Since its fundation, Local y Sostenible has always been a mission-driven company.

They’re confident that solar is the energy of the future, and they have been providing installations with the highest quality standards to those looking to save on their electricity bills, do their share in protecting the environment or revalue their homes.

It was obvious, however, that they were struggling to get this message across. They felt somewhat sceptic about the whole internet thing, and so far, they had managed to maintain their market position relying on word of mouth and powerpoint presentations.

Eventually, they realised this was a huge and unnecessary risk (the COVID pandemic would take place a few months later). This is the point where we crossed paths, and they trusted me for six months in-house to lay the foundations of their digitalization and online strategy.

From the outset, it was clear that I would devote most of my efforts rethinking the branding and rebuilding the website from scratch. SEO or email marketing made no sense without having first a proper website. Organic social media is, more often than not, a wasted effort. And on top of that, paid media was out of the question, so the path was even clearer.

Whether it’s building trust, gathering traffic or converting users, a website is at the core of almost every online strategy. And in our case, there was a lot of room for improvement: corporate copywriting, inconsistent design, old images, no SEO optimization…

But more importantly, we needed to work on the root of that: reflect on the true essence of the organization, and then make a shift in how they were presenting it to the world.

As any team that has been running under a certain brand for a long time, it’s understandable that they felt attached to it, even when we might find some striking design inconsistencies. In this context, I took it upon myself to find a middle ground that was more sophisticated but still respectful to their old identity.

I aimed for a clean design, with original images supporting a well-thought copy that, all in all, conveyed a better image and helped solve our communication pain points.

This process involved a lot of research about our company, our buyer persona, our competition, the state of the solar photovoltaic industry… along with intense communication with my colleages, especially with the project manager.

A couple SEO considerations:

• The website was meant to be lightweight and provide a good user experience. For this purpose, I used as few plugins as possible, with the design itself being a combination of Genesis Framework, a Gutenberg library and CSS.
• I took some time to improve our linking profile, which boosted the DA from 14 to 19 and reduced our spam score from 11% to 1% in a couple months.
• I carefully wrote the homepage content to target a number of relevant keywords, leading to a remarkable increase in impressions.

Since our collaboration took place between November 2019 and May 2020, a substantial amount of this period was obviously affected by the coronavirus outbreak.

This caused a lot of uncertainty on the organization, which eventually forced us to give up on some really interesting proyects (inbound articles, a physical event, a customized map of our installations, etc.)

We did managed, though, to implement a web-based software that would both help the administration team make more appealing proposals and allow clients to sign them online.

By the end of the six-month period, I also took the time to write a comprehensive document with login data, descriptions of the actions taken and my recommendations on future online-marketing actions.

All in all, not only I learned a lot through this project, but it’s also very rewarding when your contribution goes towards a mission you believe in.