Cleantech Marketing: 7 Helpful SEO Content Strategies & Examples
Cleantech marketing is necessary to build demand for new, exciting clean energy and energy efficiency innovations. In this post, I share some of my favorite content marketing strategies specifically for the cleantech industry. You’ll find helpful linked examples to illustrate each point.
Here’s why I’m writing this article: Cleantech is making major advances, but these aren’t happening nearly fast enough to meet the 1.5 degree C global warming limit established by the IPCC.
The Yale Climate Communication opinion map, “Climate Change in the American Mind,” shows that about 70% of individuals in the U.S. feel personally responsible for climate change, and want to do something to help reduce it. Only 16% strongly disagree. Adopting cleantech solutions is one way Americans can take action.
Are cleantech companies doing enough to get this message across? I’m not so sure.
Cleantech is key to the energy transition, but it isn’t nearly as visible as it could be. I believe cleantech firms have the power to take a more proactive approach to marketing and community engagement.
They can lobby for legislative action that will protect their business long-term.
They can include more diverse people in their workforces. If you’ve seen SEIA’s Solar Industry Diversity Study, you’ll know what I mean.
They can engage people in their communities. Blocpower is a good example of how to get this right.
They also have the power to use legitimate green marketing claims, in contrast to the fossil fuel greenwashing across the aisle.
This is the kind of leadership I encourage and support with my own work in cleantech marketing strategy. While I’m not here to talk about civic engagement strategy, I do have a lot to say about content marketing.
Cleantech SEO content marketing opps
I hate to call out this issue, but renewable energy and other cleantech firms are leaving lots of marketing opportunities on the table. SEO is an especially under-utilized cleantech marketing strategy that reaps huge rewards. I know these opps aren’t being pursued fully, because I’ve analyzed cleantech websites from an SEO perspective.
Many companies prefer to rely on PR strategies to bring traffic to their homepages based on brand name recognition. I have nothing against PR, but I believe cleantech companies should take a “both/and” approach. SEO helps you deliberately attract audiences that aren’t already familiar with your brand using helpful content and inbound marketing.
AltEnergy Mag includes SEO blogging as one of the best strategies for renewable energy companies to use to market their products and services.
What is SEO?
SEO strategy is a way to create and structure website content so that it earns “organic traffic” (not from paid, earned, or social sources) due to visitors’ internet searches. It is a way to improve your chances for being properly indexed by search engine bots and their algorithms. This way, when internet searchers find your content through Google Search, they’ll click on your website and learn about your brand.
Here’s why SEO is so great:
A single well-written and SEO-friendly blog post can bring consistent traffic over time. You can earn hundreds to thousands of visits to your website each month for years to come. In contrast, website visits from social media posts, ads, and press releases expire pretty rapidly.
You can target local and niche-specific words that your audience will find helpful.
There are loads of opportunity keywords in cleantech like “decarbonization” or “facts about electricity.” Each of these has low competition and high search volume. As a strategist, I’m an expert at identifying these kinds of helpful brand-aligned keywords.
Visit my SEO services designed to help cleantech companies gain a marketing foothold in SEO search.
Cleantech companies have a lot going for them
Before moving on to the specific content marketing strategies I want to share, it’s important to remind cleantech firms about the advantages they can leverage:
It’s clean. That’s the biggest benefit. Cleantech improves our health, our water, and our air quality. There is overwhelming support for renewable energy expansion across political divisions.
It’s cheap. Renewable energy has a significantly lower cost compared to other forms of energy. Most energy-efficiency technologies are designed to save companies money.
It’s increasingly reliable. It’s important to address concerns about reliability and show how it outperforms other options thanks to battery storage innovations.
It doesn’t have to be complex. The cleantech companies I’ve talked to sometimes desire to keep things complex to impress fellow engineers. The problem with this is complex, technical marketing materials only serve a very limited audience. Simplifying complexities for non-technical users is key to helping cleantech become mainstream.
It’s encouraged by policymakers. Educating users on effective and affordable pathways to implementation is key. Support customers by sharing policy updates.
It’s good for ESG investment. Cleantech helps companies report emissions reductions to the CDP and their shareholders.
Here are some examples of successful strategies I’ve seen cleantech companies use to share their benefits.
Cleantech content marketing strategies to try
Tip One: Publish Policy Explainers
Given that policies are ever-changing and crucial to making the most of cleantech, its important for companies to share policy explainers.
Examples: Believe it or not, one of Enphase Energy’s most popular webpages is an educational blog post on solar tax credits (STCs).
A smaller company, Levent Energy, also used this strategy to their advantage by creating a content pillar around the term “Renewable Energy Certificates.” Using a “hub and spoke” strategy, all of their RECs content pages link to additional sub-topic explainers. This way, people interested in this topic will spend more time on their site.
A piece I wrote on Build Back Better on Medium has received over 30K visits and 10K reads. I often wonder why more cleantech companies haven’t written about Build Back Better on their websites. Public policy polling is clear: clean energy implementation is popular.
Tip Two: Create UX-friendly Product Landing Pages
UX writing is the next big thing in marketing. It’s less about sales and more about easy navigation and clear communication. Internet users appreciate it when website navigation doesn’t come with hiccups. A great writer can help intuit users’ questions and provide headings, informational text boxes, and calls to action right when they’re needed.
Example: Enphase Energy has created gorgeous landing product pages for their popular microinverters. The copy is created from a UX design perspective to aid usability. It’s not just about telling benefits, but helping users navigate the unique features with helpful interactive design. Mobile-friendly content is extremely important for SEO, and I encourage copy to be written for to allow for easy navigation and use, not just self-promotion.
Tip Three: Borrow from Greenwashing strategies, but make them legit
A lot has been said accusing fossil fuel energy sources like oil and gas about their greenwashing ads and disinformation campaigns.
The reason fossil fuel companies are so fond of green marketing is because it’s effective. According to a Forbes study, “nearly seven in ten US Millennials actively consider company values when making a purchase – compared with 52% of all US online adults.”
Why not borrow ideas from across the aisle that they’ve poured millions of dollars into creating? Focus on the sustainability of your business using legitimate green marketing.
Example: Check out this great post from Green Mountain Energy on Protecting the Environment. It gets 17K+ visits in organic traffic per month.
Tip Four: Highlight ESG Benefits for Companies
This is an often overlooked leverage point cleantech firms have. Companies like Google are promoting their 24/7 carbon free energy sources. Cleantech is the key for businesses to unlock this and other ESG achievements.
Tip Five: Find Low-competition Opportunity Keywords
Some keywords are just low hanging fruit. If they fit with your brand, why not use them? To use this strategy, you’ll need to hire someone to do your keyword research to identify keywords that would match your brand. This is exactly how I grew one blog’s organic traffic from 3,000 to 28,000 in less than two years.
Example: Currently, one of Sunpower’s pages with the most traffic is a quick explainer on the keyword: How many kilowatts in a watt?
Tip Six: Publish Mythbusters
There is a lot of intentionally negative publicity targeted towards cleantech companies designed to slow its adoption. It helps to address these myths head on and correct disinformation from spreading. Publish mythbusters that set the record straight and dominate the conversation.
Example: Texas gas companies blamed renewable energy sources for outages during the 2021 cold snap. This gave the industry as a whole a new challenge: reassure their customers about safety during power outages.
To address concerns about outages, Xcel Energy created a fabulous guide by targeting the keyword “outage safety.”
Tip Seven: Don’t just introduce new ideas, launch them
The more energy you put into catalyzing your technology by educating about it, the more attention you’ll receive a response. Go big or go home.
All of the examples I provided are among the top ten pages for organic traffic to their websites. You’ll notice that none of them focus on sales. They just provide good, helpful, brand-aligned information. This helps build trust with your audience, and keep people engaged on your website.
Below, I share my standard process for working with clients to improve their organic traffic using informative content.
How to get started with SEO content marketing strategy
SEO Audit - I start with an SEO audit to see how your website’s doing, what keywords it’s ranking for, and what areas it can improve in the short-, medium-, and long-term using different SEO strategies.
Keyword Research - Next, I move on to an in-depth keyword research exploration to see which keyword opportunities exist for your brand and mission.
Competitor Analysis - The third and final foundational piece of the puzzle is to assess the competition. This is where I research your competitors’ websites to identify their target keywords, content gaps, and ways to differentiate your brand from theirs.
Editorial Calendar Planning - I use my research to align keyword opportunities to an inbound marketing strategy by assigning them to specific pieces of content, and fleshing out their concept in an editorial calendar.
These pieces of content are planned and scheduled to be written and published on your website either as blog posts, pillar pages, or thought leadership content.
Content writing - Next up, you’ll need to write the content in away that both search engines and humans can appreciate. I use a range of SEO best practices to do so. I include the keywords in the right places on the page, give advice about ranking from both a writing and technical perspective, and incorporate keywords naturally into the text.
While it’s not what I recommend, many clients of mine simply hire me to write without the strategy behind it. This is not a great plan for SEO. I highly recommend going all in on the strategy, because it really pays off in the success of your content.
Historical analysis and tracking progress - Finally, I offer historical analysis to track and monitor the progress of your content and make updates as needed.