent baked into the URL, the H1, the meta and the body copy. Not bullet points on a generic services page.
Geo-modified content for Bristol and surrounding areas. Bristol solar panel installers. Bath EV charger installation. The supporting geo-targeted variants that help capture buyer intent across the catchment area, without keyword-stuffing.
Supporting articles aligned with how people actually search. ‘How much does solar panel cleaning cost in Bristol?’, ‘Do I need an electrician to install an EV charger?’. Question-led content matched to the real shape of search demand, with internal links pointing back to the relevant service pages.
Technical foundations. WordPress speed and schema work, structured data for local business and service offerings, internal linking architecture rebuilt so the renewables cluster has clear topical authority.
Six months on
New page one rankings:
- ‘Solar panel cleaning’ at position 4.2
- ‘Solar panel’ at position 5.5
Six months on, organic clicks rose from 311 to 748. That's not a tweak, that's a 140% lift. Impressions climbed 33%. Click-through rate rose 67% (because once you're on page three rather than page five, more people who see you actually click). And the average position more than halved, from 43 to 24.5.
How it shows up in search
The headline wins are the renewables-specific ones. Position 4.2 for ‘solar panel cleaning’. Position 5.5 for ‘solar panel’. Position 8.7 for ‘Bristol solar panel installers’. These are buyer-intent queries with real conversion potential. ‘EV charger installation Bristol’ at 11.5 is one good content push away from page one.
Page one rankings:
- Solar panel cleaning (position 4.2)
- Solar panel (position 5.5)
- Bristol solar panel installers (position 8.7)
Striking range (page two, primed for the next push):
- EV charger installation Bristol (position 11.5)
- Solar companies Bristol (position 15.6)
- Solar electrician (position 17.7)
Why this worked
The wider lesson for trades businesses is that niching into a specialism almost always beats trying to rank for everything. ‘Electrician Bristol’ is a hard, expensive ranking to win. ‘Bristol solar panel installers’ is a much narrower lane with much warmer buyers in it. As renewables, EV and heat pump work continues to grow, the contractors who lean into a clear specialism will keep pulling away from the generalists.
Three things this case study tells us
- Niche the website, not the business. You don't have to stop offering general electrical work. You just have to stop letting it dominate the front page of your website. Lead with the specialism that drives the highest-margin work.
- Geo-modified service pages compound. ‘Solar panel installation Bristol’ plus ‘solar panel cleaning Bristol’ plus ‘EV charger installation Bristol’ is a much stronger local cluster than one generic ‘services in Bristol’ page that mentions all three.
- Click-through rate matters as much as ranking. Climbing from page five to page three doesn't just lift impressions. It dramatically lifts the percentage of people who click. CTR up 67% in this case. That compounds the rankings work into much bigger traffic gains.
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