Case study  ·  Solar design software  ·  Feb–Aug 2026  ·  6 min read

SurgePV went from 496 to 4,986 Google clicks a month, and from 5 to 42 inbound leads a week, in 7 months.

The growth came from one thing done well: a page for the solar rules, permits and incentives of every country, state, municipality and utility SurgePV sells into. 890 pages, checked by people, on one site in 9 languages.

[SurgePV logo] × theStacc
496→4,986
Google clicks a month, 10x
Search Console, Feb vs Aug 2026
5→42
Inbound leads a week
Weekly average, Feb vs Aug. 660 leads in 30 weeks
9→55
Countries sending 50+ clicks
7 months before vs Feb–Aug 2026. 184 countries sent at least one click.
Company
SurgePV, solar design and proposal software for installers and EPCs
Buyer
Solar engineers and installers, B2B. 2 of 3 clicks come from desktop
Markets
Sells worldwide. Biggest: India, South Africa, Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia
Site
One codebase, 9 languages, shared content with local compliance pages
Work
Compliance and incentive engine, blog, 3 new languages, technical SEO
Period
2 Feb to 30 Aug 2026, 30 weeks. Baseline: the 7 months before

In short

Solar is a country-by-country market. So the website became one too.

Every installer SurgePV sells to has to clear a local permit, a grid-connection form and a subsidy rule before they can quote a job. Nobody was writing those pages for them. theStacc did, for every market, and the people searching for the rules found SurgePV first.

  1. 15,367 clicks in the window, against 3,290 in the 7 months before. 4.7x. Impressions went from 540,432 to 1,437,612.
  2. The compliance hub went from 0 to 1,850 clicks a month in 4 months after Google first saw it on 19 April. 890 URLs, 4,477 clicks, average position 10.7.
  3. Africa grew 28x and Asia 8.4x. Kenya went from 0 clicks in February to 114 in August. South Africa from 11 to 496.
  4. 86.2% of clicks were non-branded. People searching for an answer, not for SurgePV. Only 13.8% searched the brand name.

[Video placeholder. Poster frame, captions and a transcript toggle go here once recorded. No autoplay.]

Our installers in Tshwane don't search for solar software. They search for the municipality's registration form. We had no page for that. Now we rank third for it, and the signups come from the page.

[CEO photo]
[CEO name]Founder and CEO, SurgePV

Draft quote, pending CEO approval


The starting point

Good product. 496 clicks a month. Growth coming from demos and word of mouth.

SurgePV makes AI-assisted solar design and proposal software. Installers use it to lay out panels, size inverters and send a quote. By early 2026 it had paying customers on four continents and a website that mostly served people who already knew the name.

In the 7 months to 1 February 2026 the site got 3,290 Google clicks in total. Nine countries sent more than 50 clicks. The blog covered general solar topics that every competitor also covered.

The gap was obvious once we looked at what installers actually type into Google. They search for the rule, not the tool: "solar registration tshwane", "cea guidelines for solar power plant", "yapı ruhsatı güneş enerjisi". Each of those queries is a person with a job to quote this week. Almost none of them had a good answer.

theStacc started on 2 February 2026. The brief was traffic that turns into installer signups, in the markets SurgePV already sells into and the ones it wanted next.


The proof

Weekly Google clicks, 2 February to 24 August 2026

This is the Search Console data, redrawn so the milestones can be marked. 121 clicks in the first week. 1,212 in the last.

Clicks per week, surgepv.comGoogle Search Console · Web search · all countries
Weekly Google clicks rising from 121 to 1,212 between February and August 2026
  • 1 · 2 FebtheStacc goes live
  • 2 · 22–23 MarTurkish, Portuguese and Arabic versions launch
  • 3 · 19 AprCompliance hub first appears in Google
  • MayImpressions jump from 35k to 79k a week
  • 4 · Jun–JulClicks pass 1,000 a week
Inbound leads per weekSurgePV lead tracker · all inbound channels · 660 leads total
Weekly inbound leads rising from 5 to a peak of 84 between February and August 2026

Weekly counts, same 30 weeks. February averaged 5 a week, August 42. The lumps are real: a week with 84 leads in August, 11 the week after the compliance hub went live. We show the series as is. In GA4, 53% of website demo requests in the window came from Organic Search.

By month

2026ClicksImpressions
February49651,180
March867113,796
April850118,154
May1,586267,701
June2,553194,969
July4,263305,146
August4,986404,079

Full calendar months. The headline uses the same February and August figures.

What the shape tells you

March and April look flat. That is the indexing lag: the compliance pages were written and published in March, Google started showing them on 19 April, and clicks followed about four weeks later. If you are budgeting for this, plan on results in months three to five, and compounding after that.

Impressions moved first. They jumped in May, a month before clicks did, because new pages start on page two and move up as Google gathers click data. Watching impressions is how you know it is working before the traffic shows.

Google had indexed 4,197 pages of the site by 10 August.


What was built

A compliance page for every place SurgePV's installers work.

Solar rules are set at four levels, and an installer needs all four to quote a job. The hub mirrors that structure. Each page answers one question for one place: which permit, which form, which tariff, which deadline, with the source document linked.

CountryCodes, net metering
StateSubsidy, policy
MunicipalityPermits, registration
UtilityGrid connection

The pages share one template and one data model, so a new country is a research job, not a design job. The writing is done by theStacc from the primary sources (the regulation, the tariff order, the utility's own application form). Each page is checked by an editor against those sources before it goes live, and SurgePV's team can correct anything from the admin.

Result: 890 URLs, 4,477 clicks in the window at an average position of 10.7, and 0 → 1,850 clicks a month from February to August. These pages are the kind that keep ranking, because the rule changes once a year and the question gets asked every week.

Top pages in the hub. Open them.

  • 444clicks · pos 5.6
    Ranks #3–4 for "solar registration tshwane"
  • 178clicks · 13,611 impr.
    Certificate of Final Electrical Inspection, step by step
  • Chhattisgarh solar, India
    171clicks
    State subsidy and net-metering page
  • Rajasthan solar, India
    164clicks
    State page
  • CEA technical standards, India
    158clicks
    Ranks #4–5 for "cea guidelines for solar power plant"

Clicks and positions for 2 Feb–30 Aug 2026, Search Console. All pages are live on https://www.surgepv.com/solar-compliance/ for you to check.


Reach

137 to 184 countries. Africa up 28x.

The hub ranks in places SurgePV had never had a visitor from. Kenya had 0 clicks in February. Below, the top markets, with February and August side by side on the same scale.

Feb 2026Aug 2026

    Monthly Google clicks by country, Search Console. Italy and France were SurgePV's existing European markets and grew more slowly from a higher base.

    ContinentBefore → windowGrowth
    Africa82 → 2,31228x
    Asia982 → 8,2118.4x
    Oceania52 → 3847.4x
    South America62 → 3796.1x
    North America337 → 7852.3x
    Europe1,775 → 3,2941.9x

    Clicks in the 7 months before (6 Jul 2025 – 1 Feb 2026) vs the 7-month window.


    Where the demo requests came from

    596 people asked for a demo. From 86 countries.

    Website demo requests, measured in GA4 as people who reached the thank-you page. 596 people requested a demo (2 Feb – 30 Aug 2026), vs 104 in the period before (GA4 demo tracking began 23 Aug 2025). That is 5.7x. They came from 86 countries, vs 43 before.

    Demo request events, 2 Feb – 30 Aug 2026

      Top 10 countries by demo request events (841 events from 596 people; a person can submit more than once). GA4, event Demo_req.

      ContinentBefore → windowGrowth
      Asia76 → 5096.7x
      Africa17 → 1066.2x
      North America25 → 1024.1x
      Europe27 → 883.3x
      Oceania1 → 2323x
      South America2 → 136.5x

      Demo request events by continent, baseline (23 Aug 2025 – 1 Feb 2026) vs the window. 53% of demo requests came from Organic Search.


      Nine languages, one site

      Localised where it matters. Shared where it doesn't.

      SurgePV's site runs in nine languages from one codebase. Product pages and most of the blog are shared and translated. Compliance pages are written per market, in that market's language, because a Turkish installer wants the Turkish permit and the Turkish word for it.

      Turkish, Portuguese and Arabic were added in March 2026 and were in Google's index within a week. Non-English pages brought 1,103 clicks in the window, about 7% of the total. We say that plainly: the growth was mostly English compliance and blog pages read in Asia and Africa. The languages are there for reach and credibility in each market, and 1,239 non-English URLs now rank.

      EnglishItalianGermanFrenchSpanishPolishTurkish · Mar 2026Portuguese · Mar 2026Arabic · Mar 2026

      [Exact URLs for the Italian and German examples to be added; the Turkish link is live.]


      How it works

      The questions every buyer asks us, answered with this site.

      StructureCan one site serve many countries?

      Yes, and it should. SurgePV is one codebase with one shared content set and a country layer on top. About 80% of a page is shared across markets; the compliance, pricing and contact details are local. Visitors land on the version for their country and language, with the alternates declared to Google so each market sees its own page in search.

      When SurgePV wants a new country, we add the compliance pages for it and switch it on. There is no second site to maintain.

      QualityDoes it read like a human wrote it?

      Each page starts from the primary source: the regulation, the tariff order, the utility's own form. The writing is held to a short brand document agreed with SurgePV at the start: tone, terms, what we never say, how we handle uncertainty. An editor reads every page against its source before publish.

      1. Research from the official source. The source is linked on the page.
      2. Draft to the brand rules. Plain language, no claims the source doesn't support.
      3. Editor check of every figure, date and form name against the source.
      4. SurgePV reviews what it wants to; everything is editable from the admin.

      The test is the Tshwane page: a municipality page that ranks #3–4 and gets 444 clicks from installers who would leave in a second if it were wrong.

      TimingHow long until it shows?

      theStacc went live on 2 February. The first compliance pages appeared in Google on 19 April, week 11. Impressions jumped in May. Clicks crossed 1,000 a week in the second half of June. The honest answer is that you see it moving by month three and feel it in leads by month five. The chart above has the exact weeks.

      LeadsIs this traffic or business?

      Both, and the lead number is the one we report on. SurgePV's sales team logs every inbound lead in a weekly tracker. It went from 5 a week in February to 42 a week in August, 660 in the 30 weeks. The lead-to-customer figures are SurgePV's and are not published here.

      Lock-inWhat if we leave?

      You keep everything. The site is plain HTML, CSS and JavaScript in a Git repository you own. Any developer can edit it. There is no plugin stack and no proprietary builder. If you are on WordPress today, we migrate the content and redirects first, so no ranking is lost in the move.

      AI searchWill ChatGPT and Perplexity cite it?

      Pages are built the way AI answers quote them: the direct answer in the first paragraph, one question per page, dated and sourced, with structured data for the organisation and each guide. We do not track citations directly yet. What GA4 does show: 25 demo requests in the window came from AI assistants (ChatGPT, Perplexity and similar), up from 0 in the period before. A small number, and a real one.

      EffortHow much of our time does it take?

      A one-hour kickoff, the brand rules sign-off, and a short review each month. SurgePV's team spent its time on the product. theStacc did the research, writing, editing, publishing and technical SEO, and reports on clicks and leads monthly from Search Console and the lead tracker. Pricing is published at https://thestacc.com/pricing/.

      New marketsWe are launching in a new country. Does this help?

      This is what the hub is for. Kenya went from 0 to 114 clicks a month, Malaysia from 3 to 157, Singapore from 4 to 174, with no sales presence in any of them. A market's compliance pages can be live within weeks of deciding to enter it, and they start collecting the people who are about to need you.


      What we'd do differently

      Not everything worked.

      • We launched the languages before the compliance hub. Turkish, Portuguese and Arabic went live in March; the hub in April. In hindsight the hub should have gone first, since it drove the growth and the languages mostly add reach to it.
      • Non-English is 7% of clicks. That is honest reach, not a growth engine. Markets where the buyer searches in English (India, South Africa, the Philippines, Singapore) outgrew the European markets where the buyer searches in their own language.
      • Leads are lumpy. A week of 84, then 31. Weekly lead data from a small sales team is noisy, which is why we report the monthly average and show the raw series.
      • Mobile is a third of clicks. Expected for engineers at a desk, but the permit pages are read on site too. Mobile load time is on the list.
      What's next

      The rules change. The pages keep up.

      • Review snippets. Software-review pages brought 282 clicks in the window, up from 4 before. More of these, in more languages.
      • Revenue per lead. GA4 now shows where demo requests come from. Tying them to closed deals by country is the next report.
      • Annual refresh. Every compliance page gets a dated re-check against its source when the rule or tariff changes.
      • AI citation tracking. Monthly checks of which SurgePV pages ChatGPT and Perplexity cite for installer questions.

      I was worried about AI content. Our users are engineers and they would have told us in a second if a page were wrong. The difference is every page links to the regulation it came from. We get corrections from installers now, which means they are reading it.

      [CEO photo]
      [CEO name]Founder and CEO, SurgePV

      Draft quote, pending CEO approval


      Methodology and sources

      Where every number on this page comes from.

      Window
      2 February to 30 August 2026, 30 weeks. Baseline is the 7 months before: 6 July 2025 to 1 February 2026.
      Clicks, impressions, positions
      Google Search Console, domain property surgepv.com, Web search, all countries. Read on 7 November 2026. Monthly figures are full calendar months. Weekly figures are weeks starting Monday 2 February through Monday 24 August.
      Leads
      The weekly leads chart is SurgePV's internal lead tracker, all inbound channels the sales team logs. Weekly averages are February (5) and August (42). 660 leads across the 30 weeks.
      Demo requests
      Google Analytics 4 (property SPV), event Demo_req: people who reached the demo thank-you page. GA4 thank-you tracking started on 23 August 2025, so its baseline is 23 August 2025 to 1 February 2026. Headline figures count people (596 vs 104); country and continent figures count events (841 in the window). Channel and AI-assistant figures are GA4 default channel groups. The two sources cross-check: 660 leads on the tracker vs 596 website demo requesters.
      Countries
      Search Console country report. "Countries sending 50+ clicks" compares the 7-month baseline (9) with the 7-month window (55). "184 countries" counts countries with at least one click in the window (137 in the baseline). Continent totals compare the baseline with the window.
      Compliance hub
      Search Console page filter on /solar-compliance/ and its language variants. 890 URLs, 4,477 clicks, average position 10.7 in the window. First impression 19 April 2026.
      Branded share
      Queries containing "surgepv": 13.8% of window clicks.
      Not shown
      Revenue per lead. We would rather leave a figure out than estimate it.
      Verification
      SurgePV can grant read access to its Search Console property on request. Every page linked here is live.

      Questions

      What buyers ask before they start.

      We sell in several countries. Do we need a site per country?

      No. One site, one codebase, a country and language layer on top. Shared pages are translated once; compliance, pricing and contact pages are local. Google is told which version belongs to which market. SurgePV runs 9 languages and 184 countries this way.

      Our brand can't afford a page that reads like AI. How do you stop that?

      Brand rules agreed at the start, primary sources on every page, and an editor who checks each page against its source before it goes live. You review what you want to and can edit anything. The pages linked on this page are the sample: read the Tshwane one as an installer would.

      How soon will we see results?

      Site live in about 5 days. Pages indexed within weeks. SurgePV saw impressions move in month three and clicks and leads in months four and five. Plan on 6 months to judge it, and expect compounding after that.

      Is this just traffic?

      We report leads, and we set up the tracking so you can see which page each one came from. SurgePV's inbound went from 5 to 42 a week. Cost per lead against your paid channels is something we work out with you in the first review.

      We're on WordPress. Is this a risky migration?

      We move the content, keep every URL or redirect it, and check Search Console daily for the first month. The new site is plain HTML and CSS in your own repository. Any developer can edit it; no plugins, no builder.

      What about AI search?

      Pages are written to be quoted: direct answer first, one question per page, sources and dates, structured data. We report what the analytics show, even when it is small. For SurgePV, 25 demo requests in the window came from AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Perplexity, up from 0 before.

      What does it cost, and how long are we committed?

      Pricing is on https://thestacc.com/pricing/. The minimum term is 3 months, which is roughly the time it takes to see the first results. Switching plans later is easy and onboarding is the same whichever plan you start on.

      We're entering a new market. Can you be ready for launch?

      Yes. The compliance and incentive pages for a new market are the first thing we build, so they are collecting searches before your sales team arrives. SurgePV's Kenya, Malaysia and Singapore numbers came with no local presence.

      See what this looks like for your markets.

      A 30-minute call. Bring your Search Console if you have one; we'll show you where the gap is and what the first 90 days would cover.