A homeowner pricing out panels opens Google on a phone, looks at the installers that come up, and fills out a form on one or two sites. Which sites those are was decided long before that search, by details nobody at the company has looked at in years.
Most advice written for solar companies is a playbook: pick keywords, build location pages, get backlinks. We did something simpler. We ran the same homepage check on every solar installer in one city and counted what came back.
How we picked the sites
On September 14 we searched Google Maps for solar installers in Honolulu. We took the open businesses with a website, five or more reviews, and a rating of 3.5 or better. That came to 16 companies.
Fifteen of the sites let the check run. One refused the automated request, so it is out of every count here. Every number below is out of 15.
The checks are the ones our free audit runs on a homepage: title tag, description, headings, images, business markup, sitemap, analytics, and Google's PageSpeed test for phones. Here is the count of sites with each problem:
| What we checked | Sites with a problem |
|---|---|
| No analytics, nothing counts visitors | 8 of 15 |
| Phone speed score under 50 | 8 of 15 |
| Images missing alt text | 13 of 15 |
| Main heading missing or duplicated | 9 of 15 |
| No business markup | 5 of 15 |
| Title tag missing or cut off in results | 6 of 15 |
| Description missing or cut off | 7 of 15 |
None of this is about the solar work. A company can install clean systems for twenty years and still have a website Google cannot read properly.
Most of the photos are invisible to Google
The 15 homepages carry 407 images between them. 251 have no alt text, the short caption Google reads in place of a photo it cannot see. That is 62 percent.
Thirteen of the 15 sites have at least one blank image. On the worst one, 72 of its 120 images say nothing to search.
Solar companies photograph their own installs, and those rooftop shots are usually the best thing on the site. Without the caption, every one of them is a blank square to Google.
Eight sites are not counting visitors
Eight of the 15 homepages carry no Google Analytics and no Tag Manager. Nothing on those pages counts who arrived, where from, or what happened next.
The phone rings or it doesn't, and that is the only signal. Whether last month was better than the one before is a guess.
Analytics is free, and adding it changes nothing a visitor would see. It changes what the owner can say about next month.
The two lines a searcher actually reads
The title tag is the blue headline in a Google result. One site has none at all. Of the 14 that do, 5 run past 60 characters, which is about where Google truncates a title to fit the screen.
The shortest title we found is 17 characters, which wastes the line. The longest is 191, which shows up cut off mid-word.
The description is the line underneath. Three sites have none, so Google picks a sentence off the page and shows that. Of the 12 that have one, 4 run past 160 characters, and the longest is 396. Both lines are text somebody types once.
Headings and the business details
Four sites have no main heading, the single H1 that tells Google what the page is about. Five have more than one. Six have exactly one, which is what Google expects.
Five sites have no business markup, the code that states solar installer, this address, these hours, in the format Google reads. Without it, Google works the details out from whatever else is on the page, and sometimes gets them wrong.
We found the same pattern when we ran this check on roofing sites across Oahu. Different trade, same blind spots.
Old files and old years
One site has no sitemap, the file that lists which pages exist so Google can find them. Among the rest, the newest date inside ranges from July 2021 to September 2026.
Three sites have told Google about nothing new since 2025 or earlier. A sitemap that has not moved in a year reads as a site nobody is updating.
Three sites also show an old year in the footer: 2022, 2022, and 2024. Small thing, but it is the first date a visitor sees, and it says nobody is home.
Slow on the phone, where the customer is
On Google's phone speed test the 15 sites scored from 28 to 79, with a median of 48. Eight land under 50, the range Google's tool marks in red as poor. Most visitors arrive on a phone, often standing in the yard they want the panels over.
Nine of the sites run on WordPress and two on Wix, so none of this is exotic. These are ordinary builders with ordinary fixes.
One more number worth knowing: Google's own SEO check in the same tool gave 5 of these sites a perfect 100, and every one of the five still has problems from this list. That check does not look at analytics, alt text on every image, or business markup, so a 100 there is not a clean bill of health.
What to do with this
Every check in this article runs free on your own site at the homepage check, with results on screen and no email asked for. If you want the whole thing looked at, every page, the Google listing, the reviews, the speed, and the competitors, there is the free audit, or book a call.